Lina Meruane
Författare till Seeing Red
Om författaren
Lina Meruane teaches Latin American Cultures in New York University's Global/Liberal Studies Program, USA. She is a Chilean critic and a distinguished writer of fiction, author of the novels Pstuma, Cercada, Fruta podrida, and Sangre en el ojo, which was awarded the prestigious Sor Juana Ins de la visa mer Cruz Prize (Mexico, 2012). She has also receive the Anna Seghers Prize for her work in fiction and literary fellowships from the Cuggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Art. Viral Voyages was originally published in Spanish by Fondo de Cultura Eonmica (Chile, 2012). visa färre
Foto taget av: wikipedia
Verk av Lina Meruane
Nervensystem (German Edition) 1 exemplar
Ay 2014 1 exemplar
Associerade verk
Taggad
Allmänna fakta
- Namn enligt folkbokföringen
- Meruane Boza, Lina
- Födelsedag
- 1970
- Kön
- female
- Nationalitet
- Chile
- Land (för karta)
- Chile
- Födelseort
- Santiago de Chile, Chile
- Utbildning
- New York University (PhD)
- Yrken
- Latin American Cultures professor, New York University
- Organisationer
- New York University
Medlemmar
Recensioner
Listor
Priser
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Associerade författare
Statistik
- Verk
- 14
- Även av
- 1
- Medlemmar
- 293
- Popularitet
- #79,900
- Betyg
- 3.6
- Recensioner
- 12
- ISBN
- 58
- Språk
- 6
Combining the fragmentary style of Renata Adler/Jenny Offill with the temporal interlacing style of Emily St. John Mandel, “Nervous System” is a novel focused on not so much a plot as a theme: the frailty of human bodies and the anxiety produced by this frailty. Each of the book’s five chapters takes on the medical issue of one member of a family, whose history gradually becomes clearer. And each of these five chapters is titled with an astronomical term, reflecting connections the author is presumably attempting to make between the very intimate and the very distant, the organic and the inorganic, which I’m afraid I didn’t cotton on to terribly well on a first read (not that there’ll be a second one).
Most of the chapters feature an unclear cause and progression of illness. The protagonist’s nerve and spinal pain, the boyfriend’s gastrointestinal problems, the brother’s too-frequent bone fractures, the father’s bleeding and infection. Only the mother’s has a clear diagnosis: cancer. The father and mother are medical doctors and so have commentary to offer throughout. The effect is to make the reader highly aware of the fragility of these bodies we inhabit, and the brief good fortune we are (hopefully) enjoying with them generally working as they should.
The novel will keep most readers at a distance through its various characteristics: the fragmentary narrative, the time hopping, the emphasis on theme over plot, the characters not given names (the partial exception of “Ella” and “El” due to Spanish pronouns becoming English proper nouns in an interesting translation choice).
One way the novel brings astronomy into the text is through the protagonist’s (“Ella’s”) failed attempts over many years to finish her dissertation in that field. In the meanwhile she teaches to mostly uninterested students. In one fragment that seems to be Meruane using symbolism that I feel on the edge of grasping but that just keeps slipping away, Elle is lecturing on the black hole at the center of our galaxy before taking leave to be with the mother during her cancer surgery:
Hmm, I think. Sounds interesting, and ominous, but there’s some connection here I’m not quite getting, I fear. Maybe you will.… (mer)