Seeing Red by Lina Meruane

Abstract

white Quebecoise girlfriend. While the café scenes bring Laferrière closer to the fiction he used to write, the majority of the book features short treatises on different aspects of Quebecois society and history such as the Quiet Revolution, the weather, and attitudes toward immigrants. Haiti is not completely absent, as Laferrière often makes comparisons between Quebec and his homeland or more broadly between “the North” and “the South.” All these reflections lead up to a guidebook destined for Mongo entitled “How to Infiltrate a New Culture” that comprises the second half of the book. This hybrid structure results in several repetitions that slow the pace of the volume’s three hundred pages, as compared to Laferrière’s novels, which inspire a breathless reading in one sitting. While not as provocative as his previous work, Mongo still has moments of humorously biting social critique , particularly in the section entitled “A Short Glossary for New Arrivals,” where we find, for example, a Quebecer defined as “an individual ready to die for a language without even trying to write it well.” Mongo will most appeal to readers with an interest in immigrant literature, in a unique outsider view of Quebec, or with a continuing interest in Laferrière’s career. Those readers new to Laferrière would do better to start with some of the earlier books, which originally earned the author his place in the Académie. Corine Tachtiris Earlham College Lina Meruane. Seeing Red. Trans. Megan McDowell. Dallas, Texas. Deep Vellum. 2016. 157 pages. Seeing Red, by Chilean writer Lina Meruane , is an exemplary autobiographical novel. At a party in New York City, the main character, Lina, suffers from a stroke, which causes the blood vessels behind her corneas to burst. According to her, this stroke was inevitable and doctors forewarned her of this fate. Her vision disappears behind what she describes as “black blood.” Rather than panicking, Lina walks back out into the party she’s attending, acting as normal as she can while threads of blood float across her eyes. As the event comes to an end, she stumbles through the city with a friend and her partner, Ignacio. Losing her eyesight means relying on those around her with more intensity. So, she must rely on her lover, Ignacio, and her overbearing mother to care for her and lead her around. Their relationships are tested, and Lina goes back and forth between appreciating them and dreading her need for them. Lina isn’t an optimistic heroine. She has a dark sense of humor, she’s difficult, and she’s selfish. The book contains bursts of immaculate stream of consciousness flowing from Lina’s mind, and it is packed with visceral language in each short chapter. Seeing Red takes the reader through the gorgeous and uncomfortable descent of Lina’s mind because of her obsession with gaining her eyesight back. She adapts to the senses she still has but becomes eerily obsessed with gaining new eyes; at one point, she even asks Ignacio for one of his eyeballs. Meruane ’s voice is undeniably fresh, corporeal, and poetic. Seeing Red reminds the reader of our inevitable fates. We get older, our DNA shrinks, and we collapse into our mortalities. For Lina, it starts with her eyes, and the book gives us the beginning of her dizzying obsession with gaining something she could never get back. Rios de la Luz Tigard, Oregon Patrick Modiano. Paris Nocturne. Trans. Phoebe Weston-Evans. New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2015. 148 pages. Thirty years after it happened, the protagonist of this haunting novel recounts how, one winter night, when he was not quite twenty-one, he was hit by a car in Paris. The driver, a young woman named Jacqueline Beausergent, looks like someone he knew when he was involved in a similar accident years earlier. Accompanied by a vaguely threatening and shady man who knows her, they are both taken to the hospital. When the protagonist wakes up, the woman has disappeared . The man makes him sign a report of the accident, gives him an envelope full of money, and disappears too, just like the protagonist ’s father did and just...