{"id":12826,"date":"2025-01-15T19:36:41","date_gmt":"2025-01-15T18:36:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12826"},"modified":"2025-01-15T19:36:41","modified_gmt":"2025-01-15T18:36:41","slug":"misha-honcharenko-trap-unfolds-me-greedily-reviewed-by-clare-patterson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12826","title":{"rendered":"Misha Honcharenko, Trap Unfolds Me Greedily, reviewed by Clare Patterson"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>A rich, challenging, poetic novel of pain, desire, violence, and grief<\/em><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/TUMG.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"695\" height=\"460\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>Misha Honcharenko | Trap Unfolds Me Greedily | Sissy Anarchy: \u00a315<\/strong><br \/><strong>Reviewed by Clare Patterson<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Following the publication of his debut poetry collection <em>Skin of Nocturnal Apple <\/em>with Pilot Press in 2023 comes Misha Honcharenko\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>A novel in shape but poetic and free-ranging in structure (and often in syntax), <em>Trap Unfolds Me Greedily <\/em>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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat is love and what are loved ones anyway?\u201d 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 \u201cself-centered flesh with little room for caring\u201d and who liked to \u201cdrink more to pour out his bad insides\u201d. 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 \u201ca kind of sacred sequence of violence\u201d the narrator emerges, desperate for love and yet feeling undeserving of it, \u201ccompletely lonely from birth\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n<p>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. \u201cThe cries of people we will remember forever, not their face but their whole past life is what is stolen from us\u201d \u2013 death as the destruction of a person, but also of their memories, their futures. Bodies are twisted, destroyed, torn apart, fragmented throughout the text \u2013 in war, but also by pain, by grief, by desire. It is a novel full of bodily fluids \u2013 blood, cum, sweat, vomit \u2013 and bodily feelings \u2013 pain, paralysis, cold, heat. <em>Trap unfolds me greedily<\/em> is at times hard to read, hard to look at \u2013 emotionally raw, heartbreaking, and with a very sharp, recognizable rendering of the desire for love that one doesn\u2019t feel deserving of. On his family, the narrator remarks \u201cevery animal deserves a mate, but you all don\u2019t\u201d \u2013 capturing (self) loathing in a cuttingly accurate manner.<\/p>\n<p>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 \u2013 sentences stop when you don\u2019t expect them to, mutate halfway through. The use of language here is unintuitive and unmooring. <em>Trap Unfolds Me Greedily <\/em>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.<\/p>\n<p><em>Reviewed by Clare Patterson<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A rich, challenging, poetic novel of pain, desire, violence, and grief Misha Honcharenko | Trap Unfolds Me Greedily | Sissy Anarchy: \u00a315Reviewed by Clare Patterson Following the publication of his debut poetry collection Skin of Nocturnal Apple with Pilot Press in 2023 comes Misha Honcharenko\u2019s debut novel. Enfolding war, childhood, fear of death and the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.2.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Misha Honcharenko, Trap Unfolds Me Greedily, reviewed by Clare Patterson - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12826\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Misha Honcharenko, Trap Unfolds Me Greedily, reviewed by Clare Patterson - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A rich, challenging, poetic novel of pain, desire, violence, and grief Misha Honcharenko | Trap Unfolds Me Greedily | Sissy Anarchy: \u00a315Reviewed by Clare Patterson Following the publication of his debut poetry collection Skin of Nocturnal Apple with Pilot Press in 2023 comes Misha Honcharenko\u2019s debut novel. 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