Elaine Vilar Madruga's THE TYRANNY OF FLIES (Tr by Kevin Gerry Dunn)

Elaine Vilar Madruga demands only a little of her readers, at first: we must suspend our disbelief enough to accept that an island nation's unofficial Second Family can contain a teenage daughter who is ferociously and very sexually attracted to inanimate objects; a son whose touch causes instant death, which animals as small as ants and as large as monkeys at the local zoo can sense and deeply and frantically desire, so that his own life is constantly accompanied by suicidal animals striving to make contact with him and end their miserable lives; and that it is actually the flies -- as in those annoying little flying pests that get in everywhere to fly around, buzzing, land on everything and immediately poop on it, and find a good juicy smelly food source onto or into which to lay eggs that hatch into squirmy little maggots that gross us out and then metamorphose into a new generation of flies even as their parents die and collect in the bottoms of our light bulbs, those flies -- yes, the flies that rule the world. And their will cannot ever be gainsaid, for how would they even know that you disagree?

I mean, I don't know about you, but I have believed a few, slightly more impossible things than these before breakfast. 

Welcome to The Tyranny of Flies. We've kept a seat for you, warm and soft like the gummy bears from a school bus passenger's pocket.

It takes a real woman to give birth, but it takes one hell of a real woman to admit you will never experience what other mothers do in those first hours, days, and months. Not just because the three babies you brought into this world took a big whopping shit inside of you, what the doctors inaptly call fetal distress but ought to call fecal jubilation*, the slow shattering of the mother's insides, the fetuses former home, with the foulest of substances; not just because you pumped out three kids with gargantuan heads that forced you to enlarge the epistiotomy twice, and not even that was good enough for the third, the breech birth. No, you will never get the same gratification as other mothers because, regardless of gender, each of your kids is a sick son of a bitch.

By the way, there is a third child in this family, and she is perhaps the strangest of them all. But more about Calia, still a poopy-pantsed toddler and despite this is the only one flies don't buzz around, tickle when they land, or vomit on, in a moment. First, though,  let's consider the family as a whole.

As I've already intimated, this is not a family that loves each other. The father, whom we only get to know as Papa, was an up-and-comer in a dictatorial regime, attending a public event in his splendid uniform, already decked out in a few of his ever-growing collection of medals, when he spotted a very pretty but otherwise ordinary girl who would become the family's Mama, and decided that She Would Do, would at least give him the beautiful children that his public presentation would require in order that his Importance might increase. She, being orphaned somewhat young by some truly extraordinary and bizarre circumstances that Papa might have wanted to know about before they married, but too late now, doesn't have any other prospects and so agreed to become his wife and have his children and let him take care of her and buy her pretty high-heeled shoes, and thus a family began.

By the time we meet this family, Papa and Mama have three children, daughter Cassandra (she of the ferocious sexual attraction to various inanimate objects, her passion growing with the size of the objects as she gets older, until at age 16 she is ready to declare that the love of her life is a neighborhood bridge, constructed of iron, genteel-ly rusting away, and certainly giving no indication that it does not welcome or consent to Cassandra's leering advances and eventual, uh, consummation); son Caleb (he of the deadly touch and parade of suicidal animals ever trailing in his wake) and daughter Calia, whom Mama is convinced is a reincarnation of Mama's dead aunt when Calia reveals both intense and non-verbal neurodivergence and a preternatural talent for drawing, even at just three years old, such realistic and lifelike animals that you'd swear that, on her anatomically accurate crayon illustrations of monkey's asses the perfectly rendered hairs would stir in the breeze of your breath if you blew on them. Mama's dead aunt could draw like that, and had other supernatural talents as well. But unlike Calia, Mama's dead aunt could be bothered to acknowledge the presence of other humans now and then.

Have you seen Yorgos Lanthimos' early film, still in Greek with English subtitles, Dogtooth? In which "A controlling, manipulative father locks his three adult offspring in a state of perpetual childhood by keeping them prisoner within the sprawling family compound," there to experiment on them rather unscrupulously by teaching them that, among other things, their canine teeth will fall out someday when they've reached full maturity and that until that happens, they are still children and owe him absolute obedience and credulousness? I think that Elaine Vilar Madruga has, but did Lanthimos one better: what if the kids started out weird and only got weirder? What if their Mama hated them from birth and wasn't shy about letting anybody know, including them? And what if their house's most frequent guest was the all-powerful leader of their country, who loved those children as though they were his own and, well, what if he really was, in some way or another their Papa? By which I mean yes, on top of everything else, there are questions of identity as well as of authorship and the reliability of our sometimes first-person, sometimes third-person narrator that might well turn out to be rather an unusual entity a la Olga Tokarczuk's The Empusium but is probably just Cassandra? Maybe?

Oh, and by the way, Papa has one hell of a stutter, such that he is all but incapable of saying his children's names correctly. Thus we see frequent references to "Cacasandra," "Cacaleb" and "Cacalia," and the visually and to a certain degree sonically implied (as explained with some glee by Kevin Gerry Dunn in his special translator's note at novel's end) scatalogical syllables "caca" are very much intentional; this book does not shy away from toilet humor. Which, should that surprise you, given what two of the children call each other?

Anyway, Cacasandra, Cacaleb and Cacalia do not live in a normal household, even before their Cuba-esque island nation's dictatorial leader begins asking his favorite child, the Bridgefucker, to start spying on her parents. For, you see, the children's aunt and uncle have been found guilty of an assassination attempt against the dictator, whom Cacasandra calls "Pop Pop Mustache" because of his magnificent facial hair (no Castro beard, though), and thus the whole clan, but especially Cacasandra's father, is under a cloud of suspicion, ever gathering, like flies. She is reluctant to become a spy, not so much out of family loyalty as out of concern that becoming a government informant will interfere with her weird and illicit love affair, but ultimately she at least lets the dictator conclude that she's going to cooperate, having learned that a shrug is a good and acceptable answer to most of the proposals of those with power over her, who were going to project their assumptions onto her anyway, after all...

But so, ultimately, The Tyranny of Flies is a story of rebellion, if only of one on the smallest possible scale and with rather disappointing results. Just because it's monkey's asses that are chiefly involved in this story, one mustn't conclude that no monkey's paws were curled closed in its telling! But pay close attention if you want to follow the plot against the dictatorship(s): a lot is going on just out of frame while Cacasandra distracts you with precocious sexual shenanigans and Cacaleb conducts monstrous art out of all of those animal suicides. Can you guess the plan? Would you, too, suffer the fate of the tyrants? Or would they ca-catch you in the act?

Sorry, I couldn't resist. 

*Dude. You cannot tell me Kevin Gerry Dunn did not have a little more fun than usual in translating this book.