Renée Branum’s debut novel begins with a chapter titled “Golden Years.” She writes, “When I picture the city now, I see it from overhead. Bird’s-eye. A long, lonely aerial view looking down onto orange clay rooftiles curved like the shells of snails.” The sensory details of Branum’s descriptions stand out immediately; Defenestrate showcases a world of vibrant textures, smells, tastes, and colors. A bridge becomes “a long spine of black bone straining across the bread-colored water.” On the streets, “a faintly greenish mist” rises from the snow in the gutters. Branum’s prose is blissful and immersive; tea does not smell like tea, but like “leaves going soft at the bottom of a well—mint, citrus, chamomile—as deep and unfathomable as the earth’s molten center.”
The book opens with the family legend that becomes its core, the black hole around which narrator Marta and her twin brother Nick endlessly orbit: Their great-great-grandfather Jiří, an architect in Prague, pushed a stonemason from scaffolding to his death for reasons not entirely concrete. Supposedly, the stonemason had been having an affair with Jiří’s young daughter, and ever since, generations of Marta and Nick’s family have been burdened by a “falling curse.”
After a falling out with their mother, Marta and Nick travel to the origin of their inherited affliction, Prague, where they spend the aimless years of new adulthood. Through Branum’s deft writing, the city is personified. She leads us down Prague’s alleyways with the same generosity as Calvino guiding readers through Invisible Cities’ Venice, until finally, the pair returns home at the end of a summer “so milky and humid that walking felt like swimming.”
Marta’s narrative is braided out of strands and fragments: their years spent in Prague, an accident and its aftermath, the twins’ childhood, the family curse, stories of those who have fallen from great heights and survived, stories of those who have fallen from great heights and weren’t so lucky. I wove into and out of Marta’s present and her past, wove between her reality and the myths with which she surrounds herself. Stories are told in brief. Each chapter spans only one or two pages—maybe three. In “Builder of Small Worlds,” Marta’s father painstakingly crafts model towns and in another, Marta visits eclectic Czech museums of miniatures. Readers learn about the Serbian flight attendant who holds the record for longest fall without a parachute; about Czech author Bohumil Hrabal, who died after a hospital window fall while attempting to feed a pigeon; about Julian Koepcke, who plummeted from a lightning-shattered airplane. Buster Keaton, an actor and comedian in American silent films, is Marta and Nick’s lifelong idol and a master of the pratfall. He appears and reappears throughout the narrative, an ever-present Eckleberg. (Marta thinks, at her brother’s hospital bedside, “It would feel wrong for Keaton to see us like this.”)
As the story nears its conclusion, Branum continues to demonstrate an impressive narrative self-awareness. Her debut features the thematic compactness and intensity of a short story and yet it’s been expanded to the length of a novel. Just as a series of vignettes begins to slow or lull, Marta reminds readers of the cliffhanger at which she left a prior strand: “I know that, in telling this story, I’ve left my father there, stranded in the moment of his shouting ‘Enough!’… I know I’ve left him poised, midstride, hanging in that moment between the lungs squeezing down and filling back up.”
Defenestrate is a novel about the stories we tell ourselves and those we tell others. The myths we build around ourselves. Branum asks, how do narratives live within our bodies? How do they evolve over seasons, years, generations? Marta tells full truths to strangers at bars, where the beers she drinks “coat me from the inside, like a chemical poured down a drain to break apart a clog…” The recipients of Marta’s stories—whether Paul Bunyan at a costume party or a soft-spoken bartender—become “sturdy vessels” into whom stories can be poured.
To those individuals who are most important in Marta’s life—her brother, her mother, or Morena, an Italian woman in Prague with whom she develops a tenuous connection—Marta’s words falter and fail. Branum asks her readers, how much of ourselves do we grant to others—to our siblings and parents, to our great loves or strangers? How much of ourselves do we preserve solely as our own? As Nick’s mental health deteriorates, Marta is faced with a question that reverberates through Branum’s novel: Where must one draw the line between sacrifice and self-preservation?
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