Me Who Dove Into the Heart of the World by Sabina Berman
On
I.Q. Tests, Karen Nieto scores between idiot and imbecile, but, as
the heiress to a Mazatlan tuna-fishing business points out, “I have
three virtues, and they are big ones” which give her “a big
advantage over standard humans.” Those virtues: she doesn't know
how to lie; she doesn't fantasize and so is not worried about things
that don't exist; and, “I know that I only know what I know.”
The
heroine of this short, stunning Mexican novel (translated from the
Spanish) has got another virtue: She sees and expresses things so
directly they seem skewed, in the twisted way that is often the only way
truth can emerge. Like Jerzy Kosinski's Chauncy Gardiner, her wisdom
is ignored (shunted, in Karen's case, as her family keeps her in the
basement), then heralded. But Karen's insights really are insights,
not just phrases repeated and misinterpreted. For instance, she
describes “the standard human world” as “a bubble where...only
what's human matters and everything else is either background, or
merchandise, or food.” And her take on happiness: “In order to be
happy, all you need to do is listen to your senses and not to
Descartes.” As for communication, she says, “...I don't allow
metaphors in my language system. Metaphors undermine the truth of
your information. Why the hell can't you people live without
metaphors?”
When
Karen is a teenager, her family dies off, leaving the fishing
business to an aunt, Isabelle, who returns from the U.S. to run it.
The first thing Isabelle does is let her niece out of the basement,
recognize her odd brilliance, and begin her grooming and education,
eventually enrolling her in college. Soon Karen is donning a wet suit
(as with many on the autism spectrum, she finds the tight binding
soothes her nerves) and swimming with the fishes, who she understands better than she understands her own species. So when the industry
is threatened by Greenpeace's objections to its inhumane practices,
it's Karen who develops the plan to save it, and, in partnership with
a predatory businessman, creates huge profits.
Sounds
like the plot of a feel-good story about multiple intelligences and
how differently-abled people could contribute to society if only we'd value
their differences, right? Well, OK, maybe it is. But it never feels
like it. There is not one drop of sentimentality or pleading or
arguing or convincing or anything else that would turn this into
an agenda instead of a story. There's lots of funny moments of
Karen's world colliding with “the standard human world,”
including the time she refers to as “How I Got lost in a Tokyo Bathroom
and Had What I Believe Was My First Sexual Encounter,” when she
discovers toilets with water-spraying jets in a high-end hotel. Then
there's her fabulous temper, which makes her do the kind of
poetically-justified things—like finally picking up and tossing
said predatory businessman off the pier and into the ocean—that we
only wish we could do. And throughout it all, there's her voice,
curious and assured, calling out the contradictions of the world, discrepancies so obvious that standard humans like us can't see them.
Read
this if you like your quirky underdog stories with a whiff of the
impossible. And if you're a film producer, maybe the one who produced
Amelie, buy the rights and turn this visual and sensory novel
into a movie.
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