I picked this one up because of its experimental aspect - the typographical use of bold "x" marks throughout the text, in place of punctuation, in spaced out bunches, in choppy blocks. Used in the telling of a story about a woman dying and looking back on her life, I imagined it could be put to interesting and productive effect, something new I hadn't seen before.

For me it didn't work. The "x" marks increasingly seemed randomly placed, a gimmick rather than a thought out meaningful part of the text. Why 1 here, then 7 there, then 3 here, then a block of 20 there? If there were 4 instead of 3 back there, would it make any difference? Is anything really contributed by this staggered block of 30 "x" marks, looking like incomprehensible ASCII art? If you removed all these from the text, is it negatively affected? I don't think it would be.

I appreciate innovation and even though this didn't work in my view, plaudits to the author and publisher for trying something.

What's here besides the typographical experiment is sparse prose that keeps the reader at an emotional distance from the characters. I never felt like I knew Nancy very well at all, though I read about a lot of trauma that happened to her. The book almost entirely focuses on her childhood; married for twenty years later in life, those decades rate only a handful of pages, mostly notable for the pathos of her absent drunk husband being reported dead after getting sucked into a fish processing machine. No body, unless you want to open a few thousand cans of "tuna". Certainly in keeping with the trends of her childhood and adolescence, that, but I'm left wondering if she had any stretches of happy contentment in those decades of life, any grace or small happiness. If she had, it wasn't going to be allowed into this bleak portrait of a life, at any rate. ( )

Nancy, a Chilean woman dying of cancer, recounts parts of her childhood and adolescence, considers relationships with her father, mother, brother, uncle, Jesulé (older Romany man she had a relationship as a teen), and Tim (her late husband). She considers the Mormon missionaries who convinced her and her father to join their church. Her brother disappeared at 19, when teens were warned women were disappearing on the beaches. Now, as a dying adult, she reconsiders all of these people and what she made of her life.

Lloret uses a wingding X to show pauses in the text. These Xs mean more--they can symbolize religion, death, space. There are images of xrays and a cordyceps-infected insect. As Nancy considers some experiences and people and then others, these Xs can mean different things, including time through an hourglass--which is the shape at both the beginning and the end.

I liked this, but I was also confused at certain parts. ( )