US edition of Bruno Lloret’s Nancy published by Two Lines Press
Chilean author Bruno Lloret’s novel Nancy, translated from Spanish by Ellen Jones, is reaching new audiences with a US edition published this month by Two Lines Press.
Lloret’s book is distinguished by its remarkable visual qualities, most evident in the free-flowing use of X characters throughout the text – characters which might also suggest religion, erasure, death, disappearance – and in the use of photos, x-rays and other graphic material.
The X started, almost on its own, to gather other functions than rhythm – silences, white noise, gaps, breathing,‘as if the world depicted in the novel emerged from the many meanings of this ubiquitous sign.
Bruno Lloret on Nancy
Most of all, Nancy is propelled by the strength of its narrator’s voice – spare, tender, ironic, and marked by an incorrigible optimism against the tragic precariousness of her life. Crippled by cancer and abandoned by her family, she tells her story from childhood through to its final moments, amid the ecological and cultural devastation of the northern Chilean hinterland.
The new edition has been greeted with strong praise:
this extraordinary novel far transcends denunciation and the exercise in style, reaching a new, unexpected, dissident realism.
Alejandro Zambra
The novel heralds a vanguard in Chilean letters and, despite its local roots, belongs to a burgeoning international literature of shared crises.
Asymptote
Bleak, beautiful and incredibly powerful.
Kirkus
This visually striking fever dream is one worth braving.
Publishers Weekly
In celebration of the new edition the Center for the Art of Translation a hosting a virtual event with Bruno Lloret, translator Ellen Jones, and moderator Kathryn Scanlan in conversation on Friday 23 April at 10:30am Australian Eastern Time (22 April, 5:30pm Pacific Time). Register for free here.
And Ellen Jones interviewed Bruno Lloret for the Southwest Review:
Nancy places a lot of emphasis on adobe, as well as on other desert materials, mountains, walls, abandoned iron constructions, even sand. Those materials are repositories for voices, and so is Nancy’s body—it’s a kind of resonance box, like in a guitar. Her body is a record of the scenes she has lived and the words she has spoken, and in turn the book itself is a record of those words, contaminated with Xs like her body is contaminated with cancerous cells. And so the book explores the parallels between landscapes, bodies, and texts.
Nancy was published in Australia by Giramondo in March 2020 and is the sixth title in Giramondo’s Southern Latitudes series, focused on writers from the Southern Hemisphere. It is the first of Lloret’s works to be published in English.
