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An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth

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A formidable, uncanny, and utterly unique new work from accomplished novelist and poet, Anna Moschovakis, whose translation of David Diop’s Frêre d’âme (At Night All Blood Is Black, Pushkin and FSG) won the 2021 International Booker Prize

In An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth, an unnamed narrator struggles to regain the ability to walk after a sudden seismic event has rendered unpredictable shifts and undulations in the ground. Convinced of a need to find and kill her younger housemate, Tala, who has disappeared, the narrator struggles physically and psychically to contend with her homicidal task in the wake of failure as a Method actor. The narrator travels back in time and out into a dust-covered, shadowy city, where she is targeted by charismatic “healing” ideologues with uncertain motives. Torn between a paranoid suspicion of internalized, toxic language, and a desperate attempt to find stability and feel something like whole, she is forced to question familiar figurations of light, shadow, authenticity, and voice, taking tentative steps toward a new understanding of self and world.

208 pages, Paperback

First published November 19, 2024

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3328 people want to read

About the author

Anna Moschovakis

25 books61 followers
Anna Moschovakis is a translator and editor, and the author of several books of poetry, including I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone (2006) and You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake (2011), which won the James Laughlin Award. She is the recipient of awards and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and has completed an apexart residency in Ethiopia. Moschovakis lives in Brooklyn and Delaware County, New York.

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 68 reviews
Profile Image for Kitty.
Author 3 books93 followers
January 15, 2025
Really hated this but who the fuck am I to say anything to anyone. Actually incredibly disturbed by anyone calling this a sapphic love story. Being incredibly jealous of a woman you find beautiful and wanting to kill her is not homosexual attraction in any meaningful way. Maybe to you guys with your Hegelian I don't even know what. But that's not how we do it on the street.
Profile Image for Nathan Shuherk.
387 reviews4,355 followers
September 21, 2025
I think this could’ve been even weirder and it would’ve been a 5star. This world doesn’t make sense. This character doesn’t make sense. But we’re supposed to read it like it slightly does…? What if, instead, we all let ourselves sink into this weird fever dream even deeper until it shattered us?
Profile Image for Trennon Wint.
20 reviews
January 16, 2025
I’m not sure I’ve ever been so ambivalent towards a book in my life. I’m in love with what this could have, and arguably should have, been but, reading it just left me with an immense lack of satisfaction.

Let me start by saying that conceptually, this story is incredible - I don’t think anyone can argue that! From the very first line I was hooked and engrossed in knowing how things would end. Although within this story, there is the basis for an amazing book; An Earthquake is the Shaking of the Surface of the Earth however, is not that book.

My biggest problem with this book is that it’s writing is infused with a sense of self-importance, the likes of which I haven’t seen in any other piece of literature. Moschovakis has planted far too many unnecessary “quirks” into this book, whose sole purpose seems to be to say: “this book is different, this book is going to be phenomenal, please talk about this book”. All of this took away from the story, and made the whole thing feel incredibly disingenuous and hard to connect with.

While I’m a sucker for some good philosophical discussions, it feels like this book was written by someone who had only a surface-level understanding of philosophy. Conversations about “do other people also have internal voices” is simply not deserving of like 5 pages and repetitive callbacks, especially when you glance over other concepts so rapidly.

I think the essence of my thoughts on this book can be summarized by saying that the author tried to do too much, and in doing so, was unable to give any individual element of the story the attention it deserved.

The unnamed narrator was fun, the quirky paragraph structure was fun, the poems at the end of each chapter were fun, the narrator’s hatred of common turn-of-phrases was fun, odd sentence structures that barely formed a coherent thought were fun, the use of “a book within a book” was fun, the plot to kill a roommate was fun, the discussions on sexuality were great, the discussions on generational trauma was great, the discussions on psychosis and mental illness were great, the discussions on life upheaval and grief were great…….all of this together? It was a disappointing mess.

