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Reviewed by Kathleen Bednarek

Ischia
by Gisela Heffes
Deep Vellum Publishing
ISBN: 978-1646052141, 252 pages, June 2023

As Steven Levine, a master teacher on dying once explained about human nature, our fear of death comes from, “an imaginary loss of an imaginary self.”

It was this quote that came to my mind after reading Ischia by Gisele Heffes. The book of fiction, which struck me as a personal science fiction because of its close voice and vivid imagery, is voiced by a first-person narrator we eventually know by the assumed name “Ischia”.

Set in Buenos Aires, we meet Ischia as they wait for a ride to the airport from their friend Lara. Lara’s late. They are waiting and getting increasingly drunk until…I didn’t know what was real anymore.

Now initially, I was not convinced that the book would be able to sustain focus because it seemed destined to never get out of Ischia’s confining viewpoint. For a brief sampler from the beginning: They (Ischia) drink multiple beers, growing increasingly intoxicated. They listen to a wide variety of music, changing CDs as their mood shifts. They get a bizarre phone call from a man named Sammy, which offers a brief, coded distraction about a stash and a “child.” They search for a joint, and after finding and smoking it, they try to urinate but get caught in a prolonged, comical episode in the bathroom. They reflect on their childhood, particularly on their difficult family history and the pent up traumatic experiences that shaped them.

The story quickly transitions though as we’re carried by a bird and further out and down the rabbit hole via layered patterns of disassociative travel. Ischia encounters a dizzying array of wild circumstances which challenged my conception of the bounds of traditional storytelling.

At one point, there is someone masquerading as composer John Cage in a room executing a wild boar from Indonesia. At another, a way to walk back from the atmosphere of space on “consistent air.”

Along with Ischia’s friends (the other central characters who have also changed their identities) Tomàs now known as Prague, and Lara now known as Brussels, we move through seedy, noir-ish type escapades as Heffes finds fantastical circumstances through the intrigues of the criminal underworld.

Heffes makes the hyper surreality possible by narrating the story with the conditional tense, offering readers a hallucinatory experience that is both ambiguously present and non-existent with an emotional intensity that juxtaposes as unmanufactured truth.

I balanced whether what was being projected in the story was ever fully realized. It’s an interesting place altogether when I reminded myself that I was indeed reading a fiction book while considering the questions it posed at the same time, such as wondering if you’re just inside a dream.

The strength of Ischia is this envelopment of story told through the conditional storytelling device. Heffes navigates readers through a maze of surreal and astounding conflicts without losing the book’s core meaning in the process.

And the core theme is something we all need to be reminded of. It’s why people like to travel—to get out of their routine which can so often blind one to the singular and brief nature of one’s own life.

The surreality of Ischia could prove overwhelming at times if one is seeking a more down to earth story that delineates, but if you’re seeking a true trip with a mind-bending spaciousness, Heffes has hit her mark with a rewarding story that reads more as an experience.

About the reviewer: Kathleen Bednarek is a writer living in Pennsylvania. She is a current MFA student and has a MA in Poetry from Wilkes University.

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