“There was only one way to leave the house and that was to eat mom,” writes Lina Meruane (Santiago de Chile, 1970) in her new book of stories Avidez (Páginas de Espuma). An overwhelming image that is behind a family that is hungry. Very hungry. Only vegetables come into his house and they are becoming increasingly scarce. The father threatens to leave if they don’t eat meat. The wife invites him to leave since she cannot fulfill her wish. Factories and slaughterhouses have closed due to an infection that is spreading through towns and cities. You can’t risk it. Nor that his children, whose bellies growl, run away in search of food, so he decides to swallow the house key. And then madness breaks loose.
The Royal Academy of Spanish Language defines avidity as desire, greed, longing. The Chilean writer exposes the same with examples as shocking as this first one, to which are added creatures born with a forked tongue, young women obsessed with hair removal, or a handful of wild animals fed by hatred, misery and punishment.
This time he does not include any story or testimony related to Palestine, as he did in previous works such as the most recent Palestine in Pieces (2021), in which he reflects on the land of his ancestors; or Becoming Palestinian (2013), in whose pages she made a total immersion in her family roots. That does not mean that he is not aware of all news related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Palestine lives in a state of permanent gravity,” he lamented during his visit to Barcelona.
The book is equally hard and the scenes probably reach the author’s subconscious after the long after-dinner conversations shared with her medical relatives. “I am used to this language. I look at the body as matter and not just as metaphor, and that runs through all my writing. I don’t find it uncomfortable that my literature is stark,” she admits.
Her crude language, shared with other Latin American authors, is another sign that “women are no longer afraid of anything. Most of us come from dark backgrounds. I myself grew up in an authoritarian regime in which dictatorial violence was the norm. But, also, femicides, still very present today. Since writing, we have said enough, and we echo something silenced for decades.”
