Novel. Planeta Chile, 2000; Oficina de Livro, Portugal, 2001. 200 pages.

Amanda and her friends at a endless late-night card party. An absent mother who is hardly mentioned. And Renata, the girl who can only enter the world of her grandmother through literature, that undefinable place at the boundary of desire. Writing as in a mechanism of convex mirrors allows the narrator to bring back family history through episodes where fact and fiction blur into one another. What really happened in each scene and what has been distorted in recollection? Renata tries to retrieve her biography as she sees herself in another cruel, mysterious girl. But perhaps we are wrong and it is Amanda who is recounting each event. From this side and from the other, the ashes of memory are consumed and questions are raised. And in the longing for a past that is recounted in bits and pieces, and in this meticulously focused past, the registers alternate. Two novels are symmetrically organized into one. A single image refracting the fate of these women linked by eroticism and death. A hazy image for piece of writing that can only be a posthumous exercise.

“…  the very first moment reveals her writing’s striving to avoid the obvious turn of the phrase, to give into the facileness of mere action….It is a pleasure to read a Lina Meruane who is never afraid of words”. Javier Edwards Renard, El Mercurio

Published by: Spanish Planeta/ Portuguese Oficina do Livro