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Seeing Red

Seeing Red

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By Lina Meruane

Translated by Megan McDowell

A visceral, moving, haunting English-language debut examines illness, the body, and human relationships by one of Chile's brightest young authors.

“Lina Meruane’s prose has great literary force: it emerges from the hammer blows of conscience, but also from the ungraspable and from pain.” —Roberto Bolaño

Publication Date: February 23, 2016

Paperback: 9781941920244

eBook: 9781941920251

Description

This powerful, profound autobiographical novel describes a young Chilean writer recently relocated to New York for doctoral work who suffers a stroke, leaving her blind and increasingly dependent on those closest to her. Fiction and autobiography intertwine in an intense, visceral, and caustic novel about the relation between the body, illness, science, and human relationships.

Biographical Note

Lina Meruane is one of the most prominent female voices in Chilean contemporary narrative. A novelist, essayist, and cultural journalist, she is the author of a host of short stories that have appeared in various anthologies and magazines in Spanish, English, German and French. She has published a collection of short stories, Las Infantas (Chile 1998, Argentina 2010), as well as three novels, Póstuma (Chile 2000, Portugal 2001), Cercada (Chile 2000) and Fruta Podrida (Chile & México 2007). The latter won the Best Unpublished Novel Prize awarded by Chile’s National Council of the Culture and the Arts in 2006. She is the winner of the Anna Seghers Prize, awarded to her by the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, Germany, 2011. Meruane received the prestigious Mexican Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize in 2012 with the publication of her most recent novel, Sangre en el ojo (Seeing Red). Holder of a Ph.D. in Latin American Literature from New York University, Meruane currently teaches World and Latin American Literature and Creative Writing at NYU.

Megan McDowell is a literary translator of many modern and contemporary South American authors, including Alejandro Zambra, Arturo Fontaine, Carlos Busqued, Álvaro Bisama, and Juan Emar. Her translations have been published in The New Yorker, McSweeney's, Words Without Borders, Mandorla, and Vice, among others. She lives in Santiago, Chile, and New York.

Reviews

One of Literary Hub’s “13 Translated Books by Women You Should Read”

Nominated for the Edinburgh Book Festival First Book Award 2017

One of Publishers Weekly’s “10 Essential 21st-Century Spanish-Language Books”

An Entropy Magazine “Best of 2016: Fiction Books” selection

Included in World Literature Today‘s “75 Notable Translations of 2016”

A Foreword Reviews Reviewers’ Choice Selection for “14 Favorites of 2016”

Author Lina Meruane was interviewed by Latin American Literature Today on "Sickness as Normality"

“Blurring the lines between fiction and memoir, Meruane’s first novel translated into English explores mortality, identity, and personal transformation. . . . This is a penetrating autobiographical novel, and for English-Language readers this work serves as a stunning introduction to a remarkable author.” Publishers Weekly

“Astonishing…Meruane’s authorial gaze is unflinching. . . . Lina resists all attempts to corral her into victimhood and insists on wielding her agency like a weapon…Seeing Red becomes a searing commentary on the limits of family relationships and the cruelty that, under duress, we are capable of exerting on those we love.” —Charlotte Whittle, Los Angeles Times

“New York and her home town, Santiago, are described in prose that blends sensation with memory, fury with fear. The story reveals its truths through immediacy of description—viscous, repulsive, and beautiful.” The New Yorker

“Perfect memory notwithstanding, blindness has affected Lina’s relationships, especially the one with Ignacio, whom she alternately leans on, loves and envies for his undamaged eyes. These passages are the most uncomfortable to read because they show how truly vulnerable we are, how tightly bound is our sense of being physically whole to our sense of being being worthy and lovable.” —Beatriz Terrazas, The Dallas Morning News

“Intense, physical, flipping from sensual to gory, Seeing Red is a book about degeneration and offers an exhilarating “fresh eye”, as the author puts it, on what it is to be alive.” —Joanna Walsh, The National

“In an autobiographical work full of discomfort, Meruane spares nothing negative, and Seeing Red is astounding and essential for it.” —Greg Walklin, Colorado Review

“Meruane’s ability to take readers into the experience of sight loss is extraordinary. Her descriptions are fresh, immediate and memorable, inviting comparisons with passages from Nobel Prize winner José Saramago’s great novel Blindness.” —Ann Morgan, A Year of Reading the World

“Aided by the fine translation from Megan McDowell, newcomers to Meruane’s spare prose and caustic wit… will admire the strange force and clarity of this novel that is as painstaking as it is wryly painful.” —Forrest Roth, The Collagist

“A novel of genius and disturbing intelligence...” —Enrique Vila-Matas, Northwest Review of Books

“A raw, sexy, visceral and sometimes brutal account of a woman losing her sight and it explores the immediate effects on her relationships with her lover, family, surroundings and her own body with an unflinching gaze.” —Kirsty Mcluckie, The Scotsman

“From this moment of darkness, the narrative hurtles forward, obsessed by Lina’s physical and emotional pains, which are examined with a vibrant, Kahloesque fascination. The narrative is also interested in how Lina’s pain stretches out, changing her relationships with the objects and people around her.” —M. Lynx Qualey, Electric Lit

Seeing Red is the triumphant realization of a stunning artistic vision, a novel as black and bitter and bloody (and beautiful) as its central conceit. It’s a novel that’s hard to describe. But you know it’s great when you read it.” —Aaron Bady, The Nation

“Susan Sontag famously wrote that there are only two nations: the one of the healthy and the one of the sick. Meruane’s corrosive writing is a meditation on a soul blinded not by illness, but by the peculiar destructive spirit produced by self-pity – that dark feeling familiar to any who has suffered their own body’s treason. In other words, all of us. Seeing Red’s spine is a deliciously perverse love story, loaded with surprising, sickening, wonderful erotic material centred in the eyeballs.” —Álvaro Enrigue, author of Sudden Death, for TANK Magazine‘s 2016 Summer Reading List

“In this fierce work of autofiction...Seeing Red excels in expressing the full scale of the horror and essential uncertainty of being betrayed by one’s own body.” —Amy Berkowitz, author of Tender Points

“Meruane writes further into, rather than through or around, blindness. Her language pulses with the psychological terror of the body’s betrayal; it pulls at the seams of the self, unleashing something deep within. This is not a fictionalized memoir of transformation and recovery, but a book that burns in your hands, something sharp and terrifying that bites back.” —Anna Zalokostas, Full Stop

“An overwhelming novel, formally brave (…) that balances with great talent the search of a personal language with narrative seduction” —Sor Juana Award jury

“In Lina Meruane’s searing autobiographical novel Seeing Red, the narrator describes what she saw during an ocular hemorrhage that rendered her blind… As she navigates this new, uncertain existence with her boyfriend—moving together to a new apartment in New York City, visiting family back in Santiago, and undergoing endless, inconclusive medical exams and procedures—Lina perseveres by force of will and a keen intuition that makes her aware of things she was incapable of knowing before she lost her sight.” Words Without Borders, Lori Feathers