There are a lot of authors experimenting just now with ways to combine the real, and the fictional, and the historical, and the personal all together There are a lot of authors experimenting just now with ways to combine the real, and the fictional, and the historical, and the personal all together into a narrative. What I've vividly discovered for myself, now that I've read When We Cease to Understand the World, is how much I adore those authors who plumb the depths of history, and then weave a unique mythology of subjective meanings from the facts. Sebald, Labatut, Stepanova all do this. It's quite a different kind of thing from the kind of writing called "auto-fiction' just now, which dives deep into just one person's history, the author's personal narrative, and adds fictional or subjective elements to that very narrow personal experience. Unlike the auto-fictioners, who put themselves at the center of their stories, Labatut and his counterparts efface themselves almost entirely from their stories. They're interested in a bigger picture. Each detail they choose adds exquisitely to the whole and the result is a Bayeux Tapestry of a novel. I love this way of writing, this way of storytelling. It's a gift to read this book....more
As I was reading Seeing Red I had a sudden vivid wish to gather some women writers together who i realize have similar energy and similar honesty in tAs I was reading Seeing Red I had a sudden vivid wish to gather some women writers together who i realize have similar energy and similar honesty in their writing as Lina Meruane has in her writing, and whose writing is, like hers, brutally physical--by which I mean, not violent, but even so, deeply felt in the body. There is no distance at all in their writing. They write about blood and love and life and death.
Seeing Red begins, literally, with blood and love, in medias res, at a party, where the protagonist--who has been told by her doctor that any pressure at all--too hard a cough, or just bending over--might cause the diseased blood vessels in her eyes to burst and cause blindness--has just moved the wrong way, and then watches her eye as it fills with blood from the inside and her vision darken. From the outside there is no sign of her injury. Her lover doesn't understand why she stumbles, not at first--he thinks she is drunk.
The voice of this novel is detached in a way that adds to its nearly unbearable pathos rather than creating distance. In this way it reminds me of Lorrie Moore's voice in the story "People Like That Are the Only People Here," and indeed along with Meruane, Lorrie Moore is one of the writers I would invite to this imaginary gathering, as well as Guadalupe Nettel, author of The Body Where I Was Born, another short vivid novel about the particular physicalities of of living inside a female body, and Maggie Nelson would be there, too, because Meruane's writing also reminds me of The Argonauts, for its relentless focus on the difficulties of love between consenting, flawed adults. And Maylis de Kerangal, author of the novel I just read, The Heart, would be there, too, because her novel, like Meruane's, is a fearless examination of the terrors of living inside a broken body.
The narrator struggles to speak truthfully about things that are too terrible, or too hidden, to be written about truthfully. This novel succeeds magnThe narrator struggles to speak truthfully about things that are too terrible, or too hidden, to be written about truthfully. This novel succeeds magnificently in turning that contradiction into art. The novel is from the point of view of a novelist trying to make sense of his childhood during the Pinochet years, and to come to terms with the choices that his parents and the other adults in his life made to survive those years.
An excerpt:
I'd spent the afternoon with a group of classmates, and we were exchanging family stories in which death appeared with urgent insistence. Of all those present I was the only one who came from a family with no dead, and that realization filled me with a strange bitterness: my friends had grown up reading the books that their dead parents or siblings left behind in the house. But in my family there were no dead and there were no books.
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