A rich, challenging, poetic novel of pain, desire, violence, and grief
Misha Honcharenko | Trap Unfolds Me Greedily | Sissy Anarchy: £15
Reviewed by Clare Patterson
Following the publication of his debut poetry collection Skin of Nocturnal Apple with Pilot Press in 2023 comes Misha Honcharenko’s debut novel. Enfolding war, childhood, fear of death and the tyranny and tenderness of family, this is a rich text that de-and re-structures language for its own evocative, sensuous means.
A novel in shape but poetic and free-ranging in structure (and often in syntax), Trap Unfolds Me Greedily follows an unnamed narrator through not so much a plot as a series of moods and scenes. A family life of male violence and female loneliness, an all-pervading fear of death, the shattering violence of war. It sounds like a heartbreaking, hard text, and at times it is, but there are also moments of rich tenderness – sex scenes with a genuine sensuality and hotness that is missing from many literary novels, a D.H. Lawrence-esque use of fragmentary sentences and repetition to produce something erotic and romantic.
“What is love and what are loved ones anyway?” asks the narrator in the opening of the novel, beginning with a scene of his upbringing, a home in which men drink and bully and women live in fear, a father who is “self-centered flesh with little room for caring” and who liked to “drink more to pour out his bad insides”. Though description is short and fragmentary, the characters in this novel are rendered sharply, in cutting yet empathetic descriptions such as these that succinctly capture the pain that leads them to inflict pain on others. From this upbringing, one in which marriage is “a kind of sacred sequence of violence” the narrator emerges, desperate for love and yet feeling undeserving of it, “completely lonely from birth”. Mingled in this desperation for love is a deep fear of, and yet obsession with, death, images of the morality of himself and others inflecting everything.
The presence of war throughout the text compounds this, the enormous grief it produces weighing on the mind of the narrator, images and sounds of death returning again and again. “The cries of people we will remember forever, not their face but their whole past life is what is stolen from us” – death as the destruction of a person, but also of their memories, their futures. Bodies are twisted, destroyed, torn apart, fragmented throughout the text – in war, but also by pain, by grief, by desire. It is a novel full of bodily fluids – blood, cum, sweat, vomit – and bodily feelings – pain, paralysis, cold, heat. Trap unfolds me greedily is at times hard to read, hard to look at – emotionally raw, heartbreaking, and with a very sharp, recognizable rendering of the desire for love that one doesn’t feel deserving of. On his family, the narrator remarks “every animal deserves a mate, but you all don’t” – capturing (self) loathing in a cuttingly accurate manner.
I read this book quickly, in one sitting, but it crept into my thoughts often for the week after. It is a strange, disorienting read – sentences stop when you don’t expect them to, mutate halfway through. The use of language here is unintuitive and unmooring. Trap Unfolds Me Greedily is well worth the effort, though: its strangeness is rich and moving, a genuine portrait of its characters and of the pain of wanting to be loved. A short, sharp stab of a novel, which leaves a mark that lingers long after reading.
Reviewed by Clare Patterson