At the center of Scar, originally published in Spanish as Cicatriz (2015), is Sonia, a young woman who is bored by her job and burdened by life at home with her overwhelmed mother, younger siblings, and grandmother with worsening dementia. As someone who has “always liked wearing masks,” Sonia finds escape online, frequenting chat rooms dedicated to literary discussion and eventually meeting Knut, an intriguing man who talks about philosophy, society’s ills, and his shoplifting. Their conversation begins with a simple exchange initiated by Knut: “You send me a picture so I can see you. In return, I’ll send you any book you ask for.” The resulting relationship is shaped by transaction and obligation, excess and desire, obsession and control. 

In a translator’s note, Nodal-Tarafa highlights her decision to retain the “intentionally disorienting” qualities that characterize the Spanish original, rendered in Mesa’s “spare, precise prose.” Mesa’s temporal play—brief shifts that move the reader forward in time before returning to the mostly chronological narrative—similarly enacts stylized disorientation. In chapters that oscillate between lengthy excerpts of Sonia and Knut’s correspondence and shorter “glimpses” into the future, Scar’s recursivity recalls the novel’s title: a scar can be reopened, the original wound revisited. 

Sonia ushers in another kind of disorientation—particularly in how she seems, at times, intentionally underdeveloped. Knut is overpoweringly present, while Sonia’s presence is attenuated. This imbalance interestingly mimics the literal time that each character has the luxury of having. Whereas Knut sends eloquent messages “that grow longer each time, more detailed” multiple times a day, Sonia has neither the time nor the energy to reciprocate. When Knut begins sending increasingly expensive gifts—stealing designer clothing instead of books and CDs—Sonia’s “sensation of having an unpaid debt persists.” In these moments, Scar’s depiction of consumerist society expands to consider the privilege required to live “outside” of societal norms, something that Knut both prides himself on and repeatedly belittles Sonia for failing to do.

When Sonia does find time to reply to Knut, she reveals only vague details. As the novel stretches across years, pivotal players in Sonia’s life—such as her husband and their young son—appear like floaters in sclera, while Sonia’s eyes are overly focused on Knut and the false image of herself that she manicures for him. Perhaps this is Scar’s most truly disorienting quality. Though Sonia’s character focalizes the narrative, this is not Sonia’s story. Any impression of Sonia that readers might piece together is more like the image that Knut falsely constructs. 

This impression is bolstered by the novel’s metafictional moments, one of which coincides with a rare instance of Sonia opening up. She reveals her secret, online relationship with Knut to a close friend: “I had a hard time thinking of him as a real person anyway. He felt more like a character to me; even I acted like a character […] in a realm that’s different than real life…” However honest Sonia is being here, Mesa accompanies the confessions with details that underscore the inevitability of noise in communication. As Sonia consumes her nth alcoholic beverage of the evening and her young son plays in the background, she gives an account of the relationship that casts Knut in a new, more flattering light. While the novel’s premise raises questions about what it means to truly know someone, Scar, at its most compelling, further asks: What noise gets in the way?

Sonia’s relationship with Knut ultimately becomes like a scar—one that she repeatedly vows never to reopen. Still she picks at it, time and again. But of any literal scar, only one is ever mentioned. In the opening chapter, Knut says to her, “You can tell there’s a mark […] The C-section scar.” While Sonia responds, “You’re quite the observer,” the rest of Mesa’s novel pushes back against Knut’s observation. Nothing else is ever revealed about the scar, and Knut’s observations and Sonia’s responses all prove questionable in subsequent chapters. Like the scar, much about Sonia remains unknown. This is the real wound Scar picks at, compellingly exploring how much obsessions with identity, consumerism, and fantasy cost in terms of true intimacy.

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Sara Mesa is the award-winning author of eight works of fiction, including Scar, Four by Four, An Invisible Fire, Among the Hedges, and Bad Handwriting. Her works have been translated into more than ten different languages.

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A graduate of University of Houston-Virginia and Dalkey Archive Press’ Applied Literary Translation program, Adriana Nodal-Tarafa holds a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology with specialization certificates in Museum Studies and Software Localization from the University of Washington. She lives in Seattle.

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Court Ludwick is the author of These Strange Bodies and the founding editor-in-chief of Broken Antler Magazine. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and Best Microfiction, and can be found in EPOCH, Washington Square Review, Denver Quarterly, Hawaii Pacific Review, Oxford Magazine, West Trade Review, and elsewhere. Court’s visual work has shown at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts, and she has taught workshops on hybrid writing and experimental form, most recently for The Dakota Writing Project and Vermillion Literacy Project. Court holds an MA from Texas Tech University and is a current PhD student at USD. She lives in Minneapolis with her lucky black cat, where she is currently at work on her second book, a creative-critical project about bones, memory, and mommy issues.