Rothko Taylor, the protagonist of the fabulous ‘Una vida buscando’ (Random House), returns home like Odysseus: after fifteen years away and transformed into someone else. But the coastal town he returns to, the fictional Edgecliff (a kind of amalgam of several Sussex towns), is not Ithaca, nor has his journey been filled with adventures, but with rejection, violence, addictions, prison, and precarity.
Given Kae Tempest’s affection for Greek myths (she has reworked the Tiresias myth in the poetry collection Hold Your Own and the Sophocles tragedy Philoctetes in the stage work Paradise), it is tempting to read her new novel, the second after the celebrated When Life Gives You a Hammer (Sexto Piso, 2018), in Homeric terms, as a contemporary inverted Odyssey: the story of a man who does not return to reclaim the life he left behind, but to shed who he was, face the wounds of the past, and discover whether it is still possible to build a home among those who once knew him as a teenage “weirdo” who sat at the back of the class, “waiting for life to reboot.”
It is also inevitable to look for Tempest within Rothko. ‘Una vida buscando’ is a coming-of-age that, while not strictly autofiction, incorporates material recognizably autobiographical: gender dysphoria, drug use as refuge against the hostility of the world, the difficult process of self-discovery, and the need to find a language with which to name oneself (the author makes pronouns a narrative device charged with meaning and emotion). These themes also thread through their songs and establish a particularly fruitful dialogue between their musical and literary work.
Narrated in two timelines that gradually reveal the causes of the collapse and the possibilities for repair, ‘Una vida buscando’ confirms Tempest’s extraordinary gifts as a novelist. Their prose retains the visual, rhythmic, and metaphorical power of their poetry, yet the breadth of the novel provides the space to build complex characters, especially Meg, Rothko’s mother, whose fragility and progressive deterioration concentrate much of the story’s pain.
Although at times the lyricism can be overly emphatic and the will to redemption becomes visible too clearly, Tempest avoids reducing the story to a didactic lesson or to an exemplary tale about trans identity. What is offered is a novel about the past, guilt, and forgiveness, about the families we touch and those we choose, about where to find your place in the world even if it costs “an entire life.”
