'Philosophical Toys' Tantalizes

An adolescent crossing the street in stilettos is one of the first images Susana Medina presents in her novel “Philosophical Toys.” The vision follows a deliberation, in the narrator’s head, on the impact of trinkets in her life. Such a sequence may seem anomalous with no apparent logic to it. As the story progresses, however, the significance of these stilettos grow more apparent. For Medina, shoes—and objects in general—function as more than useful items: They reflect a complicated aspect of humanity’s psyche. This examination into the power of objects creates a story both provocative and contemplative, whose only flaw is that it risks being too introspective.

“Philosophical Toys” brilliantly capitalizes on a simple premise: Nina, an art student in London, returns to her Spanish childhood home to find 95 boxes of shoes belonging to her deceased mother. Nina’s father has kept the shoes and done strange things with them. Her unearthing of this family secret sends her on an unusual journey of discovery. Under Medina’s direction, the story veers from its potential nature as a family drama into a universal exploration of the world’s interest in objects. In that respect, Medina distinguishes her novel for its urbanity and sagacity. While Nina continually obsesses over her mother’s past and her [father’s status as a shoe fetishist, her attempts to understand her bizarre inheritance lead her away from her family; instead, she probes into more academic areas, like psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s theory of fetishism and the object’s recurrent fetishization in Luis Buñuel’s films. The plot, with its sudden twists and unexpected developments—including a ghost writing stint and a fanatical Buñuel museum—might be the novel’s blood, but Medina ensures that the philosophical discourse is the soul, the factor that gives the book its very edge.

This results in a text devoted to narrator Nina’s ruminations—an excellent choice for a story that thrives on thought and inquiry. “What was a pervert? What was a fetishist? Was it a question of degree?” she inquires when she first considers her father’s fixation on shoes. Such unanswered questions constitute a large portion of Nina’s narrative, along with extensive diatribes on the nature of objects that are enlightening to read. These moments of scrutiny establish an abstract reading experience. In fact, the storytelling reads less like a novel than like an excursion into the protagonist’s mind. Lacking quotation marks or paragraph breaks, dialogue easily blends into description. Sentences combine disjointedly through commas and other unconventional punctuation: “As usual, he dealt with the cooking, he is a good cook, Chris,” Nina says of her boyfriend. While the experimental style might cause confusion in the hands of a less capable author, Medina masterfully infuses her writing with a natural cadence so that the narration can read as easily as the reader’s own disjointed, rambling thoughts.

“Philosophical Toys” truly revolves around Nina, and while this structural choice heavily contributes to the novel’s contemplative tone, it is also detrimental. Nearly all other characters act as one-dimensional chess pieces in Nina’s steady march towards becoming a female philosopher. Nina’s mother—the mysterious Nina Chiavelli who owned 95 pairs of shoes—is portrayed as a wannabe actress, forced to become a foot extra (a stand-in for another actress’s feet). To the novel’s credit, Medina attempts to characterize Nina Chiavelli further; now and then, she includes hints suggesting an alcoholic who sometimes regretted motherhood and often shamed her loving spouse. These efforts, however, do little to liven up a person dead for decades before the start of the novel. The only character besides Nina with any semblance of life is Nina’s friend Mary Jane. From the moment the novel establishes Mary Jane’s infatuation with saying “weeeeiiiiiiiird” and “transforming the perfectly normal into the weird,” it suggests someone who rivals Nina in her vivacity and unique characterization. Mary Jane, perhaps, is the only other character with agency—the one who surprises the most in her actions, from her obsession with baby toys to her desire to pull off a disappearing act. But even then, she becomes a philosophical tool: Her artistic interest in youthful trinkets and stuffed animals only serve to corroborate Nina’s exploration of objects. For all her unique characterization, Mary Jane, too, is a victim to the book’s themes.

Herein lies the novel’s greatest fault: its fascination with philosophy. There is little doubt that Medina knows how to imbue her pages with high concepts. She is aware of the impossibility of fully understanding humanity’s manias and passions. “To posit the world as a question mark implies the adventure of answers. I didn’t seem to find plausible answers to things, I only seemed to find questions,” muses Nina. But in the pursuit of philosophy, Medina sacrifices other critical aspects of a novel. Character development, save for Nina’s, becomes stale. The novel forces the reader to accept certain facts, rather than allowing them to experience them. “Mary Jane was becoming desperate, bitter, dejected, insecure, slowly, progressively, increasingly,” says Nina, not realizing that her friend’s increasingly worrying antics carry more weight than her statement. And even the philosophy grows tiring. With statements like “Objects bind us and objects separate us” and “Words age and lose in luminosity” occupying every paragraph, the ebb of critical thought becomes unrelentless, leaving little room for self-reflection.

This is not to discount the novel’s philosophical merit or the careful manner in which Medina develops her themes. “Then a fragile adolescent running on stilettos crossed the street majestically,” Nina notes near the end of the story, her words a carbon copy of those expressed in the novel’s first page. In its initial appearance, the comment feels jarring and abrupt, but on its return, it carries a deliberate gravitas. The shifting impact reflects a subtle growth within Nina’s narrative and, perhaps, the reader’s perception of it too. It is a sophisticated illustration of the way in which the novel’s plot, characters, and extended musings converge to create an intellectual piece of literature. For all of its flaws, “Philosophical Toys” ultimately presents an engaging, modern take on the human obsession with the tangible.