Aline Soules

The city is filled with tiny, glimmering lights: it’s late, I said
to myself. In summer, it gets dark around eight thirty. But
Lara still isn’t here. No call, no sign of life. Why was she
late? I wondered what could’ve happened. (7)

Heffes plunges us into the story with a sense of foreboding. And like every mind everywhere, she continues: “I tried to convince myself…” followed by a list of possible ordinary reasons. But Lara hates when people are late. And Tomás is waiting, and the plane is leaving in four hours. The I (Ischia) of the story goes through a range of emotions until she decides to wait.

            From there, she speculates, and the next section of chapter 1 is filled with conditional verbs. “I would wait until…” “I’d grow bored…” “I’d serve myself in my inseparable Winnie-the-Pooh mug that one of my brothers brought me from Disney…” She uses the mug to drop into backstory. This combination of speculation and backstory continues to the end of the chapter: “Then I’d fall asleep.”

            The structure of this chapter, the smooth transitions from present to future to past, the revelation of character, and Heffes’ ability to reproduce the minuscule wanderings of the mind enthrall. This is exactly how the mind works—the shifts in time, the shifts in thoughts, the ripples of shifting emotions. We are deep in the mind of the I.

            She also transitions seamlessly from chapter to chapter (each a single paragraph). After ending the first chapter with falling asleep, she opens chapter two with “I’d sleep for a few hours on the floor…” and continues the same speculative process, but now she moves us from the ordinary world into one of magical realism, flying on the back of a bird that says:

Hey you, what are you thinking? That everything’s a big
joke? Yeah, you, do you think that anyone who flies high
doesn’t fall? Do you think that anyone who flies high
doesn’t fall? I’d look into the eyes of the blue bird, and I’d
be afraid. (25)

            One challenge of this work is its density. Each chapter is a solid block of text and Heffes eschews quotation marks for dialogue. Another challenge is the continuation of the speculation through the entire novel. A third challenge is deciding what the I invents and what has actually happened. The I is Ischia (after an island in the Tyrrhenian Sea), Lara is Brussels, and Tomás is Prague.

            If we persist through the fantasies, the I’s story emerges, along with the consequences of her many traumas, e.g., an abusive father, the early death of her mother, the separation of the orphaned children (of whom the I is only one), a rape. Then there are the consequences, e.g., addiction, a desire to escape. The story starts in Buenos Aires, but she chooses European places, half a world away, to reference herself, Lara and Tomás. Escape is literal and figurative. Then, there are the stories the I imagines, e.g., a pregnancy and birth of a child.

            Ultimately, this book is about the stories we tell ourselves, all too poignant in our current day. In stories, do we always recognize the real as opposed to the imagined? If we are the I of the story, what is real and what is not? How does the I separate the information of her life from its disinformation? Talk to two people about “what happened” in a memory and we get two different stories. Heffes’ understanding of how human minds work and her awareness of the importance of the stories we tell ourselves are presented masterfully in this novel.

            In Lisa Haselton’s interview with the author (https://lisahaselton.com/2025/03/12/interview-with-novelist-gisela-heffes/), Heffes begins:

“Ischia is an obscene novel that begins with the narration
of the long piss of its main character (“Ischia”), a work
that mocks everything and holds nothing back when
confronting established norms, whether literary or
cultural.”

Her goal “was to play with the idea that the story wasn’t actually happening.” She also explains that she “chose to narrate it in the conditional, urging readers to question whether the story truly happened or not.” Sometimes, the continued use of “would” and “could” and “I’d” and “we’d” feels a little cumbersome, but the success of this book rests in her ability to embed us in the mind of the I and follow the I’s tortuous path. She does not lose the intimacy and closeness into which she plummets us.

            In many ways, this story is a tour de force. Heffes is in full command of her material. This is not an easy read, but it is very much a worthwhile one.