An electrifying novel about illness, displacement, and what holds us together, by the author of Seeing Red
Nervous System
A Novel
- “Nervous System burns in the mind long after one has read it, not unlike the ghosts who circumnavigate our psyches, and the winding corridors of history, to hammer us on the head with the raw truth that time is not linear. The distance between the deep past and the present, Meruane shows, is much shorter than we might be inclined to think.”—The New York Times Book Review
Ella is an astrophysicist struggling with her doctoral thesis in the “country of the present” but she is from the “country of the past,” a place burdened in her memory by both personal and political tragedies. Her partner, El, is a forensic scientist who analyzes the bones of victims of state violence and is recovering from an explosion at a work site that almost killed him. Consumed by writer’s block, Ella finds herself wishing that she would become ill, which would provide time for writing and perhaps an excuse for her lack of progress. Then she begins to experience mysterious symptoms that doctors find undiagnosable.
As Ella’s anxiety grows, the past begins to exert a strong gravitational pull, and other members of her family come into focus: the widowed Father, the Stepmother, the Twins, and the Firstborn. Each of them has their own experience of illness and violence, and eventually the systems that both hold them together and atomize them are exposed.
In this extraordinary clinical biography of a family, full of affection and resentment, dark humor and buried secrets, illness describes the traumas that can be visited not just upon the body, but on families and on the history of the countries—present and past—that we live in.
As Ella’s anxiety grows, the past begins to exert a strong gravitational pull, and other members of her family come into focus: the widowed Father, the Stepmother, the Twins, and the Firstborn. Each of them has their own experience of illness and violence, and eventually the systems that both hold them together and atomize them are exposed.
In this extraordinary clinical biography of a family, full of affection and resentment, dark humor and buried secrets, illness describes the traumas that can be visited not just upon the body, but on families and on the history of the countries—present and past—that we live in.
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About the Author
Credit: Lorena Palavecino
Upcoming Events
Nona Fernandéz and Lina Meruane appearing virtually at The Center for Fiction
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Nona Fernández and Lina Meruane in conversation virtually at the Center for Fiction. Interpreted by Natasha Wimmer.
Praise
- “Razor-sharp. . . . On a sentence level [Nervous System is] unimpeachable.”—Publishers Weekly
- “Nervous System is a novel both fanciful and visceral, pairing the study of the cosmos with medical mysteries and wounds on earth.”—Shelf Awareness
- “A postmodern meditation on how illness and loss forge connections . . . A complex, melancholy tale of a woman on the brink.”—Kirkus Reviews
- “This is an absolutely fantastic novel. From black holes to mass graves, undiagnosable diseases and (perhaps most terrifying of all) a PhD that hasn’t been written, Nervous System is frank, brave, and unsparing. The precision of Meruane’s sentences will cut through you like a scalpel.”—Julianne Pachico