726 reviews25 followers
September 20, 2024
Anna Maschovakis won the 2021 Man Booker International Prize for her translation of David Diop’s novel At Night All Blood is Black. Her latest novel is set in a dystopian landscape in which the earth rumbles, rollicks and undulates violently, such that walking across a room is fraught with danger of falling. The nameless narrator, a former theater actor, is struggling with maintaining balance physically and emotionally. Then when Tala moves in with our protagonist, an obsession begins that forms and informs the bulk of the narrative.

The vertiginous quality of Moschovakis’ prose is emblematic of the disruptive environment that constantly shakes and quakes.

Via our narrator, the author mines the profound psychological dissonance caused by the seismic event and entrance of an infatuation.

Moschovakis’ strength lies in her inventive and stylistic use of language, her playfulness with metaphor, with simile, with tropes; all skillfully employed to enhance and enforce the story.

Most impressive is her character study of someone caught in the throes of a passion they do and do not wish to escape.

Read Alikes:
Eleanor, or The Rejection of the Progress of Love - Anna Moschovakis
The Possession - Annie Ernaux (author) Anna Moschovakis (trans.)
Harrow - Joy Williams
Hurricane Season - Fernanda Melchor (author), Sophie Hughes (trans.)
Profile Image for lids :).
297 reviews1 follower
December 26, 2024
i enjoyed it a lot, tried to read it while i was stoned and got way too paranoid. definitely one that leaves you with questions. this is a very... jarring(?) narrative style and POV.
Profile Image for Katherine.
250 reviews
November 23, 2024
Review to come in the Buffalo Hive :)

In his 1807 work The Phenomenology of Spirit, philosopher Georg Wilhlem Friedrich Hegel outlined a meaning-making system known as the dialectic, in which two entities are defined via mutual, antagonistic recognition of the other. This dialectic has proven powerful, influencing political and philosophical movements ranging from existentialism to communism to fascism. Yet it’s also propped up by a dead metaphor, a metaphor either used so often it has become a cliche, or one whose real-world reference point has been lost over time: that of a master and a bondsman, one trying to kill the other even though the other’s death means self-annihilation.

Picture this parable of unequal self and other transposed onto two women—an unnamed, semi-retired stage actress and her beautiful, vivacious, but enigmatic tenant Tala—and you’ll have the plot of Anna Moschovakis’s An Earthquake is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth. In a world in which earthquakes have become an unpredictable daily occurrence, metaphorically and physically shaking the foundations of her life, the narrator has found stability only in relation to Tala, but specifically in the single-minded urge to kill Tala. All stable meaning collapses when Tala abruptly disappears.

Moschovakis, an acclaimed translator, poet, and novelist who studied philosophy and comparative literature, clearly knows the master and the bondsman parable. And at times, her novel reads more like a thesis on how language is used during times of crisis, one that weaves together Hegelian philosophy, literary discussion of metaphor, and performance theory traditions against the backdrop of a disaster reminiscent of the COVID-19 pandemic. The narrator serves as Moschovakis’s mouthpiece. As she finds herself increasingly confined to her own home, unable to walk on shaky ground, she turns inwards to meandering critiques of language. Dead metaphor is one such target. The lexicon of disaster “resilience” and “relief,” words stretched to the limit of their usefulness when repeated over and over, is another.

The blurring of the surface/interior dialectic, increasingly an area of focus for philosophers and literary scholars, also manifests across the novel, from its geological premise to its ruminations on stage performance, method acting, and the personal and social performances implicit in our daily lives and dreams. This too the narrator attributes to a structuring issue of language, and with good reason. Performativity—all surface and no interior, a theory now used in diverse scholarly fields from gender studies to finance—originated in linguistics, after all.

