Nancy by Bruno Lloret, translated from Spanish by Ellen Jones, Two Lines Press, 2021

Death haunts the pages of Nancy, Chilean author Bruno Lloret’s 2015 debut. When we meet her, the eponymous heroine is dying of cancer, a painful end to a painful life. The novel—structured as a series of recollections with verses from the Old Testament prefacing most chapters—is written sparely, subdued in tone if not in depth of feeling. Scattered across each page are bold X’s, a mark of punctuation that carries more weight than the period. They don’t impair comprehension of the narrative but rather cast a subtle shadow, calling to mind a graveyard of nameless crosses, or marks on a map—death as the ultimate destination. The first and final pages of the novel feature these marks in a half-hourglass and hourglass pattern, and the shape of each individual X, as they stalk the story and linger between thoughts, echoes the notion of convergence and divergence, time left and time lost. (For a sense of how the marks function in the text, read an excerpt of Nancy in Words Without Borders.)

For Nancy, the point of convergence—the moment of irretrievable loss from which everything then diverges—is when her brother goes missing. Nancy’s childhood in northern Chile, in a coastal town between the desert and the sea, has not been happy. Her mother resents her existence, and Nancy’s girlhood becomes carefully choreographed to avoid inevitable blame and brutal abuse. Her older brother, Pato, is an ally, a friend, a “superhero.” When Nancy turns fourteen, he leaves home to find work at the port in a nearby city. Two years later, he disappears outside a nightclub.

Nancy’s troubles neither begin nor end with Pato’s disappearance, but the family’s grief and misery seem to radiate from this point. The loss doesn’t have the finality of death, and Nancy and her parents find various ways to cope with the pain of knowing he’s gone, but not knowing where. Her mom flees to the port city, ostensibly to look for Pato, and finds instead a way out of her old life and into an abusive relationship. Back in Ch, Nancy and her dad quietly care for each other, Nancy assuming the role of homemaker while her dad works. When he eventually loses his job, he finds solace in Mormonism as the life he built collapses around him—and Nancy.

Nancy heralds a future-facing vanguard in Chilean letters (the novel is set a few years in the future, and Lloret doesn’t overtly grapple with the legacy of Chile’s dictatorship) and, despite its deep local roots, belongs to a burgeoning international literature of shared crises. Born in 1990, Lloret belongs to a generation that must confront rampant environmental destruction and the climate crisis, and contemporary fiction has increasingly taken on apocalyptic motifs. (See, for example, Ling Ma’s 2018 novel Severance, which takes place during a society-shattering pandemic.) Nancy is not an apocalypse novel, but the environment characterizes the narrative to a striking extent in this story of one northern Chilean woman’s life. READ MORE…