An Untamed State by Roxane Gay is brutal, lush, and intense. I am an utterly amateur blogger, so I don't know much about how you transition to and from trigger warnings with grace, so I'll just say that the book features an extraordinary amount of graphic violence against its protagonist, and my review of it will naturally have to allude to this.
Mirelle is a Haitian-American woman who, while visiting her parents in Port-Au-Prince with her husband and son, is kidnapped and held for ransom. Her father, a shrewd businessman and patriarch, takes a hard-line in the negotiations for her return, and as a result, Mirelle is held captive, tortured and raped for 13 days, while her infant son and her Nebraska-born and raised husband, largely unfamiliar with Haitian culture and the business of kidnapping, wait.
The narrative of her captivity is broken up with flashbacks to her childhood as the daughter of Haitian immigrants in the US, her courtship with her husband, and her life as a wife and mother. There were moments when I felt like I desperately needed these breaks, these brief moments of human love and joy, in order to recover from the torture sequences. But there were other moments when the torture stuff was so intense and real that I almost felt it would be better to just rush through it and get it over with. As a result, the narrative arc mimics Mirelle's experience, as long periods of isolation are flooded by memories, and long sequences of physical abuse completely deplete her sense of time.
The latter half of the novel chronicles the long and complicated recovery of both Mirelle and her family. Although so many characters at the beginning of the novel remind Mirelle's husband that kidnappings happen all the time in Haiti, no one has prepared either of them for everything that happens after the negotiations are completed and she is returned.
I would be lying if I said it was easy to read or that I got through it comfortably. There was some squirming and some swallowing of tears as I read the most intense passages of violence. Part of what bothered me the most was the fact that Roxane Gay has vaguely alluded to being the victim of heinous physical and sexual violence as a girl in some of her essays, and so even though I knew it was fiction, I also knew that the vividness of the descriptions are due to her first-hand experience. But that said, Mirelle's long struggle to recover and find resolution could also likely be based on Gay's own, and that is heartening. She has spoken in interviews about her strong primal connection to this book, in particular, of all her writing, and it seems like it functions itself as an exercise in recovery.
All of that aside, it is a beautiful book, and if you can get through it, the moments of violence will probably not be what sticks with you-- so much of the narrative is focused on love and family, motherhood and sexuality. It felt like a distinctly feminine book to me, in so many ways, and I was really reminded of Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, which, if you're unfamiliar, is a re-imagining of the life of Mr. Rochester's first wife, the "madwoman in the attic" of Jane Eyre. Both novels share the backdrop of the post-colonial Caribbean and the inner lives and downward spiraling of their respective heroines.