The result of this obsession with language is the collapse of meaning as the novel progresses. Lines and sections from unknown scripts, notebook entries, and even poetic fragments intrude on the narration without preamble or explanation. Past the halfway point, our unreliable narrator has shifted from knowingly deconstructing scenes as a method actress to describing scenes as if she herself can no longer piece together what’s happening, driving her further into herself. Of what could potentially be a photo shoot involving the performance of grief, she writes:

“There are people inside…As before, some of them are sitting in the cubicles around the room’s perimeter. Some of them are on the phone. Two of them, as before, are more in the middle of the room, talking, but this time instead of standing they are on high stools, each of them on one stool, with a third stool between them, and sitting on the third stool is a rectangular metal object. One of the people sitting on one of the stools is holding a metal cylinder which appears to be attached to the object on the stool, though whatever it is that attaches it, wires I guess, is hard to make out from a distance through the mirrored glass.

“The person holding the cylinder is wearing an expression of distress, which is somehow easy to make out. I mean that the emotion of the person’s expression is clear, while other aspects of the person are blurry…I can feel the emotion’s clarity extend toward the windows, the only thing that separates me from the scene inside, and while there is something compelling about the prospect of receiving it, of welcoming it and letting it and its clarity overtake me, I am aware of my prior agenda, and my awareness of my prior agenda makes me take a step back, and then two steps back, away from the window and back toward my little house, toward my project, toward my notebooks and the priorities listed on the cabinet door of the kitchenette, neglected now for days.”

If all of this sounds confusing, it is. The casual reader will likely struggle with this book if evaluated on the terms of a traditional novel. Its plot reads like a thought experiment (as previously noted, it was lifted from a philosophical treatise), and its characters are not written to be particularly relatable or likable. Even as someone with an investment in the novel’s linguistic questions, I found myself struggling with disbelief and incredulity: if the point was to probe at crises of meaning that accompany real-world crises, why premise the novel on a metaphorical crisis? And why not just write a philosophy paper instead?

Yet An Earthquake is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth’s examination of how closely language can govern the foundations of reality—both that of the novel and of our world—also feels incredibly timely. Returning to the narrator’s exploration of dead metaphor, or indeed of all linguistic cliches: If we think of metaphor itself as a meaning-making system, a way of stabilizing something uncertain via comparison to a known entity, dead metaphors create meaning based on what we think we know but do not actually know. They’re bad foundations. Plus, they lack imagination. If we can only rely on overused linguistic tropes to understand the future, we miss the chance to rip up old systems of meaning in favor of new possibilities.

Pondering the words of an anarchist, erstwhile friend, the narrator notes, “the important thing is that the new stories don’t always displace the old ones, they just reduce their authority…It doesn’t seem to matter if the new stories are, themselves, equally disturbing, or even if they are more disturbing than the experienced events they are attempting to replace. Their role isn’t to lighten things up; the work they do is only the work of dis-attachment, of insisting on multiplicity.”

Let those words be a guide to how to read An Earthquake is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth. It does not “lighten things up.” Its literary experiments are unlikely to replace the comforting familiarity of a good novel, with interesting characters and an inventive plot. Yet its refusal to give you an easy, direct path towards meaning challenges us readers to practice alternative ways towards making sense of a world. To find different ways of moving across an ever-shaking earth—one that looks so much like our own.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Andy Weston.
3,147 reviews222 followers
January 25, 2025
In an uncanny near future, a seismic event has disrupted Earth's crust, leaving everyone to live through continuous earthquakes. Though many of them are large, they are nearly constant.
I was living in Santiago for the 5th biggest earthquake of all time, 8.8 strength, though its epicentre was 200 miles away. For the following few weeks the ground frequently rumbled with aftershocks, even outside on the playing fields I was working on.

So, certainly an attractive premise, and the first part of the book lives up to that potential. Steadily though, the author, who is clearly a gifted writer, gets caught up with the use of language to the detriment of the narrative.

