Two veterinary students, Miguel and Brenda, have brought their relationship to a painful end. They are united -and were eventually separated- by the pursuit of an elusive plan: the realization of an ideal of ‘extreme beauty’. This quest takes Brenda to obsessively dedicate herself to collecting the carcasses of dead dogs and teaching herself taxidermy in order to return them to a lifelike state. Meanwhile Miguel spends a year working on boats and herding goats until he is accused of the murder of a transvestite he has sex with. These are two characters fascinated by finding beauty in what is generally ignored, reviled or neglected. And yet it may just be that this compulsive quest is misguided, that the ideal had already been attained: there it was, the two of them together, the lovers, the unity that once had been an ‘extreme beauty’.
With echoes of Onetti and Clarice Lispector in literature, and cinematic atmospheres close to Lynch, Carlos Reygadas and above all Cronenberg’s “Crash” with its fetishist abundance of bent metals and broken bodies, Winter structures the novel in short fragments: a narrative that incorporates a variety of registers, from poetic vignettes to legal documentation, email transcriptions, and direct testimony. Hailed by Chilean literary circles and media, here is the first novel by an author we will be talking about for a long time!
193 pages – Original Language: Spanish (Alquímia, Santiago de Chile)