Review: Nancy

Nancy by Bruno Lloret
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Nancy by Bruno Lloret, translated by Ellen Jones, is about Nancy, her childhood, her long marriage that ends badly, returning to Chile with a cancer diagnosis, etc. The childhood part comes after her adulthood and fills in some gaps about her negligent parents. The physical book has an interesting layout with X marking punctuation sometimes, but sometimes it's more visual. I am a Two Lines Press subscriber so they also sent a letterpress print of a page of the book, pretty unexpected and cool.

I like when an author does something I haven't seen before, and even more when someone manages to translate it. The X on the page feels like found poetry, or my just poetry, also like a symbol. I have talked before on the podcast about how infrequently we see Mormon characters (perhaps more appropriately LDS characters) in books outside of "inspirational" titles but this plays a major part in at least one character's story. It showed a Chile that was more of a conglomeration of other places' remnants, a bit bleak, more current than other books I've read placed there.

One of my goals this year is to be more immediate in reading subscription books so gold star for me as I've had it only a month or less.

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Travels in a Thin Country by Sara Wheeler

 

Travels in a Thin Country: A Journey Through Chile by Sara Wheeler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Around the World: 11 of 52 (still need to post review for #10)

The author combines history, political intrigue, stories of people she travels with or meets along the way, verbal snapshots of unbelievable landscape, and box after box of wine (mixed with Coke) into a travel book that has made Chile even more of a mystery to me NOW than when I started reading it.

The country stretches along South America and includes icebergs, rainforests, desert, mountains, island regions, wine country, with a diversity of old European colonials and (mostly extinct) native people groups. She never travels to Easter Island, but it seems like it is more Polynesian than anything else (and I still have a book to read for it by itself). I learned about quite a few more cold weather islands that I didn't know about (hooray) but if traveling there is anything like she describes in 1992, I'm not sure I could do it (boo).  I'm going to dream about them over on my Pinterest wanderlust board, if you want to see what I find. 

Quotation tidbits I liked:
"'The problem is,' he went on, 'that you don't stop being an exile when you get home. It becomes a state of mind. You can be an exile inside your head. Perpetual travellers are often like that... Mind you, you don't necessarily have to go anywhere to feel that kind of permanent alienation. Perhaps the worst kind of exile is mental.'"

"It was unutterably peaceful. At that moment the past held no regrets and the future no fears; I could have given up everything worldly to live the rest of my life on that island."