Nancy by Bruno Lloret

Abstract

0 dreams, reality, and the fictions they create . Slipping starts off rather disorienting for the reader, a beginning that quickly slips into a commentary on the fractured lived experiences of various people disillusioned by the dreams and lost promises of the Arab Spring. While the revolution permeates the consciousness of the various characters within the novel, it is never mentioned by name. Instead, the reader must rely on each of the various characters who have invested their lives in chasing fantasies that never come to fruition. Though Egyptian critics have celebrated its poetic form, rightly so, what makes the novel stand out are its myriad characters and Kheir’s ability to weave connections between each while incorporating elements of the supernatural that feel tangible and realistic to the reader. True to the title of the novel, each chapter slips in and out of focus, touching on some thematic aspect of the imperfect human condition and how loss shapes and reshapes reality. In this manner, the novel juxtaposes its two protagonists’ lives—the journalist, Seif, searching for the next editorial scoop and his self-exiled guide, Bahr—while moving back and forth between the past and the present. As Bahr gives Seif a tour of Egypt’s mythical back allies and its hidden underground cultures, he recounts his life beginning with a harrowing childhood experience that forces him to live a life without a home to call his own. As each chapter unfolds, and each of the various characters come into focus with their own fantastical stories, Bahr narrates his life to Seif who, in turn, is forced to reconcile his own past traumas that begin and end with the Arab Spring and his “lost” lover, Ayla. A carefully crafted love poem and a commentary on the fragileness of post– Arab Spring dreaming, Slipping leaves the reader questioning reality while showing fiction’s ability to trap the dreamer within their own fantasies. Sean Weaver Louisiana State University Bruno Lloret Nancy Trans. Ellen Jones. San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2021. 156 pages. FIGHTING A DREADFUL illness, the eponymous narrator of this sobering novel reflects on a life shaped by personal misfortune and broader social ills. Nancy Cortes has lost a mother, a brother, a husband. She’s about to lose much more. Nevertheless , her devout father says she needn’t get too glum. After all, they’ll both be dead soon enough. “This world is a desert of crosses,” he says. Considering what she’s endured, this qualifies as a pep talk. Bruno Lloret’s Nancy is a powerful English -language debut about a woman who summons the fortitude to persist amid acute suffering. Set primarily in Chile, where the London-based author was born, the novel takes the form of a harrowing memoir with a distinctive typographical feature: Lloret peppers his book with X’s. Sometimes, two X’s take the place of punctuation marks. Elsewhere, they appear by the dozens, separating paragraphs and annexing large chunks of several pages. Lloret has said that the X’s suggest “silences , white noise, gaps, breathing.” They evoke the incisions and X-rays of Nancy’s medical treatment; when they appear in abundance, they resemble rows of Christian burial plots—“a desert of crosses.” This is apt symbolism for a sorrowful tale. The novel opens with Nancy in the back of a truck, apparently being smuggled across a stretch of South America. The story eventually circles back in an understated , satisfying final chapter. In between, she shares episodes from a painful life, fortifying herself with irony and gallows humor. As a child, Nancy is her mother’s favorite target for verbal abuse—this is detailed in an expletive-laced footnote— and her brother’s traveling partner on trips to the seaside. The X’s dwindle during one such outing, suggesting a moment of tranquility; they return when he disappears without explanation. Meanwhile, as women’s murdered bodies are discovered on a nearby beach, a local man sexually preys upon Nancy. In time, her mother WORLDLIT.ORG 95 0 deserts her, and her father succumbs to religious charlatans. Married as a teen to a man twice her age, Nancy watches her husband get drunk every...