Seeing Red

This book challenged me. I'm visually impaired from birth. The imagery used is equal parts intriguing and terrifying. It's a must read.

This book is described as a new-to-me genre – autobiographical novel. Apparently the author, Lina Meruane, had a stroke and suffered temporary blindness, necessitating surgery. Her novel’s main character, also named Lina Meruane, is based on the author, also being an author having serious problems with her vision. The literary character literally sees red from the burst blood vessels behind her eye.The book is written in short chapters with a stream of consciousness aspect to them. Having been through a period of blindness herself, the author writes a very realistic portrayal of a woman’s deterioration of vision and the effects of her impending blindness on not only herself but her loved ones. While Ms. Meruane did a wonderful job describing all of the terrors of blindness and its devastating consequences, there was an element of black humor that I wasn’t able to appreciate. It’s an intelligent read and one I feel I should have been able to immerse myself into more than I was able to.This book was given to me by the publisher through Edelweiss in return for an honest review.

This book broke me in good ways. Her artistic vision is stunning and the novel is as black and bitter and bloody (and beautiful) as its central conceit. For the protagonist, life as a blind woman is saturated with experience, overstuffed with a vivid and vital cacophony. Where we might expect a flat expanse of red, the bloody curtain of her blindness exposes a dense texture of experience, a superfluous excess that can be hard to absorb. Without sight to intercept and organize the world as space, the dam bursts; a flood of sound, feeling, smell, temperature, vibration, and tastes, all jostling for attention. Sight creates distance; her blindness closes the gap, and the tactility of the world is aggressive and overwhelming (“What do un-sighted people do with all this sensory detail?” I found myself wondering). The walls catch her hands, and the furniture moves to trip her; bodies collide in space and everything burns or freezes and cuts...

Seeing Red is an intriguing blend of fact and fiction where it is impossible to know how much of the narrative actually happened to Lina Meruane, the author, and how much has been imagined for Lina Meruane, the fictional character. Reading the novel in the first person adds to this sense of the two being indistinguishable and, for me, this worked brilliantly well although, having since read other reviews, I understand that not all readers were as enthusiastic!I was grateful that Seeing Red does not go into graphically clinical detail about Lina eyes because that would probably have been too much for squeamish little me. Instead Meruane focuses on how it feels to suddenly be robbed of clear vision. I admit that going blind is one of my personal fears so I could identify with Lina's emotional responses. Her having expected eventual blindness (as a result of diabetes) was a particularly chilling concept. I cannot imagine how terrifying it would be to spend months or years knowing that an essentially minor physical action (picking up something off the floor) could have such dire repercussions. Of course, as Lina is in America, there is also the added stress of having to deal with her heartless healthcare insurance company.Lina herself, the fictional one, doesn't come across as a typically sympathetic character. She isn't a passive female victim of circumstance and I loved that her initial need to lean - figuratively and literally - on her partner, Ignacio, is soon replaced by a determination to regain her independence. While Ignacio and Lina's family pin their hopes on successful surgery to restore Lina's sight, the woman herself cannot maintain such blind faith (pun intended). Learning of her doctor's fallibility is a turning point and, again, I loved that Letz isn't a typical fictional surgeon. He is tired, not dashing, and struggles to remember one patient from another. Retinas are strikingly individual, but the patients carrying them into his office, day after day, blur together.Seeing Red explores senses other than sight of course. Lina begins to speak in terms of sound, scent or touch as she becomes more fluent in translating these senses into her new sight. Meruane also explores to what extent sighted people don't actually use their vision. We see what used to be rather than what is there now, or we allow our emotions or our cultural heritage to colour true appearances. I bought Seeing Red on a WorldReads whim knowing pretty much nothing about the novel or Meruane's writing. I am delighted to have found a thoughtful and thought-provoking gem.

The story is good, but I have no idea how this book was printed.It has no punctuations when characters are speaking. There are either no spaces or double spaces within the text. It’s a mess. Even though the story was good, I was constantly distracted by this terrible editing. How can people publish books like this is beyond me.As for the delivery, Amazon delivered it on time but the book was dirty and dusty.