Quintan Ana Wikswo’s A Long Curving Scar Where the Heart Should Be demands to be read and lived with for a few days or weeks—as long as you like, it’s got enough spirit and thought and music and visual interest to hold you. A considerable and openhearted novel, it is at once wild and sophisticated, poetic and prosaic. Although it is Wikswo’s first novel, it shows her to be intrepid storyteller, as she confronts issues of race, sex, gender, religion, and desire with an appreciation toward their complexity and oft-chaotic natures.
A human rights worker since 1988, Quintan Ana Wikswo is also a frequently exhibited visual artist. Two years ago, Coffee House Press published her first book, a collection of short stories called The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far (evidently she has a unique and enchanting inclination for long titles). This collection carried its readers into new narrative territories, often to come face-to-face with the unknown. Her otherworldly and fantastical stories—a woman who lays eggs, two lover trapped in a double nautilus, an ancient creature called “mother” who lives in a Mason jar—illustrate those deeply human circumstances of loss of control, worlds turned upside down, and the things we often deny about ourselves but are inescapable.
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