This week we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month Thrust by Lidia Yuknavitch.
I used to be a purist with my books. I never dog-eared the pages, never wrote in the margins, never cracked the spine. Lately, though, I’ve become a bit looser with that. I’ve found that it makes a book more meaningful when you can see the record of having read and interacted with it — it makes the text that much more alive.
And boy, is there a record of me having read
Thrust by Lidia Yuknavitch. My copy is
heavy with notations. I dog-eared pages, drew stars next to passages I didn’t want to forget, underlined sentences worth remembering. It is so good. So beautifully written. So intricate and deft and rich and big — to the extent that it’s difficult to decide what angle to approach it from when describing it.
I dog-eared pages, drew stars next to passages I didn’t want to forget, underlined sentences worth remembering.
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Maybe I start by using metaphor:
Thrust is a constellation (so many stories orbiting around each other, the hints of other stories like stars specked across the sky) or
Thrust is the ocean (too deep to understand all of its mysteries, contains so much danger and wonder and beauty and what-the-heck-was-that) or
Thrust is a museum (but the kind of museum in a Ben Stiller movie, where the exhibits come alive after hours, blending and bleeding across millenia) or
Thrust is a loom (stories woven together across time, threads binding and braiding experiences together).
Except none of those seem quite right. They don’t do enough to communicate the scope of a book like
Thrust. I felt continuous awe while reading at how Yuknavitch could have managed to contain this entire story as she wrote it, and how a story this alive and strange and fierce could have come from one brain.
The story centers on Laisvé, a young girl living in a police state toward the end of the 21st century, who has the ability to swim through time. She encounters a range of characters, including a juvenile delinquent and his case worker, a sex worker and her sculptor cousin, the laborers working on the Statue of Liberty, and a dictator’s daughter. The characters are all struggling beneath the weight of their worlds, while trying to figure out what it means to be good citizens alongside one another. Laisvé weaves through their stories, a small thread reminding us how much is connected, even if we can’t see those connections clearly.
Despite its heft and the weight of the topics it dwells on (including but not limited to immigration, climate change, bodily autonomy, freedom, desire, survival),
Thrust is a hopeful book. It shows us a world that might be able to build beyond its brokenness. Imagine! Despite everything: hope.
At one point, a character asks: “How do we assemble our hearts to keep them from cracking?” I think a lot of the book’s work is an attempt to answer that question — or an argument that, even though the question doesn’t have an answer, attempting to answer it is a good and worthwhile task in a world that continues to try to break us.
Truly: how
do we assemble our hearts to keep them from cracking?