Put more simply, it becomes confusing and something of a struggle. The plot comes across as a thought experiment with philosophical diversions, and the characters without depth, neither empathetic or likeable.
Profile Image for M.
82 reviews
January 4, 2025
i am no longer going to force myself to finish books i dislike. this is the last time i push through with hope
Profile Image for Josh Mlot.
568 reviews12 followers
May 17, 2025
I don’t know how much I enjoyed this, but I respect what it’s trying to do and there were moments I appreciated. This is a poetic, philosophical reflection on loss, loneliness, emotional health, and self help. Full of metaphor and existential inner struggle, the short novel is unmoored from reality throughout—what is real and what is not and what is metaphor? There are moments of humor and a playfulness with language that stood out to me, but as a whole it felt very much like a fever dream of intellectual exercise.
Profile Image for ju.
54 reviews1 follower
December 20, 2024
This book gives you no answers, but DOES give you all the right questions. Short and existential, begging you to reckon with what stability really means. This book makes a mockery of self-help curricula in a way that is sharp, shadowy, and also… helpful?
Profile Image for Callie.
15 reviews
October 12, 2025
Idk why I even bothered to finish this. Probably cause it was a quick read with very short and oddly dispersed chapters. Maybe I don’t relate enough to the mind of an actor to enjoy the book, but I thought it was pretentious and simultaneously boring.
Profile Image for Hanley Ange.
10 reviews
April 16, 2025
weird and I don’t really know what happened but I liked it anyway
Profile Image for Meagan Shay.
270 reviews4 followers
December 2, 2024
Set in a recent apocalyptic future in which there are near-constant earthquakes, an unreliable narrator/former actress explains the inner workings of her mind and deepest desires, chiefly being, to kill her roommate whom she sees as a stand-in for the perfect version of herself. Her roommate’s sudden disappearance drives the main character to seek her roommate outside of their shared home, where she gets a better sense of the world and her place in it. Many characters try to convert their ideologies on our protagonist, which forces her to question her authenticity and motives. This novel is Moschovakis’s first step away from poetry into literary prose. Each sentence is finely crafted and leaves the reader in a contemplative mood. The main themes are transformation and performance. On a philosophical level, the audience is asked to question their motives for performance in a world that asks for meta-hyperawareness of the self.

VERDICT Recommended for readers of poetry, philosophy, and self-examination. A “mad woman” trope set in a slightly dystopian future for fans of Annie Ernaux and Ocean Voung who are ready to leave with more questions than answers, to their benefit.
Profile Image for Ann.
110 reviews
January 11, 2025
I really didn't like this book, but stuck with it to find out where it was going. Unfortunately, that answer was "Nowhere". What follows aren't so much spoilers as my take on the plot, such as it is. I'm unappreciative of any deeper psychological meaning, and I'm unhappy with any book that makes my brain hurt because I have to work so hard just to get through it. On the basis of a good newspaper review, I picked it up from the library. So - YMMV.
2 stars because I did get through it. It helped that a lot of the pages are 1 sentence only.
Profile Image for yuuto.
10 reviews
February 14, 2025
I’d like to believe that a smarter reader than myself might find this book interesting and/or meaningful, but I personally had a miserable time reading it. Deliriously recursive and purple with a masturbatory quality. A lot of words used to communicate very little. The narrator is so strangled by the narrative’s refusal to ever resolve that she’s almost less of a character by the end than in the beginning. I felt dehydrated the whole time I was reading and not even in a fun, despairing way. Two stars because it’s at least short.
Profile Image for Renee Godding.
848 reviews969 followers
February 15, 2025
Actual Rating: 1.5/5 stars

“They say that walking is controlled falling, they say put one foot in front of the other, they say things will return to normal and you will adjust to the change, as if those are similar promises, and possible. They give you special equipment if you are deemed worthy of it, and if not, they assure you that you have special talents for adaptation. They call you resilient. If I am repeating what they say rather than what I think of what they say, it’s because – not being resilient – I struggle with every step.”

