Carnality applies this concept to its characters early on, and it seeps into the very structure: Lina Wolff’s second novel can’t quite decide who to make its protagonist. Split into three parts told by three different characters, one long interconnected plot begins to unwind. No one here is willing to play second fiddle to anyone else, to let their narrative be anything but primary, but no one is willing to accept responsibility, either. The three narrators—Mercuro, Sor Lucia, and Bennedith—likewise can’t agree on who is the victim, the villain, and the hero. Lucia comments on the characters’ questionable capers throughout the course of the novel: “Everyone needs to be allowed to grow in the direction of their choosing. If you intervene, you risk producing . . . distortions.” Carnality offers integrated narratives, which reveal bizarre, carnal, and bloodthirsty characters and motivations, always with goals other than what they are willing to reveal or admit.
Although the first section of the novel is purportedly dedicated to Mercuro, the narrative actually begins by focusing on Bennedith, a Swedish writer on a three-month grant in Madrid. Bennedith meets a man in a bar who tells her a story that at first seems like the ravings of a lunatic. At the center of his terrible tale is a nun—short like a dwarf, wrinkled, horrible and diabolical, missing a thumb—Sor Lucia. Bennedith is bored and, in some ways, longing for an attachment that feels dangerous, risky. But Mercuro’s presence becomes parasitic: soon, the story of Bennedith’s life in Madrid is entirely taken over by Mercuro. Mercuro’s narrative is followed by a second, epistolary section written by Sor Lucia in a series of letters addressed to Bennedith, who is now an active participant in the drama and no longer an audience at a bar. Bennedith is never truly given her own section; or perhaps she doesn’t claim one. While her narrative marks the beginning of the novel, it is told in the third person, allowing Bennedith to slink into the background, a secondary character in her own story. No one claims the last section of the novel, although its third person echoes Bennedith’s removed voice from earlier in the book. The narrator presents herself as an onlooker, a mere observer, making her’s seem perhaps the most suspicious perspective of them all. The novel’s lack of commitment to a storytelling medium, which comes across starkly in Frank Perry’s translation from the Swedish, perhaps reveals the most about its characters.
The title takes its name from an online reality show, also called Carnality, which is at the center of the three interconnected plot lines. As Lucia puts it, “For me, the show is a blissful hour of life distilled to its essence,” even referring to it at some point as “my child.” Only accessible on the dark web, Carnality is a show where a contestant confesses their sins and then receives punishment for their transgressions, and Lucia is the Jerry Springer of the entire operation. The misdeeds in question are sins of the flesh. As Lucia explains, “for many people life was about carnality, about the flesh rather than the soul.” Mercuro’s misdeed is cheating on his wife, Soledad, with his lover, Penelope. His invitation into Carnality, and the confession of his crimes, lead to a punishment ordered by Lucia’s associates, Miss Pink and Mister Blue. Although birthed from the internet and television, Carnality is conceived through ancient concepts: Mercuro’s punishment is closer to Hammurabi’s Code, or the Old Testament law in Exodus: “An eye for an eye.”
Carnality presents itself like a tableau from the Egyptian Book of the Dead: the goddess Maat weighing a man’s heart against her feather of truth. For Mercuro, the consequences of his confession of carnal sins would be deadly, and he goes on the run. However, when Lucia gets the chance to explain the show’s concept to Bennedith, she does not see it as all that serious. She says, “After all, this show is not about social work but providing entertainment.” But by now, we know that Lucia, like the Bible itself, speaks with great conviction behind every statement, even as she constantly contradicts herself. Bennedith never offers her own opinion about which of these assessments of the show—entertainment or divine justice—is truer to its nature. However, she eventually takes Mercuro as a lover and soon finds herself culpable, facing ramifications of her own.
Carnality—the book as well as the eponymous television show—is interested in detangling human nature, and fixates on ideas about retribution, punishment, and, ultimately, forgiveness. Lucia occasionally takes the role of confessor, a position usually reserved for priests. Her unconventional job evolves further and further until she begins dictating matters of life and death, actively involving herself in the petitioners’ lives and making events happen that they’re unwilling to pull the trigger on. As she explains to Bennedith in her letters:
It isn’t always possible, you see, to help people if you insist on never shedding blood. This depends, in turn, on how thoroughly you want to immerse yourself in the process, how far you are prepared to go to actually provide relief, and, of course, how brave you are. I have never been someone interested in half measures, so I was prepared to risk everything to follow the voice I thought I could hear inside me.
This ethos inspired her work in Carnality. And, unfortunately for Mercuro, by the time he arrives on set, his misdeeds are so grave that avoiding a bloody punishment is impossible: he is hunted by Miss Pink and Mister Blue, who are in turn driven by the brave and fearless Sor Lucia.
Ultimately, the philosophy behind Lucia’s philosophy is found in her childhood, the most central event of which is the loss of her thumb. While there are whispers that Lucia’s thumb was bitten off by a pig, these turn out to be simply gossip, and Lucia reveals the truth to Bennedith in her letters, including her mother’s remark to the man responsible for the event: “You didn’t just maim her hand . . . you maimed her soul as well.” The entire incident offers a sick genesis of what Lucia spends a good portion of her letters arguing for: the importance of bloodshed, how it is necessary to right a wrong, and how even when it is misdirected and comes up short, it offers the ability to begin again.
