Nancy

Description:


'One of the most original books of the year' – Natalia Barbelagua, Revista Intemperie

In a small city perched
between the Pacific Ocean and the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, a dying
woman relives her childhood and adolescence in vivid detail. In the trance of
her sickness, she recalls her reactions to the breakup of her family, the disappearance
of her brother, the defection of her mother, her father's conversion to
Mormonism — snapshots in which sex, violence, poverty and environmental
degradation intersect against the oppressive and ecstatic backdrop of religious
belief.


'This world is a
desert of crosses,' she remembers her father telling her — and in the visually striking
layout of Nancy, crosses in bold make
up the very fabric and rhythm of the book. The text is full of Xs, which can be
read in many ways: as multiplication symbols, scars, marks on a treasure map — or
as signs of erasure, the striking out of reality, the approach of death, like
the cancer that threatens Nancy's life and memories.



'A novel that
flows naturally and can be read quickly, which is not to say that it's simple –
quite the opposite. It toys with existential questions about what it means to
be human' — Juvenal Romero Pérez, Revista Lecturas



'[Nancy] uncovers
the painful wounds inflicted by belief and by poverty, when life has become a
wilderness, a minefield, an act of survival, in which even love and desire are
reduced to nothing, witnesses to a happiness as improbable as it is
precarious.' — Leonardo Sanhueza