The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey
Two halves – fiction and nonfiction – make up Catherine Lacey's experimental and groundbreaking memoir without beginning or end
Given its title, you would be forgiven for thinking Catherine Lacey’s The Möbius Book would be an airless work of cyclical allegory and scalable allusions: all topology, no topicality. Thankfully, this is not the case. Lacey’s latest is actually a work of two halves, both fiercely compelling and fresh: on the one hand, a frank examination of the acts of love and faith – as well as their absences and antitheses – that have marked the author’s life in recent years; and on the other, a crisp short story echoing – or, depending in which order you read it, foreshadowing – the entropic rise and fall of the other half of the book.
In this superb blend of studied memoir and loosely sketched fiction, matters that destabilise, from heartbreak to hunger, are given license to remain largely unreconciled; errors are 'allow[ed] to live.' There is precision here, too: friendships – even those that perhaps qualify more as 'distant company' than ride-or-die – are the primary axis of The Möbius Book; and Lacey’s steady depiction of these platonic bonds help steer her recount of life as it was, as it is, and as she has imagined it.
As The Möbius Book collapses the boundaries of the genre – animated, as it is, by a sense of an ending and a beginning on a continuum – Lacey grants her reader the assurance that there might still be 'good ways to be demolished.'