Winner of the Chilean National Council of Culture and Arts “Best Unpublished Novel” Award 2006 & Winner of the Premio Cálamo Otra Mirada 2016

Zoila del Campo and her sister María, known as “The Elder”, live in a small town in industrial Chile called Ojo Seco (“Dry Eye”). Here their lives revolve around Zoila’s degenerative disease and María’s job at a fruit export company.

In this setting we see the pressure Zoila is put under when she chooses to resist medical care, and the elaborate means her sister takes to gain money and power in the workplace and, as she does so, the tensions she creates that give the story its shades of the surreal.

First published in Chile and Mexico by Fondo de Cultura Económica. A fragment was translated into English by Megan McDowell for Asymptote.

“The author remains faithful to her radical aesthetic choice in favour of language as expressive material.” Patricio Jara, El Mercurio

“…a powerful text that is a demonstration of her talent as a narrator, with an aesthetic which is unrelenting and combines crude images with a honed and piercing language, and a bold narrative structure that takes the reader down a rigorous path full of questions.” Javier Edwards Renard, El Mercurio

“Lina Meruane, whose prose resists tradition, is an intelligent, self-critical writer who knows how to anticipate any objections… I take my hat off to her.” Marta Sanz, El País