Scan barcode
A review by octavia_cade
Purgatory: A Bilingual Edition by Raúl Zurita
challenging
dark
sad
fast-paced
3.5
This is super interesting, but it is I think a little elliptical for my tastes. I like the format of it, which is very mixed - there are EEGs and a doctor's reports and a photo of Zurita's (self) mutilated face amidst the poems. It's a good thing I never skip introductions and afterwords, because otherwise I wouldn't have understood much of this at all. Zurita was a young man when Pinochet's military junta came to power in Chile. He was arrested and tortured, and this book of poems is a record of the time - not so much a record of what happened to him specifically, but more a record of what was happening to his country.
Now, I understand from these extra elements that this book had a significant cultural impact in Chile, and I can only guess that it's because it was recognisable, in some way, to its readers. There's a long series of poems about the Atacama Desert, and a long series about a cow, and the poems are appealing, but, as I said, elliptical. Once I learned from the surrounding matter that Pinochet had concentration camps in the Atacama it started to make more sense, but even ignorant as I am it seems plain that the cow poems are not actually about cows. They're about power, and loneliness, and the whole effect of the collection is one of terrible fragmentation, of not being able to talk about something and having to find a way to do so regardless. It's a fascinating work, but I think for me to really appreciate it I'd need to read some Chilean history in order to grasp a lot of the undercurrents here.
Now, I understand from these extra elements that this book had a significant cultural impact in Chile, and I can only guess that it's because it was recognisable, in some way, to its readers. There's a long series of poems about the Atacama Desert, and a long series about a cow, and the poems are appealing, but, as I said, elliptical. Once I learned from the surrounding matter that Pinochet had concentration camps in the Atacama it started to make more sense, but even ignorant as I am it seems plain that the cow poems are not actually about cows. They're about power, and loneliness, and the whole effect of the collection is one of terrible fragmentation, of not being able to talk about something and having to find a way to do so regardless. It's a fascinating work, but I think for me to really appreciate it I'd need to read some Chilean history in order to grasp a lot of the undercurrents here.