Raised as the daughter of pig farmers, Lucia’s mother instilled in her a belief that slaughtering animals and butchering their meat was ultimately a skill that revealed insight into the deeper workings of human relationships and society at large. When joining the convent, Lucia tells the Mother Superior, “I had been working with animals all my life, and that I had always set a great store by never depriving an animal of its dignity, not even at the moment of death. I said that on some profound inner level the way a person treats animals is how they treat themselves.” This moment reveals something about the Swedish title of the novel, Köttets Tid, which translates into “the time of the flesh” or “the time of the meat.” Knowing how to butcher an animal allows Lucia to rise through the ranks of the convent, becoming a leader among “the chastened sisters.”
What Wolff implies, but never directly alludes to, is that the worldview Lucia has adopted allows her to excel in a Catholic institution. As we’re taught in Sunday school, hopefully by a less scary nun than Lucia, the only way to find forgiveness for our transgressions is through a sacrifice—the crucifixion. An all-powerful God ultimately reveals himself incapable of forgiveness without bloodshed. Lucia’s show Carnality is centered around ideas about how the flesh corrupts the soul and what must be done to free the latter. Having a body in many ways is a fatal flaw, since it leads to the temptations of the carnal flesh that can ruin a soul. As Lucia later says, “My body was Pandora’s box. All bodies are, in fact, Pandora’s boxes. What you glimpse inside when the lid is opened are disease, desire, and sordidness of all kinds.” This central idea of where the physical body fits into the corruption of the soul—and sometimes, a suggestion that its mortification is the only possible restoration—is explored in both versions of Carnality, Lucia’s and Wolff’s: that the flesh and the soul are mortal enemies as much as they are the key to the other’s survival. Instead of parasitic twins, perhaps they’re conjoined twins who can’t so easily be disentangled.
Wolff is working around big ideas at the center of her novel—the physical body and the soul, if forgiveness is possible without retribution, if the inherent nature of man is good or evil—which are surrounded by the imagery of the dark web and Catholicism, of confession and reality television. All of it is a brilliant distraction from the simplicity of the novel, easily found if one turns back their attention to its distinctive narrative structure. A lonely writer with a longing for connection who finds herself the first audience of the days-long story of a man on the run and then later the recipient of the letters of a nun explaining her entire life. As Lucia tells Bennedith, “For some reason I do not understand, you appear to be the person who can make the words pour out of me in a delightful way.” Carnality is in many ways about the corruption people face when they’re involved with others—opening themselves up to betrayal as well as the corruption of their own morals to appease others. Mercuro is corrupted by his desire for Penelope. Bennedith is corrupted by Mercuro. Lucia exposes herself in writing letters to Bennedith, letting her guard down. As the first few chapters of the Bible tell us, Adam and Eve sinned together in the garden as a pair, egging each other on to break God’s one rule. God took pity on Adam for his loneliness, gave him a partner, and his connection with another exposed his weaknesses. Would man have fallen if he was left all alone?
As Lucia explains in her letters, Mercuro’s wife isn’t the first woman she has ministered to whose husband has been unfaithful. When explaining her wife’s previous exploits, she paints the picture of a cuckquean, saying, “For the first time in ages, she had been able to think about something other than her husband’s infidelity. She had watched the people around her, felt the air against her sin. And really tasted her food.” The affair is all-consuming for her, and Lucia nearly finds her as guilty as her husband in his adultery, as Mercuro’s wife becomes obsessed with her betrayal. The betrayal she experiences has been consuming. Of course, another novel would approach this observation from another direction. The way you fall in love with someone and quietly start using their mannerisms. Repeating their familiar words. Slowly becoming someone else because you love them. How your feelings for someone else can consume you until your life has shrunk. Their happiness dictates your own.
The temptations of the flesh, Carnality suggests, can be motivated by something as simple as loneliness. While still a young woman, Lucia first leaves the convent to visit her mother, she finds out that her mother has let Sergio Alameda out of the crawl space, and that the two now live together as a couple, and are eventually being buried together. Human relationships often present the most destabilizing of all factors at play; intimacy is a wild card that can reshuffle the entire deck. After Lucia takes a young girl named Ava into the convent and makes her a protégé, she is accused by the girl’s mother of stealing her daughter. Later, as Ava morphs into Miss White, Lucia admits she has corrupted her by loving her, a weakness which has damaged both their souls. Again, Lucia suffers this same human flaw, telling Bennedith her story in a series of letters, offering vulnerability, but it is a compulsion she can’t stop and indulges beyond her better judgment.
Unlike Bennedith and Mercuro, whose flippant narratives refuse to pin the finger on their own sins and take responsibility, Lucia accepts her weaknesses. She also understands punishment, and has accepted what is entailed. She’s already lost her thumb. She has no qualms about who she is, what she’s capable of, and what her soul looks like. As Lucia says, “You do realize, don’t you, that it’s those who are really kind hearted who become the bitterest people of all time? The ones who fail to extract retribution and then feel betrayed.” Lucia—the grim reaper of Carnality, the butcher of pigs, the goddess Maat, the confessor and the executioner—knows the worth of retribution, as well as the value of bloodshed. As she explains from the shadows of the dark web where she works, “A war meant devastation, but what is devastation if not also an opportunity to start again?” In Wolff’s Carnality, the real question is who will be standing at the end. The answer feels clear, since only one seems aware of the risk of the volatile connections made throughout the novel.