It’s probably too early in the year to be calling anything most disappointing read of 2025, but can’t imagine any scenario where this book isn’t at least a contender… I picked this book up based off its synopsis and having read the first page standing in the bookstore. I was immediately sold on the first paragraph (see above), thinking this was going to be a new favourite. The sad part is; I can see the bones of that favourite book in here. It’s outline is there in the symbolism and the ideas. It’s just that I hated the way the author went about constructing the “body” of the book around it.

The backflap tells us that follow an unnamed narrator with a failed career as a method-actor behind her, as she struggles to regain the ability to walk in the wake of a seismic event that leaves the world constantly unstable. Unmoored by the shifts in the dystopian world around here, she (seemingly without reason) begins to fantasize about killing her roommate. The idea of relearning to walk on undulating ground, as a metaphor for trauma/change alone was the main draw for me but unfortunately this is barely comes into play. Instead we get a lot of reflection on method-acting, performance theory, and how it influenced our protagonists sense of self. Yes, there’s potentially a lot of interesting discussion to be had here too, but as a topic it’s a lot less original and has been explored before (and better!) many times.
The author also indulges in a lot of (for lack of a better word) “language-games” and dissecting words to the point where they lose all meaning. It’s a trend I’ve been seeing quite a bit in prize-winning fiction, and only works for me if it’s done really well and sparingly. An Earthquake is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth doesn’t have enough restraint to pull it off tactfully.
The result is something that feels bloated, pretentious and strangely “literary-prize-coded”. It’s no surprise that the words BOOKER PRIZE are plastered over the front-cover; this book is pulling out all its tricks in hopes to win it. “Look how clever my writing is” it seems to scream; “this is more than justfiction”. It leads to little gems like these:

“The flash is not the same thing as understanding. The flash is what understanding was invented to replace.” or

“Assonance is for asses.” or

“An aster is a member of the planet’s second largest family of plants, to which many people are allergic. Its flowers resemble stars. A disaster is a conflict or a dissonance, a problem between what people want and what the stars want for them. In any game, one player’s disaster can be another’s win.”

Connecting “asters” (the flowers) with “disasters” as if they’re an antithesis… I mean, sure it sounds profound and interesting, but when you sit and think about it, its an absolutely hollow sentence without deeper meaning beyond word-similarity. I genuinely fear that literary critics will praise quasi-profundity like this, just out of fear of being called “too stupid to understand it”. I for one, won’t be joining in.

Overall: stunning cover, brilliant concepts, but an execution so self-aggrandizing and bloated that it borders on unreadable. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this one.
Profile Image for Kirby Shramuk.
45 reviews1 follower
July 6, 2025
2.75 rounded up to 3. This novel was not at all what I expected. Our nameless main character is a very unreliable narrator, who says a seismic event caused the world to suddenly start shaking. She is a former actress, who may have had some success, though not A-lister status.

I am not sure if this is what Moschovakis intended but as I was reading, I saw a woman who was going through menopause and fell on hard times who was having trouble adjusting to her changing body. For starters, our narrator mentions she has so many tampons but cannot use them anymore, which to me signals menopause. The narrator also refers to her lack of youth and beauty, her changing body, how it is unfamiliar and she can't hold her body in a way where she can stay standing when the Earth shakes.

Our narrator wants to kill her roommate, Tala, for being everything she is not. While reading, I interpreted Tala as being our narrator's younger and more successful self. Tala is everything she is not: able to dance, laugh, and go outside without fear. But there are times when the narrator's obsession almost feels like self-hatred. Going back to my menopause theory, Tala is her younger self and our narrator resents she has changed so completely from who she used to be. Tala does not seem to exist; everyone around our narrator is very uncomfortable when the narrator brings up Tala. It is a unique way to personify self hatred and regretting your decisions that lead you to how you are. I don't think the seismic event was a physical earthquake or change in the Earth, but a seismic change within the Narrator's life. A metaphoric seismic event.

