Juice

Juice, by Renee Gladman, is a novel of an experience of a narrator, who I’m assuming to be a girl due to her mentioning “drying my hair in the hot part of the forest”.  My impression of the story line is that the narrator is questioning who she is and why she does and says the things she does. My take on the short fiction is that it’s definitely a question of self.

                Gladman begins her story telling the reader about the narrator in snap-shots. She was an archeology student, or rather the narrator was in an “archeological gang”. I suppose interest may have been produced since her mother’s “lover” was the leader of the gang. Together, they were to “explore the facts” of their history. Her ancestors left a tyrannical nation in order to start over in the mountains. The people are now free and are “nobody’s conquerors”.

She lives in statues that the “sky illuminates”. People believe that she lives in the south because of how the narrator describes the mountains, whether it’s the description or her dialect. She was taught to speak of herself “peripherally”, which I would assume allowed her to connect with the surroundings, people and the earth. It is possible to conclude that due to her archeological process of thinking and the way she was brought to “mature by impression alone” led her to a life of brokenness. She mentions that she has “grown to think of people for physical pleasure”. People are more than just bodies. They have minds and feelings that govern their conscience.  I think this is part of why she had made a connection with her home. When everyone disappears, she realizes her loss and even mentions, “… you feel it, but so synonymously with the flow of your blood or taking in air that the beauty seems to be about you”. It has a romantic feel for her love of her home. It’s a picturesque moment, but it crumbles when she finds that her home “exists without you”. She asks the reader to “contemplate the disturbance of that compounded by the apparent exodus of those who, in your mind, were extensions of yourself.”. It’s a terribly sad story! To imagine that you fit in an certain place and to find that you don’t is crushing to the ego.