A Glass Eye by Miren Agur Meabe

A Glass eye by Miren Agur Meabe

Spanish (Basque) Fiction

Orignal title – Kristalezko begi bat 

Translator – Amaia Gabantxo

Source – personal copy

As usual for the Spanish lit month, I try to get a crossover work from the Basque region for my good friend Lisa Indigenous lit week. Miren Agur Meabe has written poetry and mainly youth literature but has also written a number of novels as well as working as a translator. Her poetry deals with the female body and her first work were said to have a lot of symbolism and postmodern concept of the moment “The moment lives us and we only live the moment” The me and the moment surround us. This is very apt for this novel from her.

The first artificial eye in history is 4800 years old. They found it in an archaeological site in the Burnt City, in what was ancient Mesopotamia, near the current frontier with Arghanistan. It was inside the head of a young woman, and was made of tar and animal fat. It has an Iris at its centre, and gold rays imitating eye capilaries, less than half a milometer thin.

It must have been hard for its owner to get used to that foreighn object; I know tahat from experience. If a chickpea in the shoe hurts, a pebble in the eye socket is no nicer. Driven by pain, despair, or plain disappointment, many have taken hammer to eye to smash it

The first Glass eye chapter makes to think what that first ey must felt and looked like !!

A glass eye is the title of the novel. But as the narrator of our novel a middle-aged woman has had to live since her late teens with a glass eye. Apart from that fact.  we are given a history of the glass eye, the care of what materials have been used in history to make a glass eye. I was surprised that glass eyes made of glass only last a few years due to the salt in tear. I love a little fact. Anyway are unnamed narrator is a writer herself we meet her just after she has found two shadows on a mammogram. Her partner just called M for most of the book is supportive but then next thing we know she has split with M and left her job to become a fulltime writer and moved to France to the wonderfully named Le rayon Vert the green-ray that light in the evening when the sun hits the ground also the title of a Rohmer film which follows a woman that has just split up in a relationship and found a new love. Her our narrator struggles to fill the void left by M with writing like my last Spanish lit read a book that has writer’s block in but her is a woman running from a scare!

I have rad a lot in these  two-and-a-half months ( the quotes tjat pepper the textd have helped me rise up). A special mention must go to Anne Ernaux’s Simple passions. That story taught me that some loves are non-refundable investments. I’ll never posses the author’s clairvoyance, but I feel forever linked to her because she sheltered me while I unravelled my chaos. I have also taken the liberty to copy from J,.M Coetzee’s summer, the idea of adding footnotes and specirying the questions the text leaves unresolved.

This is in the last chapter I loved the Eraux  mention and agree she is a writer that has touched me as well

I loved this I love just like the narrator she jumped of the page I loved how she split the chapters between the story of her life and a sort short history of glass eyes.  The chapters are vignette-like in style with the longest is just about ten pages most a couple of pages. It is the tale of one women’s search to write but also for what brought her to this point a sort of new freedom that isn’t all it seems. Which for me made this feel like a book that had slipped under Peirene’s radar it felt like one that they would publish and anyone that knows me that is high praise no this is from Parthian a publisher I don’t know too much about which is a shame as this is the second book from them in translation I have enjoyed.