About the book
One of the most captivating young authors in current literature explores virtual refuges and faulty emotional bonds through the generational gaze of “almost digital natives.” The characters in her novel inhabit these intangible spaces in search of humanity and comfort, and embrace imagination as a strategy to confront the unnameable wounds of existence.
Is it possible to relate to the fish in an aquarium through glass as if the glass were a screen? And vice versa, to relate to a screen as if it were a window to the world?
The Imaginary Wound is a story about what we do with the pieces left over after dismantling life and trying to put it back together again. A novel in which everything flows to provoke astonishment.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
«The transition from a pre-internet world to a world dominated by the discovery of the internet happened for me just at the turn from childhood to adolescence. Through the characters in this book I was interested in investigating the way in which we, “almost digital natives,” relate simultaneously to these two worlds that we have experienced. In a way, the protagonists of the novel extend the paradigms of virtual relationships to their “analog” relationships. Is it possible to relate to the fish in an aquarium through the glass as if that glass were a screen? And vice versa, is it possible to relate to the screen on which a television series is broadcast as if it were a window?
The explosion of the debate around artificial intelligence also made me think, by contrast, about the nature of those first virtual spaces that are more controllable, predictable and friendly. For the characters in this book, these spaces become refuges full of humanity and consolation: they make friends in thematic forums, find a purpose in life by letting themselves be carried away by catastrophic viral suggestions, try to avoid the passage of time and the fear of death by saving files on a hard drive or are able to replace an absent sister with a tarot reader through a chat. But hope is not something intrinsic to these spaces, which are always intangible (like literature), so they have to invent it.
So, although there is something disconcerting about the fact that the newest thing we had is becoming old, what interests me is not to evoke any kind of nostalgia for these first virtual spaces but the imaginative component that they demand from the “user.” What interests me, and I think that is what the novel is about, is how the four protagonists and the rest of the characters end up using this imaginative strategy to confront the unspeakable wounds that have crossed their lives. Not so much to go through them, but to build new and better lives.
BERTA DAVILA
I brought Cleo and Rob home a week after my father died. Cleo and Rob are two orange freshwater fish, and I found them for sale in a grimy aquarium next to the counter at the pet store. I was looking for something else, something with a warm heart and soft fur, something like a cat. Then the saleswoman convinced me that fish are no work and that they offer the same companionship as a cat and require much less commitment. That seemed like the final sign.
*Original content provided by the publisher
Source: https://algunoslibrosbuenos.com/la-herida-imaginaria