Seeing Red by Lina MeruaneMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
When the veins in Lina's eyes burst, filling her sight with blood, she struggles through months of blindness, wavering between attempting to be independent and being reliant on her partner, Ignacio, and her family.
In Seeing Red, she narrates her experience, filled with asides to Ignacio. It reads like part-diary, part-rambling, an autobiographical novel of a writer's relationship with sight. It's one of those books that need to be read in one sitting--not because it is particularly enthralling, but because the webs that she spins and the tangents she veers into in her narrative are easily lost once you take your eyes off them.
There's a taste of her Hispanic background that rolls off the page in the words used and the way she phrases her thoughts; the story starts in New York but soon steps into Santiago, Chile, where she explores her family dynamics and prods at the differences between her Chilean self and Ignacio's Galician background, ending back in New York where her eyes are operated on by Doctor Lekz, a Russian doctor born in Galicia who forgets Lina's name every time she comes in but remembers the state of her eyes and what's wrong with them.
It took some time for me to get into the story--I started it twice, pushing through past the 25% mark until I reached a point where the narrative emerged strong enough to pull me along its very scattered path.
Note: I received a review copy via Edelweiss.
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