Austin author Szilvia Molnar’s debut novel The Nursery, a memoir-looking work about a new mother suppressing baby-harming thoughts, is an engaging experiment in uncomfortable empathy that finds its tonal antecedents in cerebral body horror movies like David Cronenberg’s The Brood and David Lynch’s Eraserhead, and its stylistic sisterhood in the early avant-garde confessionals of French novelist and screen writer Marguerite Duras.
Expressing the parasitic pain her unnamed narrator experiences while nursing her newborn, Molnar writes: “With a hand on the back of her head, I put her face toward my nipple and a toothless mouth opens. She latches on with lips soft as a fish. I squirm from the initial discomfort of her bite.”
Our heroine, a translator of Swedish literature who refers to her infant as a leech and calls her “Button,” goes on to detail the rushed hospital room moments after delivery as a kind of bartering of bodily fluids stalled by medical devices: “Liquids poured out of me, liquids were pushed into my veins, and a catheter was pricked into my urethra.”
