The claustrophobic atmosphere of Lina Meruane’s compelling novel, Seeing Red, envelopes you from the first lines. The narrator, Lucina, is distraught. Sentences end mid-thought. Unfinished. A party is in full swing, only a room away, but she is suddenly alone, isolated.
I had to give myself an injection at twelve o’clock sharp but now I wouldn’t make it, because the pile of precariously balanced coats let my purse slide to the floor, because instead of stopping conscientiously, as I should have, I bent over and reached to pick it up . And a firecracker went off in my head. But it was no fire I was seeing, it was blood spilling out inside my eye. The most shockingly beautiful blood I have ever seen. The most outrageous. The most terrifying.
A diabetic diagnosed with a serious condition affecting her eyes, Lucina had been warned against leaning over and now one thoughtless movement has left her eyesight, her work and her normal connections to the external world threatened by a curtain of blood. What follows is a deeply internalized monologue that builds in neurotic intensity, narrated by a woman struggling against her worst fears with a rapidly diminishing reserve of dignity and grace.
Inspired by her own real-life episode of blindness, Seeing Red is not exactly an autobiographical novel. In an interview, the Chilean author and essayist explains that she began writing what she thought would be a memoir, but as the relationship with truth began to interest her less, it quickly became a piece of fiction. She was, however, keenly interested in capturing the experience of blindness as “seen” from the perspective of the unseeing person—something raw that would be in contrast to the tendency in Latin American literature to present blind characters from view of the outsider.
Set in the early 2000s, Lucina, the protagonist of Seeing Red is, like her creator, a writer (writing under the name “Lina” Meruane) who lives in New York City with her boyfriend Ignacio, an academic. Their relationship is only about six months old and they are just about to move to a new apartment when her sight starts to rapidly disappear. She faces an uncertain prognosis, and a delay before the doctor will be able to consider operating, but they are bound to one another by the intense emotion of a new romance. That’s a good thing, because Lucina will test it, especially when she flies home to Chile to visit her parents—both of whom are doctors—while Ignacio attends a conference in Argentina. He soon joins her as they to try to salvage a vacation they’d planned, one that is now restricted to Chile, primarily to her family’s Santiago home, because of her fragile condition. Relying on her memory, she guides her partner through a city he has never visited, trying at the same time to blindly negotiate an emotional minefield of complicated family dynamics and past relationships.
The narrative style cleverly enhances the increasingly unreliable nature of Lucina’s connection to the world around her. Through a series of unbroken single-paragraph sections, each two or three pages long, we are held hostage to her unseeing perspective. Thoughts unspoken race through her mind, as she imagines how those around her are reacting, picturing their expressions and adding to their words her own visualized commentary. She second guesses herself. She second guesses everyone and everything. One can only imagine how her patient partner or her aloof mother really feel as everything is channelled through Lucina’s personal filter. Her reconstructions. Her cynical digressions. Her abruptly aborted sentences. As readers we have to trust her descriptions which are themselves coloured by her anxieties and growing agitation.
Aren’t you dying of cold? Ignacio insisted, rubbing his hands together as if lighting a fire. I was trained to resist the damp air that was seeping into his bones. His teeth chattered. He got up from the chair and bent his legs to wake them up. He rummaged quickly in a packet of cigarettes, the match scratched my ears, and I heard him suck on the cigarette in spite of his imaginary flu. I could envision him forming fragile smoke rings that his forced cough then tore apart, his dry cough and the beaten voice of a bellyaching Galician. Winter in my Santiago made him remember winter in his own, in Compostela, and he told me again how as a boy he’d slept beside a wall that let water filter in from outside, how he’d spent his whole childhood sick, covered in rashes, his ears hardened by chilblains. He exaggerated his hardships, or invented them, all so as not to talk about our own.
The question of her relationship with Ignacio, and whether it will stand the strain, haunts Lucina. She wants to give him the freedom to decide if he would be willing to stay, even if the unthinkable happens and her sight never returns, and yet they are each terrified of being alone, lost and overwhelmed by the enormous implications that hang over them both. Conversations begin but are quickly aborted. Strange sexual urges obsess her. Once back in New York, with surgery ahead, the narrative only becomes more charged and visceral and surreal. In Megan McDowell’s excellent translation, none of the energy or intensity is lost. Lucina is a complex, difficult, thoroughly compelling character. Her story vividly demonstrates the fear of losing control, the limitations of relying on the mind’s eye and the extreme pressures a person in crisis can put on those close to them.
Seeing Red by Lina Meruane is translated by Megan McDowell and published by Deep Vellum.
roughghosts 
One thought on “Love is blind too: Seeing Red by Lina Meruane”