Voice of the Fish by Lars Horn Review by Faith Hanna

Voice of the Fish   

A Lyric Essay by Lars Horn

Review by Faith Hanna

Graywolf Press

ISBN: 978-1-64445-089-5

Publication Date: 6/7/22

Pages: 240

‘Voice of the Fish,’ A Graywolf Prize Winner’s Form-defying Approach to Writing About the Body 

There are books that arrive less as body and more as embodying, as if they are designed to evoke the nature of change.  Lars Horn’s debut book, Voice of the Fish, fits into this non-category. Labeled a lyric essay, the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize winner bends expected edges and boundaries, much like the author’s own relationship with their transmasculine body. The book is and it isn’t a memoir, a series of essays, art criticism, travelogue, or one long prose poem. It is an accretion of associated, arranged fragments that build into a mood with the feel of narrative, and in this way, it is similar to Maggie Nelson‘s Bluets and Evan Lavender-Smith‘s From Old Notebooks. Horn’s structural evasiveness is also evocative of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which begins as a letter to the narrator’s mother, but readily morphs into poetry as the narrator unmakes language to reflect their own recreation. It belongs to a lineage of books that are as coherent as they are fluid, as if made to congeal one way while sliding into something else entirely.  

Part of Voice of the Fish is an odyssey with mystical, medical, and philosophical musings interspersed throughout. Horn travels to Georgia (the country), Russia, the US, Belgium, and the UK where they live with their eccentric mother, an artist, who in earlier years encouraged Lars to “look more dead” as she photographed them for her work (35). One single section nimbly traverses and relates Amazonian beliefs on knifefish, hurricane conditions in Miami, a Plutarch quote on how “men were first produced by fishes,” a reflection on how Horn sees themself better in “rivers, lakes, cliffs, in the arcs of migrating birds, schooling fish…slow tides, waters eddying along darkened shoreline” all within three pages, as Horn builds the momentum for their ideas around fish, water, and embodiment (43-50). But while a less skilled author might end up confusing a reader with the diversity of their material, Horn skillfully breaks the book’s contents down into 23 almost ruthlessly aesthetic units of varying lengths. Six of these are made with paragraphs organized by Roman numerals. Another section, titled Last Night the Sea Spat My Body, reads more like a character profile poured out one drop at at time.  

This daring and deliberate fluidity of form is part of an aesthetic that Horn developed after being too ill to read or write for six months in 2014. “I still can’t fully explain the loss of language, why my body caved–exhaustion, depression, the sheer physical pain, “ they write (6). “But living for six months in a body that wouldn’t adhere to words, that balked at sentences, made me aware of the body as texture. As image and gesture. Rhythm. As varying weight” (6). Towards the end of the book Horn reveals that they approach writing “as three dimensional construction, as composition, lighting, texture, as sculpture and image….through a textural, physical logic, a sort of curation in space,” suggesting that the fluid dynamism that they bring to their body and body of work are parallel (164).  

This is evident in the way Horn’s places smaller units of text before larger ones, as if flowing thinner streams of thought into larger bodies of ideas. For example, a half-page reflection on the tilapia’s significance in ancient Egypt as a symbol of rebirth precedes a chapter on how Horn transitioned after being “asphyxiated for over a decade” (46). That same chapter goes on to describe the origins of fishbowls, which gave way to aquariums, places where Horn has always found creatures to watch, connect with, and learn from: though captive, the animals do not deny their own nature; Horn, who feels as if their body is made of fishes, watches these creatures to recall what it is “to move with instinct, clear intent” and connect with a way of living that is more felt than defined, even as they seem to acknowledge that their life is conditioned by the parameters of an environment that attempts to confine, curb, and limit their nature ( 47). Animals that live in aquariums, Horn reminds us, grow less and die earlier, even as they entertain their ball-cap bearing captors. By structuring the book to feel like a meandering expedition, Horn deftly renders what it’s been like to explore their own changing shape in the world.  

Another one of the book’s most entertaining strengths are the vibrant, sometimes scientific, sometimes esoteric vignettes that contextualize and convey mystical messages if not universal truths. For example, Horn writes how clown, parrot, and jellyfish all change sex during their lifetimes, then reflects how those facts liberate them to see that “sex cannot be reduced to a simple binary in the species…[that sex is] more rite of passage than destination.” Knowing this, Horn says, makes them “feel so much more human” (19). If it exists in nature, they seem to say, then it can exist in human nature too. Horn also introduces the idea that animals can be holier than humans, and therefore, that aspiring to be closer to them can bring us closer to divinity. Pliny the Elder’s eels, they write, were “adorned with gold earrings and necklaces…kept as oracular aids and used to decipher messages from the gods” (16). Amidst all of the violence against man and animal in Rome, “the eels, just paces from this thick pulse of blood and fat and fur and mud, of gulped, fetid air, the eels circled–untouched, uninterrupted–their watery world so much closer to the ether of the gods” (16). That all resonates with what I read to be one Horn’s lived manifestoes–to embody and to nurture a proclivity to feel out a higher power and live it, sometimes before it’s understood, regardless of whether that truth neatly fits into what we assume to be human, or not.  

