Synopsis "Nervous System "

An electrifying novel about illness, displacement, and what holds us together, by the author of Seeing RedElla is an astrophysicist struggling with her doctoral thesis in the country of the present but she is from the country of the past, a place burdened in her memory by both personal and political tragedies. Her partner, El, is a forensic scientist who analyzes the bones of victims of state violence and is recovering from an explosion at a work site that almost killed him. Consumed by writers block, Ella finds herself wishing that she would become ill, which would provide time for writing and perhaps an excuse for her lack of progress. Then she begins to experience mysterious symptoms that doctors find undiagnosable.As Ellas anxiety grows, the past begins to exert a strong gravitational pull, and other members of her family come into focus: the widowed Father, the Stepmother, the Twins, and the Firstborn. Each of them has their own experience of illness and violence, and eventually the systems that both hold them together and atomize them are exposed.Lina Meruanes Nervous System is an extraordinary clinical biography of a family, full of affection and resentment, dark humor and buried secrets, in which illness describes the traumas that can be visited not just upon the body, but on families and on the history of the countriespresent and pastthat we live in.

Lina Meruane

(Author)

View Author's Page

Lina Meruane (Santiago de Chile, 1970). Her fiction work includes the short story collection Las infantas (1998) and the novels Póstuma (2000), Cercada (2000), Fruta podrida (2007) and Sangre en el ojo (2012, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award); the latter has been translated into English, French, German, Portuguese, and Italian. She has received the Cálamo Otra Mirada literary awards (Spain, 2016) and Anna Seghers (Berlin, 2011), as well as scholarships from the Guggenheim Foundation (2004), National Endowment for the Arts (2010) and DAAD Artists in Berlin (2017). Among her non-fiction books are the essay Viajes virales (2012) and the chronicle-essay Volverse Palestina (2014), winner of the Chilean Arab Culture Institute Award in 2015. She currently teaches Latin American culture and creative writing at New York University.

See less