An illusory reality colors this darkly comic novel by the International Booker Prize winner. Set on a still-trembling Earth after a global seismic event, the unnamed narrator sets out to find and kill her missing roommate. In a dusty city, she encounters ideologues offering healing who further destabilize the shaky ground of her existence. — Lorraine Berry, Los Angeles Times,”30 Books to Read This Fall”
In An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth, an unnamed narrator at the end of a mediocre acting career struggles to regain the ability to walk after a seismic event leaves the ground shattered and in constant motion. When her alluring younger housemate, Tala, disappears, what had begun as an obsession grows into an impulse to kill, forcing the narrator to confront the meaning of the ruptures that have suddenly upended her life. The drive to find and eliminate Tala becomes an existential pursuit, leading back in time and out into a desolate, dust-covered city, where lie charismatic “healing” ideologues with uncertain motives. Torn between a gnawing desire to reckon with the forces that have made her and an immediate need to find the stability to survive, she is forced to question familiar figurations of light, shadow, authenticity, resistance, and the limits of personal transformation in an alienated, alienating world.
– an Indie Next pick for December 2024
– Chicago Review of Books, “12 Must-Read Books for November”
– Los Angeles Times, “30 Books to Read This Fall”
– Library Journal, November Literary Fiction Alert
“A terribly intelligent novel . . . An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth is about ruptures, about the vacuum formed when roles and routines evaporate; it’s also about the strange seductiveness of metaphors, of characters, of story, how once you agree to their first terms you find yourself trapped in that framework. Unsettling and insightful, the novel is an homage to finding a new sense of balance—or to crawling if the shaking is too intense.” —Jake Casella Brookins, Locus Magazine
“A narrative meditation on the obsessions one clings to in the face of chaos . . . Reading Moschovakis’s prose is a singular experience.” —Alice Martin, Shelf Awareness
“A coolly provocative portrait of an aging actor in a city beset by seismic activity. . . . The narrator’s preoccupation with poetic language (she’s a staunch critic of “junk metaphors”) lends the novel a deep and lively intelligence. Readers of experimental fiction ought to seek this out.” —Publishers Weekly
“This story advances the thematic precepts of Moschovakis’ earlier work: rejecting binaries for the more shrouded truths that can be found when language, morality, and even individual selfhood are deconstructed. Moschovakis continues to provoke her readers to ask: What is a story? Or, even, what is a life?” —Kirkus Reviews
“[Moschovakis’] strengths include her inventive and stylistic use of language and her playfulness with metaphor, simile, and tropes, all skillfully employed to enhance and enforce the story. Most impressive is her character study of a person caught in the throes of a passion they both do and do not wish to escape.” —Booklist
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Advance Praise
“Like Anna Kavan and Mary Shelley before her, Anna Moschovakis knows that the phone call is always coming from inside the building. An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth is a haunting in nine acts—a terrifyingly apt commentary on contemporary psychology in which what has been lost is somehow too close to touch.” —Lucy Ives, author of Life Is Everywhere
“Moschovakis’s hallucinatory writing constellates the mind’s obsessive recursions with precision. An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth undoubtedly raises the curtain to reveal her not-so-quietly standing among geniuses like Annie Ernaux, Joy Williams, and Clarice Lispector.” —Claire Donato, author of Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts