A Furious Oyster

by Jessica Sequeira

On a street of jacarandas in Santiago de Chile, a scientist in her laboratory analyses an intriguing set of data. Storms in the city are not only meteorological events, but generate a certain force that permits the dead to intervene in human lives before definitively passing on. Now the poet Neruda has appeared on the machine’s radar, and the scientist is compiling a dossier dedicated to the writer. Her documentation includes Neruda’s visits to Santiago as well as other fragments of his consciousness produced by the storm — lost memoirs, an erotic dream, impressions of the poet from the afterlife.From beyond the grave Neruda helps his followers, observes a budding romance, comforts a grieving hotel owner and sends literary enemies on a wild goose chase to the south of the country. The title A Furious Oyster comes from a line in Neruda’s poem ‘El desenterrado’ [The unburied], in which the poet imagines the Spanish Count of Villamediana rising from his tomb to visit the earth, the ‘furious oyster’ of his ear once more able to hear the living.

128 pages, Paperback

Published August 15, 2018

Reviews

[Guy Mankowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still processing this unusually intelligent, poetic, insightful and innovative book so may well revise this. But I was struck by the dextrous use of form- from scientist notes, to Neruda’s lost works, to the intangible weight of dreams, as devices by which to tell a story. The fact that the story itself has such a range of voices, a poetic weight to its labyrinthine language, also adds to its appeal. It is not a book to be read easily, but one to be savoured. I found in the concept of a scientist finding a way by which the dead penetrate and shape the world of the living a brilliant one. This depiction of the nature of reality to me evoked JG Ballard and his own dense lyricism in novels like The Unlimited Dream Company. But there is also a theoretical and academic underpinning to this which gave it weight. It is a book that is hard to define but one to cherish. Innovative, poetic, dense and yet dextrous, and above all with around it the white glow of a kind of divine insight.