The pedestrian

The pedestrian is intimate as an ultrasound of the past, revealing a many-chambered organ haunted by someones, somethings and others. A cross between medium and technician, Valerie Hsiung meticulously probes the uncanny gap between before and after with a language devised for this purpose and no other. Precise, unflinching and subtle, Hsiung’s sentences shift to meet the unspeakable where it lives—within.

Silky grief, kinetic gaps and dislocations, and a potent, trance-like narration that brushes and brushes against the inarticulable. Valerie Hsiung’s The pedestrian is entirely outside of category, awakening nerves long dormant through its gorgeous obliquity, its charge of fresh music. The hypnosis is plainly startling, entangling the reader and guiding her into the most otherworldly of spaces: the other worlds rushing forth, ungovernable, inside this one. In place of the usual tired meanings comes the largesse of mystery and deeper, stranger voices. The pedestrian is an antidote ampule to memory’s cliches. No, not just memory’s cliches—to any force that conspires to sever the dreaming from the waking.

The pedestrian is a map to a terrain of shards and shadows. While reading it, I felt lost only to the land of the normative, a lush fugitivity. I traveled far with, because of, and in this book. Hsiung trusts in the politics of decomposition, making syntaxes that have been distorted by grief, and thus sharpened to what cannot be colonially extracted. Writers like this know that grammar, vocabulary, and the sentence itself are haunted, so they write not to exorcise or cure this condition of its ghosts, but to make a place for them to live, a place they belong.

Two is a confounding number, asserting, through its adjacency to one, the split from which consciousness proceeds. In the third person, Valerie establishes a self in two parts, living two lives, witnessing in memory an architecture of diasporic remembrance at odds with Proustian time. The past in The pedestrian is cellular—replicated, split, migrated— its membranes stretched by Valerie’s devoted prose, its unsentimental attunement to the fray of love and loss. She renders what’s closest—a mother, a house, a child—radically extimate. An inversion inviting, at the turn of every mundane gesture, history’s ravenous ghost (eating is always a reminder of hunger). Legs splayed open, birthing herself with each new paragraph, She is a revelation. She shows how perfect the sentence can be as a place to keep the wound active. A staggering act of containment enabling us to remain in touch with the break, and to find, in the split, all of life’s surplus.