The Box by Mandy-Suzanne Wong
The Box by Mandy-Suzanne Wong
English | 2023 | Sci-Fi & Fantasy
A stylistically dazzling novel about things, people, and the forces and seams between them.
Of course, each thing has its own sides to every story.
In a dark and crooked lane in an unnamed city where it never ceases to snow, a small white box falls from a coat pocket. It is made of paper strips woven tightly together; there is no apparent way to open it without destroying it. What compels a passing witness to this event, a self-described anthrophobe not inclined to engage with other people, to pick up the box and chase after the stranger who dropped it?
The Box follows a rectangular cuboid as it changes hands in a collapsing metropolis, causing confluences, conflicts, rifts, and disasters. Different narrators, each with a distinctive voice, give accounts of decisive moments in the box’s life. From the anthrophobe to a newly hired curator of a renowned art collection to a couple who own an antiquarian bookshop to a hotel bartender hiding from a terrible past, the storytellers repeat rumors and rely on faulty memories, grasping at a thing that continually escapes them. Haunting their secondhand recollections is one mysterious woman who, convinced of the box’s good or evil powers, pursues it with deadly desperation.
A mesmerizing, intricately constructed puzzle of a novel, The Box challenges our understanding of subjects and objects, of cause and effect. Is it only humans who have agency? What is or isn’t animate? What do we value and what do we discard?
