Soul's Infarct (Helen Lane Editions) (Paperback)

~ Diamela Eltit (Author), Paz Errázuriz (Photographer), Ronald Christ (Translator)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

“Another splendid book by Diamela Eltit, Chile’s most celebrated experimental writer. In collaboration with renowned photographer Paz Errázuriz, Eltit questions the lovers’ discourse—how this magic is born, how it is sustained and nourished—and roots her perspective in those outcasts whom society has condemned to the margins. These abject figures, locked for life in a psychiatric institution for the poor and insane, are the protagonists of this beautiful book about love; they are the guardians of what Eltit describes as ‘that mysterious symbolic disorder’ which nothing in medical science can ever come close to explaining. Soul’s Infarct is certain to embrace the reader who in turn will recall the power of love as a moment in which the senses override the intellect, an instant when we surrender ourselves to the tremulous body of desire, to hunger for the other to reach a transgressive bliss. Award-winning translator Ronald Christ is unique in his ability to tease out the subtle rhythms of Eltit’s text and bring to English-language readers the sublime poetic prose of Soul’s Infarct.”—Francine Masiello, University of California at Berkeley

“Binocular: visual and verbal lenses, individual but parallel in focus, Soul’s Infarct brings up close—brings us up close—to the distanced, the unmentionable, the unsightly: crazy people, who yet are people in love, witnessing their immense emotion before Paz Errázuriz’s welcoming camera, conveying their unknown and unknowable selves and histories through Diamela Eltit’s transformative, recording word. Soul’s Infarct is doubly unique.”—Catalina Parra

About the Author

The winner of Guggenheim and Social Science Research Council grants, Diamela Eltit is the key figure in radical ficiton from Latin America. She has been translated into French, English, and Finnish. A professor at Santiago's Metropolitan Technological University, Eltit has taught at Columbia, Berkeley, Stanford, Washington, Pittsburgh, and John's Hopkins Universities. She was recently appointed Global Professor at NYU.

Ronald Christ won the Kayden National Translation Award for Diamela Eltit's "E. Luminata" and the ForeWord Book of the Year Award for Altamirano's "El Zarco, The Blue-eyed Bandit." Currently translating Álvaro Pombo's "Contra Natura" under a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Cutlure, Christ's most recent critical work is "Bonevardi: Constructing Magic."

Product Details

• Paperback: 84 pages
• Publisher: Helen Lane Books (April 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0930829670
• ISBN-13: 978-0930829674
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 8.3 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,310,396 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A pleasing and admirable book, September 27, 2009

By	Cristopher Hollingsworth (Mobile, Alabama USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As with all Lumen books, 'Soul's Infarct' is a pleasure to read and own. The generous, square format and flexible paper binding opens easily: on these pages Eltit's intimate, arresting prose and Errázuriz's humane photographs have room to speak as well as spoon. The varied but simple layout works with the black and white scheme and the courier font--this last choice warms a suggestion of institutional paperwork with the emotional patina of typewritten pages. Ronald Christ's English is current and confidently elastic, overlaying like skin his translation's living sentence rhythms. A pleasing and admirable book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sheer inspiration, August 31, 2009

By	Gene H. Bell Villada (Cambridge, Mass., USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The very idea for this book is unique, original, and without precedent: romantic love as it flourishes among the mixed inmates of an insane asylum for the completely destitute and often with no identification, located in the countryside not far from Santiago de Chile. The asylum, formerly a TB sanitarium, was converted to its present status fifty years ago, when the TB vaccine had rendered such special refuges obsolete. To compound the ironies of the experience and its setting, the institution bears the unfortunate name "Putaendo."

We have here an ideal collaboration: Diamela Eltit, one of Latin America's most experimental, lyrical, meditative writers, weaving her lover's discourses around these couples of all ages, who in turn are captured in the photos of Paz Errázuriz, she giving the subjects a quiet dignity, a memorable humanity. This is nothing like Diane Arbus's morbid fascination with society's outcasts--more like Walker Evans fondly remembering a nation's unlucky rejects. Yet both author and photographer do their job with empathic joy, with not so much as a hint of condescension. No wonder some of the 500 inmates started calling Paz "auntie"...

Eltit deploys a whole gamut of emotions and expression, bringing in issues of the soul and the body, of Romanticism, of identity, of love letters, and more. One thinks of Yeats's "Crazy Jane" poems, where love, it is said, can be found even amid the most harrowing of human circumstances.

My only quibble is with the translated title--apparently the result of Eltit's insistence. The original Spanish, EL INFARTO DEL ALMA, is completely idiomatic; it echoes many a love phrase, and besides, "infarto" is the usual word in Spanish for "heart attack."In English, by contrast, "infarct" is a completely technical term, and pure cacophony besides. I wish that the author, one of Chile's most highly respected literary artists, had allowed for a more euphonious and idiomatic English handle.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing literary and fotographic work, amazing translation!, August 8, 2009

By	Carmen Celina "jounalist" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This book by two renown Chilean artists -novelist Diamela Eltit and photographer Paz Errázuriz- defies categorization. The images of lovers from a provincial psychiatric hospital are coupled with a text that is neither a documentary chronicle on the lives of the protagonists nor an essay on love, madness and the madness of love. Instead, Eltit produces a literary text that, triggered by the image, explores through language the question of love and madness and its relation with marginality and power. Far from adopting a paternalistic or sentimental approach, Eltit delves on the form of the love letter to produce a highly elaborated aesthetic experience which has been amazingly captured in this long overdue translation. Ronald Christ, who previously worked on Eltit's novel E. Luminata, excels in this English rendering of a fundamental and compelling piece of contemporary Latin American literature.