A short intense brutal story of the relationship between a mother and her daughter. Feebleminded explores issues of need, dependency, and love in a language and style that is ferocious in its execution leaving the reader drained by this assault on his senses that has just taken place. ( )

Nearly every sentence in this novel offers up an image that was either grotesque, or alarming, or disturbingly violent. I haven't been so repulsed by a story since reading Kathy Acker. And that's the point. This novel brilliantly accomplishes what it sets out to do. And the translation I can only call masterful, because the precise words and phrases chosen here for the English transformation of the original Spanish consistently surprised and disgusted me, which is the aim of this work. Can words on a page be so disruptively disturbing? Yes, they can be. Even now that I've read the novel I can open to any page and some sentence will brim over with a brilliantly grotesque nugget of turdish perfection.

I'm mulling over why this novel is so much more disturbing and frankly more nauseating to me than the author's previous novel, Die, My Love, when these two novels reach for the same territory of alienation and female fury. All I know is I felt soaring release when I read Die My Love; I identified with the postpartum alienation of its protagonist and rejoiced at her rage. Whereas with Feebleminded I felt like the author was holding my head under and I was drowning in a fetid pool of nihilistic and unhinged madness.

That said, you should read it. ( )