The character is clearly mentally ill and had a breakdown that lead her to view the world is shaking. It is an interesting exposition into how she sees the world. The reader can infer that our narrator was sexually abused during her acting career, which may lead her to manifesting her younger self and wanting to kill everything good about her so that Tala won't suffer the same fate as our narrator.

It seems to end with our narrator healing herself enough to power through and step outside even when the world is shaking and is scary.

However, this book seems to be crude for no particular reason at some points, particularly when describing the narrator's sexual fantasies. I admit, maybe it is supposed to be uncomfortable, but I felt it didn't add to the plot. Additionally, sometimes it felt like the plot was a stream of consciousness, much like "Catcher in the Rye." I don't really enjoy stream of consciousness, as I personally find it almost lazy writing, like an excuse to just ramble until you find the point.

I'll admit it, I went into this book with negative expectations. My fiancé read this novel and was not a fan, and curiosity got the best of me on a long car ride, so I decided to pick it up. This book did make me think deeply about my own thoughts and fears on aging, and wishing I could go back and talk to my younger self. I wouldn't necessarily read it again, but it was a thought-provoking piece.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
355 reviews4 followers
February 20, 2025
Since the day of the big earthquake, the ground had not stopped moving. The aftershocks had been going for years, most people are on indefinite furlough (if they even have a job still waiting for them) and each tremor threatens to be the next big one. So people had learned to live with the shaking Earth.

If you expect to hear an explanation of what happened to get us here, that won't be the book for you. The unnamed narrator has no idea of what is going on outside of her own home (and occasionally in her neighborhood in the rare times when she ventures out). What she does know is that she burned her own career to the ground (she used to be an actress) and that her only way to survive is by trying to organize her own life and relying on others for most of her needs. That latter part becomes harder when her roommate disappears at the same time when our narrator starts entertaining ideas about disappearing her for good despite being dependent on her (and jealous and probably a bit in love with her at the same time) And through all that we get glimpses of the narrator's past - framed in the terms of Method acting which had made her who she was.

The overall frame of the novel sounds a lot like a play on Hegel's lord–bondsman dialectic - and with a good reason I suspect (the author has a BA in philosophy). I am not sure if the novel was supposed to be that or if it happened just because it makes sense based on where the author's interest lie - the acknowledgements essay mentions her interest in self-actualization and the Method but not Hegel. I am not sure if I am not projecting a bit because I just happened to read something about Hegel a few weeks ago and things just lined up in my mind. But then this is sometimes how connections are made I guess.

It is a novel which barely goes anywhere - it is about the inner world collapsing while the external world cannot stop moving. The author plays on that difference in speed successfully and that helps the narrative actually get a momentum. But it remains open ended - I do not think the plan was to ever answer the questions - the whole point was asking the questions. In that it succeeds. But if you pick up this one expecting a dystopian novel or even a conventional novel, you are likely to remain disappointed.
Profile Image for Steven.
434 reviews10 followers
November 24, 2024
tl;dr uhhhhhhhhh

“When you have made up a story in your head as a way of connecting observations or experiences that don’t easily add up, you can get attached to the story in a way that is similar to the way you can get attached to the story of an experience that you had but that did not make sense because you weren’t given all of the information necessary to make sense of it at the time…” (p. 178)


I think if you see the words “International Booker” and an eye-popping synopsis such as the one on An Earthquake…, you can probably expect that to be as interesting as the book gets. I picked this up from the library just based on the title, and then read the summary and thought, “sure, why not.”

The whole book felt like one big “Sure, why not,” as the narrator mused on various subjects – self-help, acting, desire – towards an unclear end. This is not a thriller, this is not primarily a “dystopia”. An Earthquake is an ideas book. The narration is full of ideation, wondering, and reflection; however, the narrator of the story seemed to go against their own flow of ideas. The narrator is unreliable, if not because of dishonesty, then because their memory constantly seems to fail them (forgetting faces, their lines as an actress). Their mind is also quite frustrating to occupy; the prose has the effect of turning something over and over and over again in your head, trying to make sense of it. But the repetitive analyses of people, places, and things never had the sense of revealing more detail. It felt tiresome.

