Bloodline

Carla Maliandi’s latest novel Bloodline [La estirpe] begins with a literal blow to the head, one that leaves both the protagonist and the reader speechless.

One day Ana wakes up to a world that she doesn’t recognize. She lives in a place where she doesn’t feel she belongs. She doesn’t remember her life, her husband or her child; her sense of self is shattered. She’s turned into someone else — a gigantic insect if you will.

The story follows a woman named Ana as she tries to recuperate from a ridiculous but nonetheless catastrophic accident that happened at her 40th birthday party. As she tries, in agony, to pick up bits and pieces from her pre-accident life, the flashes of her past get mixed up with other ones from Argentine’s charged history of the early 20th century. These flashes appear not as a decoratıve background, but because Ana is a writer, and after having lost virtually everything, she hasn’t lost one thing that makes her who she is: her desire to write.

The more Ana tries to recover her past connections, her will to construct a narrative brings out a complex map of memories and emotions. As the story unfolds we discover that Ana had been a happy woman. She’s got a house, a well-off family that cares about her, a teaching position where she’s respected. However, the novel leaves us with questions about this happy picture because before the accident Ana had been writing a family story, or rather the story of her family who, we find out later, won’t be so comfortable with uncovering what happened in the past. Is it better to go there or not? Does remembering bring back happiness or open old wounds? If we look away from them, will they simply disappear?

The past is a strange phenomenon in the sense that it’s there whether one wants to remember or not. As a matter of fact Ana doesn’t remember it. Not in the way we tend to think of it anyway. Ana carries her long-forgotten family past inside of herself even when her mind goes absolutely blank. Much like the way we inherit some parent’s eyes, our father’s hair color or a mother’s fixed gaze out the window on a quiet Sunday afternoon. It’s not a conscious choice. We simply inhabit it. They’re ingrained in our blood.

Ana doesn’t actually lose her “speech” but the continuity of her narrative(s) — both the one she was living and the one she had been writing — along with her own language. Losing touch with what had been familiar in her daily life, she taps into her distant past, and goes somewhere far darker than imagined. And the question remains: how much are we willing to lose in order to know ourselves?