Reviewed by Katie Smith
Though only 150 pages, Bruno Lloret's Nancy delivers a gut punch with every line. It is a novel about death and dying, memory and the self, how we construct the story of our own lives and what matters in our final moments.
As his titular protagonist dies of cancer in a northern Chilean city, she drifts in and out of memory, in a mental fog from her medication. She vividly recalls her childhood and teenage years: her brother's disappearance and family's destruction, her father's conversion to Mormonism, her own sexual discovery, the violence and poverty experienced firsthand and through those around her. Through Ellen Jones, who translated the novel from Spanish, Lloret at once extols capitalism, environmental destruction, religious zeal and domestic violence, while in the next breath, he writes about loneliness and pain with incredible tenderness. His writing is gritty, desolate and dusty, as if the desert landscape could seep into the text and its characters on its own.
Nothing grows here, he said x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
Everything burns from sheer abundancex x x x x So much salt x x x x x
But Lloret manages to cut through the haze of Nancy's memory and the dreary, deliciously somber experience of the novel through his protagonist's voice. The novel is experimental in design, unlike anything I've ever read before. Through Lloret's use of form—Xs are plopped throughout the prose to shape the reader's pace and cadence, a device he calls cruceo or crossing—Nancy's voice is so distinctive that when we lose her at the novel's close, it feels like the death of a friend.
"I was. . .determined to construct a voice, a rhythm, outside my own physical boundaries," Lloret writes in an author's note. "I wanted a spoken, fluent, intermittent transcription of her voice. . . The X started, almost on its own, to gather other functions other than rhythm—silences, white noise, gaps, breathing—as if the world depicted in the novel emerged from the many meanings of this ubiquitous sign."
Lloret takes every rule about grammar and punctuation, and, more or less, tosses it into the dirt. Xs take the place of em dashes, exclamation marks, and most periods and commas, and create a visual across the page.
For example, in an early scene, Nancy is smuggled out of Chile and spends the night in rural Bolivia, where she shares a sweet moment with a local shepherd. She asks about the weather and the cloudless day, and the cruceo does so much heavy lifting. The Xs create silence and overwhelm the text so that the short bits of sentence look like the wisps of clouds in an otherwise clear sky.
x x x x x x x And how d'you know when
something bad's gonna happen? x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x He hushed
the dogs with his hand and sent them back to keep
the flock in check. As he waved goodbye, he said: Just
look at the shadows of the clouds on the mountains
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x Clouds are good
news x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x x Their shadows are bad news x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x It's all the same thing x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
"It's a moment of quietness and contemplation," said Lloret in an interview for Southwest Review. "I've been there, to that part of Bolivia, and the sky and the sun are just amazing, surreal. It's like another world. I wanted to create a safe place for the character in that moment, so I started to experiment with the Xs and the results were so satisfactory that I kept using them, not only graphically but also to make the language interact somehow with the landscape."
In a world that, as we know, doesn't always care about women's voices, particularly as they age, to hear Nancy's voice so clearly on the page feels political. A lot of social and political problems weave their way through Nancy's story, but femicide in particular always looms in the story's background as a constant threat. During her teenage years, women are continually found dead on the beach, and Nancy witnesses domestic violence in her mother's relationship with her new partner. Here, Lloret's text, so innovative and fluid, transforms to fit the narrative, and the Xs function as crosses.
Nancy captures Lloret's fears and hopes for the future: the devastated environment and its people at the mercy of a government who's failed them. But on the ground level, Nancy's world is small. By the novel's close, as she slips further toward death, her memories and the present intertwine and work together to march her story to its end. She recalls the last time she saw her father, her papá santo, as the men honked the horns of their trucks outside, calling for her to flee with them. Much of the scene is deftly written in double entendre:
x x x x x x x x I'm leaving, papá, for good, I
told him in the end x x x x He looked at me with
the eyes of a sacrificial lamb, and sighed:
Do you have to, Nancy, you're old enough
now x x x
x x I asked myself: Am I old enough?
The Xs slowly, laboriously fade out into nothing over two and a half pages—before starting to fill up the lines on the page again. As the audience feels the tremendous pain of losing Nancy, this woman we've known to be so vividly alive before us, the cruceo gives us hope. The last line is full of Xs, of Nancy's life force, without a word to break them up or a cloud in the sky. Wherever this lifetime has led her, if the shepherd's right, it's probably somewhere good. It's all the same thing.