And yet, I couldn’t help but devour this. I think it was partially my own morbid curiosity (“is this book going to do anything else???”), but I also think the events of the book were entertaining enough. The prose, despite being a bit repetitive and aimless, had a delightfully dry, tongue-in-cheek quality to it. The deadest deadpan. Very little about this book goes down easy, from the narration to the setting to the characters, but it was at times oddly satisfying to behold. (I think.)
Profile Image for Molly Duplaga.
99 reviews3 followers
November 21, 2024
I quite liked this book at the start, and found myself pulled back to it until the very end, at which point I honestly lost touch with the narrative.

This novel follows an unnamed narrator as she navigates a world that somewhat resembles our own, but suffers from frequent earthquake-type events. I’ve never experienced an earthquake, but the descriptions in this book also made me think of the land actually appearing to move like water. Does this happen? Either way, we experience this difficult-to-move-in terrain through the mind of the narrator. She’s of unknown age, but you also know she can’t be very young or very old, as she is nearing the end of her acting career (this is the best description of where she is in life) but also discover she is navigating life with a new disability. A very existential (and queer at times) XXX life crisis if you will.

Let’s not forget, included in her stream of consciousness are interruptions by visitors but most importantly, her desire to kill her roommate Tala. Whom she also…loves? But Tala is actually missing, and what she means by “kill” Tala starts to blur in its definition as this search goes on.

This is a very interior novel, in the way that you can imagine you are in the mind and body of someone else, but also their memories and pain and sensations. It reminded me a lot in this aspect “Elena Knows” by Claudia Pinẽiro; in this case, the more time our narrator spends in her home alone, the more she withdraws into her mind and body. The mother in “Elena Knows” withdrew into her past and her mind became the central setting, as her physical world was limited to the journey she took that day.

Kinda esoteric and philosophical, which is normally my stuff, but the blur between the novel’s reality and the narrator’s interior world lost me.
Profile Image for Fox Fox.
90 reviews1 follower
July 14, 2025
Respectfully, what the actual fuck was this book? There’s no plot but not in a cool way, in a “wow, I actually have no idea what is going on, is the narrator making up that the ground is shaking? Why is she finding weird brochures everywhere? Why does she want to kill her housemate that she is in love with? Why are we talking about method acting for 15 pages?”

To me, it’s very clear that poets should take creative writing classes or have better editors when they try to write novels. Like how about some transitions that help progress the narrative and help us understand why the protagonist is making these weird decisions.

Also calling this “dystopian” or “science fiction” actually makes me want self immolate. It’s a fucking existential dread induced impending climate catastrophe novel with the fact that earthquakes are (maybe) always happening as such a minor fucking plot point. By the way the earthquakes are never explained, not felt by all characters, and could have been such a cool premise just fall so flat. I’m sort of tired of this genre of existential dread novels with climate catastrophe as a weird background setting. Like why?

I’m glad it was short.
Profile Image for Natalie Marlin.
37 reviews6 followers
August 29, 2024
Where Participation was marked by jarring schisms in narrative style and POV, this fully takes advantage of Moschovakis' knack for submersion in the interior, disappearing into its narrator's fraying, introspective responses to profound loneliness and neutered autonomy in the midst of soft furlough-inducing eco-dystopia and chronic illness so completely that I found myself choked with anticipation at each subsequent section of the novel. What few major stylistic breaks are to be found here all arrive like carefully meted, sudden, hard slaps, disrupting the inner voice with such precision that they reconfigure how the voice we're locked into can be interpreted. How much is self-construction? Projection? Performance? Dredging up of inner subconscious? How much is acting, and how much is a twitch toward action? How much is an urge to decimate out of envy, and how much is an urge to decimate out of confused love? Of our narrator, and of ourselves?