Horn matches their ambitious odyssey with a narrator who looms mythic across the pages. They were born between Pisces and Aries as an asteroid narrowly missed earth, to a mother who never wanted to be a mother, in a home without mirrors or scales or family portraits (as if, I concluded, to train Horn to sense from the inside out). They were taught from their earliest years to endure discomfort to model with live eels, salmon heads, and maggots. They’ve witnessed “beasts” that come to the foot of their bed and decided to “house” them (140). The utter strangeness of  Horn’s experiences–not least of which is an encounter with a gentle and prescient witch-doctor on Belgium’s border–make a convincing case that Horn isn’t entirely human, that there really is something fishy about them. The overall effect is that the book feels both natural and otherworldly, as if I were hearing from a fish, if a fish was a human drawn to water, the subconscious, and the undefined as they learn to know themselves from the body out.  

 The otherworldliness of Voice of the Fish’s narrator and their circumstances reminded me of Akwaeke Emezi’s narrator in Freshwater, which made me wonder who or even what I was hearing from. Emezi’s narrator claims to be ogbanje or a god born inside of a human’s body, which is also true of how Emezi sees themselves; Horn seems to be embodying the voice of a fish. Both authors have transitioned. Both write as if they were beyond human. Both books have voices with stories that almost overwhelm the humanness of their circumstances, especially as the boundary between narrator and author becomes daringly diffuse. In Horn’s case, their appeal to being a body of fishes made me wonder who I was hearing from, which I found oddly exhilarating. When else have I heard a human speak as if a fish, much less a human who seems to derive their brilliance from aspiring to be one?

It seems only proper that Horn is asking the real and slippery questions that they are proposing as a narrator that’s just as elusive. How do you, after all, write towards and as what is amorphous, flowing, and changing to begin with? What is it to be a body of movement and emerging definitions in a world that craves definition, status, and (especially as of late) confinement?  

Exploring the unconventional seems to quicken and widen Horn’s responses, if not answers, to these inquiries. “I’d like to think that bodies, bodies that fail to adhere to norms of language, that can’t manipulate words in the ways that they are told they must, I’d like to think there is space for them, for me, to speak. That maybe experiencing the world as less worded, as gesture, vivid image, can be seen not as a lack but as a resource. That they can bring some unusual angle, strange value to writing, reading, to how we communicate” (166-167). And while their appeal is powerfully laid out here, what I found even more invigorating was Horn’s approach to language, structure, and content in Voice of the Fish. That is, the way they bring us along great distances in mind and body while rounding almost intentionally amorphous conclusions, and yet, through all of it, we are contained within the book’s thoughtfully and skillfully designed units.  

And yet, as I moved through the narrative, I searched for more quotidian personal and intimate moments like eating, showering, or hugging. I wanted to know how these inform Horn’s feel for their body and body of work. Why? Because I related to Horn’s experience of the body as existing in change, if not always to the strangeness of their circumstances, and I craved more acknowledgement that one does not need to turn to ancient scrolls or go on epic pilgrimages to find inspiration to go beyond what we are. Even so, Voice of the Fish courageously opens windows that reveal the opportunities and tensions, often unexpected, that arrive with moving through the world as a queer, transmasculine body and soul.  

Voice of the Fish truly defies one form by embracing many, turning, like its author and subject, from established ideas, towards felt truths, not by denying history, but by recasting it through the lens of a person who has, for all of their life, known themselves through plunging mysteries. It’s a thrilling, adventurous, expansive ride—less for those who seek comfort in well wrought tradition than for those who crave the skilled-freshness of the unexpected.  

Faith Hanna is a Panamanian-American MFA candidate, writing fellow, and nonfiction journal editor at St. Mary’s College of California. Her essays and short stories have appeared in Forum, Athena Talks, Mazing, and Relate Magazine. 

Lars Horn is a writer and translator working in literary and experimental non-fiction. The recipient of the Tin House Without Borders Residency and a Sewanee Writers’ Conference scholarship, Horn’s writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Literary Hub, Granta, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Initially specialising in Phenomenology and Visual Arts scholarship, they hold MAs from the University of Edinburgh, the École normale supérieure, Paris, and Concordia University, Montreal. They split their time between Miami, Colorado, and the UK with their wife, the writer Jaquira Díaz.

24 August 2022