Imagine every acerbic, barbed, caustic thought you’ve ever had, all stitched together into one highly quotable novel, where not a single sentence will ever go where you would predict. This is Missouri Williams’ The Vivisectors.
The novel places its heroine, Agathe, at the heart of a sardonic tale set in a fictional university town with a post-apocalyptic, overgrown vegetation problem. It is ‘a dying city’ that has ‘become too exhausted’. It's here that Agathe finds herself employed by ‘a deluded rich woman’ working as a professor, whose work is riddled with errors and whose thoughts are embedded with zeal.
With the turn of every page, the words remind you what it is really like to inhabit the mind of an impassive, pococurante teen for whom nothing and no one incites any particular passion. This includes the particularly polarising introduction of her mother, a woman left catatonic after a failed attempt at suicide. For Agathe, she is ‘the dead woman in a chair’. It’s not vitriolic, and her mind isn’t malicious; Agathe is simply ‘mad at the whole world’: ‘Like everyone in the family, [Agathe] resented being alive’.
Soon, her path collides with Adam, who is ‘far too alive for... our crumbling necropolis’. ‘I hated him at once’, Agathe thinks. And yet, one finds her oscillating in her own detached way to a love story as old as time: an enemies-to-lovers trope in the workplace. Readers get to know him, learn how he is a contrarian in a university brimming with a guilty political past, and fall in love with him even as Agathe attempts to resist his indirect charms. Williams manages to make you blush and sigh even as one nods and murmurs ‘hmm’ through one's glasses of intellectual pretension demanded by this satirical novel.
{{/usCountry}}Soon, her path collides with Adam, who is ‘far too alive for... our crumbling necropolis’. ‘I hated him at once’, Agathe thinks. And yet, one finds her oscillating in her own detached way to a love story as old as time: an enemies-to-lovers trope in the workplace. Readers get to know him, learn how he is a contrarian in a university brimming with a guilty political past, and fall in love with him even as Agathe attempts to resist his indirect charms. Williams manages to make you blush and sigh even as one nods and murmurs ‘hmm’ through one's glasses of intellectual pretension demanded by this satirical novel.
{{/usCountry}}The sentences are long, the paragraphs offer sparse breaks, and the chapters offer little to no respite from Agathe's bleak perspective, although her personality is performative enough to neither stand out nor seem too withdrawn to those around her. She is the personification of the most sullen teenage phase that most of us have faced, and yet her brilliantly articulated sentences create what is decidedly a dreadfully delicious tale of reluctant romance in a surreal dystopian world.
What’s interesting is the structure of the book: we learn Agathe’s name only halfway through the story. And this is where the narrative truly breaks free of her passivity and acquires an agency separate from her stoic drift. The city comes undone, the university is in flux, the politics begin to unravel, and Agathe and Adam’s romance finally starts blooming from hesitation to courtship to love. Here, Adam tells her in no uncertain terms: “You’ve come to mean something to me. I’d like to mean something to you.” This essentially sums up The Vivisectors for all we ever want is for the world around us to light up as someone takes our hand.
We’re all victims of the human condition, and the only medicine it needs is: love.
Title: The Vivisectors
Author: Missouri Williams
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Price: ₹699
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