This intense autobiographical novel describes a young Chilean writer recently relocated to New York for doctoral work who suffers a stroke, leaving her blind and increasingly dependent on those closest to her.
...the triumphant realization of a stunning artistic vision, a novel as black and bitter and bloody (and beautiful) as its central conceit ... Seeing Red offers no answers, or judgement, of course; only an unblinking gaze into the abyss. But her exploration of what dependence does to love is harrowing. And as the novel winds to an increasingly torturous conclusion—dead-ending onto a twist I hadn’t anticipated until I was literally reading the words—her blindness becomes a metaphor, at last, for the tyranny of human frailty and need, the strangling hunger of bodies that break and fail, and the whirlpool of our shared mortality.
Seeing Red becomes a searing commentary on the limits of family relationships and the cruelty that, under duress, we are capable of exerting on those we love ... Meruane's sentences burn with vigor and urgency. Occasionally, they dissolve before concluding, forcing the reader to complete the thought, as if words themselves had been cauterized, like veins
