Nervous system : a novel /

In the north, in the country of the present, Ella, a physics professor, and her partner El, a forensic scientist, are both struggling with debilitating health concerns. His stem from an explosion at a work site, hers have a less clear origin and receive a more cryptic presentation. Far away, in the country of the south, in the country of the past, her family (the Father, the Mother, the Firstborn, the Girl Twin, the Boy Twin) experiences their own health challenges, all relayed in fragmented, visceral prose that illuminates their experience of illness: isolation, confusion, speculation, fear, and detachment. The third (and expected last) in Chilean author Meruanes' exploration of illness, following Seeing Red (2012) and Fruta podrida (2007), which has not been translated into English, is cerebral, raw, and disorienting, effectively creating an unsettling and tense reading experience. McDowell's translation maintains a cadence that evokes the original Spanish. Best for larger collections with a call for literary South American works.

Chilean writer Meruane's razor-sharp novel (after Seeing Red) follows a young woman struggling to complete a dissertation in astrophysics. Ella's doctoral work is going nowhere; she can't even decide on a topic, something she keeps secret from her partner, El, and her father, who has poured his life savings into her education. (Her father, in turn, has kept his investment in her education a secret from Ella's stepmother and half siblings.) Desperate, Ella invokes the spirit of her mother, who died in childbirth, praying for her to afflict her with a disease that will excuse her from her teaching responsibilities. Obsession with illness and injury is the overriding subject of the narrative--Ella manifests an undiagnosable spinal pain, El is injured in an explosion, her stepmother's breast cancer returns. Her father, himself a doctor, is hospitalized. Meruane is a writer of undeniable talent; her portrayal of the body as a site of suffering is nuanced and unflinching. The years of dictatorship and "still-undiscovered graves" in Ella's unnamed "preterit country," and the migrant "problem" in her "country of the present," where people speak a different language, add more dark layers. While there isn't much in the way of momentum, on a sentence level it's unimpeachable. The result is a challenge, but one that gives the reader much to chew on. (May)

A woman considers her lifelong obsessions with illness, death, and the universe. The second novel translated into English by Chilean author Meruane concerns Ella, an astrophysics scholar whose efforts to finish her dissertation on black holes are perpetually foiled. Her health is one reason for that: She's suffering from back pain whose cause proves difficult to diagnose but presses her into palliative chemotherapy. Her loved ones' health is another: Her husband, an anthropologist, was badly injured in an explosion near a dig where he was working; her father, a renowned doctor, is in decline. These predicaments prompt Ella to remember her mother's death, shortly after Ella was born, and remembering only stokes her feelings of complicity in her loss. (Her older brother isn't shy about assigning blame: "Did you forget you killed her?" he tells Ella.) For all the family drama at play here, though, the novel is less a morbid domestic tale and more a postmodern meditation on how illness and loss forge connections as enduring as a happy marriage or healthy children; if Don DeLillo wrote a family saga, it might read like this. Astrophysics gives Ella an occupation, but the business of stars and the vacuum of outer space also establishes a chilly mood, putting her anxieties at a remove. ("The ancients thought that sadness came from a malign alignment of the stars.") Meruane is an engaging, lyrical writer, often injecting her sentences with peculiar triplets of words that evoke Ella's scattered consciousness: "Fingers that entered her dry open lip-full mouth…"; "She had lost house head hummingbirds." The iciness of Meruane's style somewhat blunts the impact of the climax, but her command of Ella's anxiety, bordering on despair, makes it a fair trade-off. A complex, melancholy tale of a woman on the brink. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.