Summerbook#14: Seeing Red

By -

 Seeing Red, by Lina Meruane (Sangre in el ojo)

I was quite interested in this Chilean novel, which I saw billed as "one of Chile's most exciting young writers" in her first work translated into English, which was about trauma and its effects.  I didn't quite expect what I got!

Lina is a young Chilean grad student living in the US with her boyfriend, Ignacio, but she has to be extremely careful with her eyes, which have a bunch of extra veins growing in them, and they're brittle.  So the first thing that happens is that the veins burst and Lina becomes very nearly blind as one eye fills with blood and the other comes pretty close.*

Immediately, her life becomes far more difficult, as she has to take a leave of absence and usually depends on Ignacio to get around.  The doctor wants to wait and see if the blood kind of goes away.  Her family back in Chile want her home immediately and for her to see a proper Chilean doctor; she and Ignacio do travel down, but Lina's fraught relationship with her dramatic and overbearing mother impedes any other action.

Back home, Lina needs an eye operation right away.  (I tell you what, I have never ever read so much detailed description of eye surgery in a novel, and I'm not sure I ever want to again.)  Recovery is long, and gives her plenty of time to fret about the possible results.  She becomes obsessed with eyes; her own, Ignacio's, her mother's.  Eventually, her demands on her loved ones reach an intolerable impasse.

 

Based on the blurb, I'd expected a lot more about trauma and relationships and a lot less graphic description of eyeball anatomy and surgery.  As someone with particularly difficult eyeballs, I'm not sure I would recommend it to anybody else like me.  (On the other hand, maybe somebody without difficult eyeballs would find it unendurably horrifying?)   The whole thing is supposed to be based on Meruane's own experiences, blurring the lines between fiction and reality.  Which, of course, makes me really wonder exactly how far Meruane's experience went, because she seems to be sighted now.   It was a very good novel; just not what I expected.

I am not sure if a woman a few years older than I am qualifies as one of Chile's exciting young writers.  Unless all the writers in Chile are 70+ and none have emerged in the last 30 years?  Regardless, she is an excellent writer and the accolades are all deserved.  This was a gripping and skilled novel.


 _____________________________________________

*This description freaked me out so much that I asked my ophthalmologist friend if it was real.  He says "Vitreous hemorrhage, or bleeding inside the eye due to neovascularization (abnormal blood vessels or veins inside the eye) can occur with many causes...."  So, there's something new to worry about...agh.

 

 

 



Comments

  1. Jenny @ Reading the EndAugust 22, 2020 at 4:43 AM

    Oh my God! No! Ack! I like reading books in translation and it's always exciting to discover new authors but NO TO EYE STUFF, please and thank you. :P

    ReplyDelete
  2. reeseAugust 22, 2020 at 12:22 PM

    On the other hand, if you decide to do an eye surgery in novels theme, there's Susan Sontag's Desth Kit...it, too, made me very squeamish...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Marian HAugust 22, 2020 at 9:02 PM

    This sounds extremely unpleasant, but I've been on the lookout for Chilean authors, so thanks for sharing! :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more