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Nancy. Bruno Lloret, translated by Ellen Jones. San Francisco, California: Two Lines Press, 2021. 156 pages. $19.95
It is impossible to ignore the X’s inserted into the text of Bruno Lloret’s Nancy. Grouped together, they create malleable, graphic blocks of clay which Lloret pulls and compresses, constructs walls from, and punches holes through. X’s ebb and flow over the prose, creating small tidal pools where they collect among the paragraphs. They have the presence of living creatures, multiplying at an alarming rate like Tribbles or cancer cells.
Each page is a work of typography art. Embracing this, Two Lines Press sent their subscribers limited-edition letterpress prints of the three most visually striking pages. (The font is not identified). The care taken working and reworking the layouts is evidenced by how much more effective and aesthetically pleasing the X’s appear in the final hardcover edition than in the early galleys. Something to do with the margins, I think. The galley also includes an introduction by Lloret, explaining the evolution of the book. This was replaced by a section of advance praise and blurbs. A good call. Readers should be allowed to form their own opinions about the X, rather than looking for patterns they’re told exist, but are not immediately obvious.
In addition to the X’s there are black and white, and one color, photos – mostly of x-rays – as well as a few other typographic/pictorial elements. Each chapter begins with a passage from the Bible. Nancy’s format is singular, unique like the woman it is named for. The visual imagery evokes a sense of memory. The X’s create structure. They ground the story as both icon and metaphor, linking the beginning to the end. One complements the other.
On its own, Nancy is a brilliant piece of dialogue written in a distinctive voice. Told in the first person, Lloret’s heroine delivers a long, continuous monologue on her life. She artlessly describes what it is like to live on the edges of society; and what it means to be disadvantaged by poverty, exploitation, and loss. Ellen Jones’ translation telegraphs the rasp in Nancy’s voice and summons the cackle of her laugh. Raucous, irreverent, and resilient – the character brought back memories of my grandmother’s sisters, great aunts from Puerto Rico talking late into the night at family reunions. Their eruptions of laughter startled and delighted me. Their toughness terrified me. In the end, the X’s work only because Bruno Lloret is an exceptional writer. Remove them and what remains is still beautiful.
After the final shovelful of earth, the last few stragglers dispersed silently, not daring to give their condolences, and I went back to being a ghost. The only person who continued to give me the time of day during this whole nightmare was Isadorita. A kindly fat woman who comes and looks after me every now and then. We share our regrets sometimes, quietly, and I try to console her. She’d wanted to be the carnival queen and everyone had laughed at her. When we ran into each other in the street she looked like a kindred spirit. She saw me sunk in a void, alone. I saw how anxious she was, everyone acting friendly then laughing behind her back. Sometimes they laughed in her face, too. I love that she talks to me, that she washes the dishes, and most of all that she tries to smile between sighs.
At the center of Nancy’s story is her beloved brother Pato, who disappeared when she was a child. Unlike the many who were “disappeared” in Chile during Pinochet’s dictatorship, Pato’s absence has nothing to do with politics. The most likely scenario being that he was killed, the inevitable consequence of a criminal life. “That motherfucker left us alone… who knows what he was mixed up in?” his wife tells Nancy. Pato’s loss shatters the already cracked family unit. Nancy’s mother, an abusive woman subject to rages, abandons Nancy and her father for another man. Her father, who genuinely seems to love his daughter and wants to provide for her, escapes into religious zealotry. When Nancy sets out in search of something better, she doesn’t know what “something better” might look like. Her journey is a kind of Odyssey populated by Romany, missionaries, doctors, and gringos – lost souls all.
Nancy is dying of cancer when we meet her. We are reading a recitation of well-worn memories. She is living out her final days in a small house, watching telenovelas with her roommate, not so far from the place she ran away from all those years before. Her words, spoken directly, are brutal cataloging of facts and events. We will eventually learn what happened to Pato… or, rather, Nancy will tell us what little she knows. But there is no heartwarming story buried amidst the tragedy or the X’s. No startling revelation or unexpected twist to set the world to rights. Nancy isn’t even a particularly likable character. In that lost introduction1 I mentioned earlier, Lloret warns us – “Physical and symbolic violence, precarious lives, poverty, and the rise of Christian denominations, where no state nor any other sense of community exists, are problems to be faced, not to be idealized or framed like picturesque problems of the third world. Reading Nancy is no substitute for justice and dignity in the lives of Chileans.” We aren’t allowed to take refuge in the pretense of empathy.
Not everyone’s life leaves a mark. Despite what we want to believe about our own, most lives shrink into obscurity over time. By the end, we understand that Nancy’s is one life buried amongst many. Maybe that is how it should be. Nancy is an extraordinary debut novel. One of loneliness, but also fortitude. A story bereft of hope, but not of happiness. A work of stark poetry set amidst a brutalist landscape of anonymous X’s.