Pandora
Ana Paula Pacheco’s Pandora is a startling, bold allegorical novella about pandemic-era hazards to women.
COVID-19 upends literature professor Ana’s life. Her classes and her friendship with Alice, with whom she plans a pornography site, move online. Flouting lockdown, the women embark on a sexual partnership—cut short by first Alice, then Ana, being hospitalized with the virus. When Alice dies, Ana embarks on “marriages” to a pangolin and a seven-foot-tall bat. At a psychiatrist’s behest, she revisits her childhood and interrogates the meanings of this “menagerie of ghosts.”
The initial autofiction setup shades into surrealism: The apartment crawls with insects for the pangolin to eat, so Ana scales the walls on support hooks. Ana is afraid the moody creature will kill her; she wakes up bleeding after marital rape. The megabat is just as exploitative, rendering Ana’s home a guano-covered cave and demanding she feed him with her own blood. Absurd yet gruesome, these scenarios of domestic abuse pair two of the species most often blamed for the pandemic with its disproportionate effects on women.
Though short, the book keeps shifting shape. The form varies to include numbered sections, the syllabus for Ana’s new course, journal entries, and extended fantasies. Throughout, depictions of animals enable commentary on economic inequalities and gendered struggles. Bull and bear symbols for the market embody violence and hunger; the unrealistic aesthetic expectations placed on female bodies are made clear when Ana, imagining herself as a dolphin or eagle, considers labiaplasty and Botox. The deadpan narration obscures reality, while the psychiatrist’s interventions cast doubt on what Ana presents as fact. The question of how she might break free is tantalizing.
Pandora is a playful, visceral, and intriguing fable in which a woman’s mental health crisis reveals a bevy of misogynistic threats.
Reviewed by
Rebecca Foster
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
