Punctured Diary - by Mercedes Halfon (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Two intimate, perceptive novellas about learning to see anew from a fresh voice in Latin American fiction

In Punctured Diary, Mercedes Halfon finely crafts two stories, each following a woman as she navigates a personal crisis and attempts to reorient herself, both physically and psychologically, in a changing world. The title novella is told through the journal entries of a young Argentine writer who follows her lover to Berlin--and through a summer of discontent--finding herself only after she's been abandoned in the foreign city. In the second novella, a woman with a hereditary eye condition faces her fear of going blind as she cares for her aging mother, discovers she's pregnant, and reflects on the work of doctors, inventors, philosophers, and artists whose own struggles with sight made them visionaries.

Journeying through the mind and the quotidian, Halfon illuminates the human urge to find new ways of seeing that can shift and shape the narratives of our lives.

Review Quotes

"I am interested in everything that Mercedes Halfon writes. It is a true privilege that she shares her world with us." --Jazmina Barrera, author of On Lighthouses and The Queen of Swords

"With one of the most compelling voices in contemporary literature, Mercedes Halfon crafts an intimate, endearing, and observant narrative. The concision of poetry allows her, in these two novellas, to say a great deal in very few words. What does it mean to see? What does it mean to get lost? What does it mean to find one's way? These questions become existential, and the writing answers them obliquely, subtly, through a gradual unfolding, drawing us close to the beauty of her wandering." --Pedro Mairal, author of The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra and The Woman from Uruguay

"A brief, fresh, and surprising book--one that will be treasured by lovers of the unclassifiable." --Guadalupe Nettel, author of After the Winter and Still Born, at Infobae

About the Author

Mercedes Halfon is an award-winning poet, novelist, film director, cultural journalist, and professor at the Universidad Nacional de las Artes. Among other honors, she is the recipient of the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation Fellowship, Bogotá's Goethe Institut Fellowship, Barcelona's Montserrat Roig Writing Fellowship, Madrid's Centre of Contemporary Creation Fellowship, and multiple grants from Argentina's Fondo Nacional de las Artes. Outsider Everywhere, Halfon's literary biography of Witold Gombrowicz, is published in English by Fitzcarraldo Editions, and Punctured Diary, her first work of fiction available in English, is published by Bellevue Literary Press. She lives in Buenos Aires.