Haunting. Moschovakis is one of our finest working writers, and so greatly underrated.
Profile Image for Yolanda | yolandaannmarie.reads.
1,214 reviews40 followers
September 2, 2024
[arc review]
Thank you to NetGalley and Catapult/Counterpoint Press/Soft Skull for providing an arc in exchange for an honest review.
An Earthquake is A Shaking of the Surface of the Earth releases November 19, 2024

A seismic event leaves the world shattered, with a ground that is in constant motion.

Our unnamed narrator, plagued with self-doubt and desire, wants what her roommate has, and the only reasonable way to get what she wants is to kill her. So when her roommate disappears, she’s forced to leave the confines of their home and put all her hours of planning to use.

“I’ve long understood I’m not perfect. That the only answer to an imperfect life would be a perfect death. […] I could wish to wish to die, but I could not wish to die. But what if the perfect death doesn’t have to be mine?”

The narrative wasn’t very streamlined, especially not towards the dark desires of actually finding Tara, and I fear I was unable to grasp the underlying message that was being conveyed.
Profile Image for Jeanne.
1,260 reviews99 followers
March 21, 2025
In An Earthquake is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth, our unnamed narrator, a former actor, struggles with maintaining her sense of balance both physically and, more importantly, emotionally. Set in a near future in a post-apocalyptic world, our narrator experiences nearly constant earthquakes, an external manifestation of her mind's inner workings and deepest desires?

An Earthquake is disorienting and, as fitting for a novel written by a poet, raises a series of questions unique to each reader. I wondered what it means to be stable, to accept yourself, to be well-adjusted. When one experiences trauma, the world is in constant flux. Is this flux real, imagined, or only experienced within?

These questions worked (for me) in this short novel, but would have been impossible if longer – which may have been Moschovakis' point: trauma disorients, a disorientation that continues for long periods but that is tolerable only for short ones.
Profile Image for Nicole Chipp.
114 reviews6 followers
February 18, 2025
It's hard to put my reading experience into words. I was frequently confused, but I also loved certain passages. A lot seems to happen in the book, but we're barely told anything. It's as if the protagonist is half asleep the entire time. There's this one part near the end that's a stream of conscious monologue about hair and jackets. I loved that part. I read that part aloud to my husband. It was my favorite thing in the book.
I think Anna Moschovakis was trying to do something with this book, and I think she definitely achieved it. Unfortunately, I don't think I'm smart enough to have figured out that something. I would highly recommend this book to anyone that absolutely loves literary fiction. If you ate up "My Year of Rest and Relaxation" and want something similar, but more confusing, then you should read "An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth".
Thank you to Anna Moschovakis and Soft Skull via Netgalley for access to an eARC in exchange for my honest review.
Profile Image for Cullen.
115 reviews5 followers
January 2, 2025
Okay, real rate is probably 4.5 stars (feel like a broken record saying that), but this is also definitely one of those small reads that I continue to think about moving forward. While Moschovakis does not dive deep into the characters in this story, her biggest strength in this novella is her focus on and engagement with language, the work it does in shaping who we are, and how it is used to shape others and our relationships. Particularly, her identification of and focus on “junk metaphors” (filler metaphors that don’t have direct objects but we all use) has fully shaped my awareness of my language. Highly recommend this one for anyone considering how we perform ourselves, becoming through performance and in performance, and the particular experience of language as worldview.
522 reviews4 followers
January 3, 2025
Strange tale of a method actor in a future world full of earthquakes and tremors and most people are on some form f government support. The story is narrated by a women (not named) who has had two recent changes in her life, a terrible performance on the closing night of a play, and is renting a bedroom in her house to a beautiful young women named Tala. The performance has put her career and living at risk and Tala has made her envious and borderline psychotic. I guess the real story here is how to maintain a semblance of sanity when all else is mad. Okay.
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