Type
Text
Type
Thesis
Advisor
Walker, Lou Ann | Jones, Kaylie | Simonson, Helen.
Date
2015-05-01
Keywords
Literature
Department
Department of Creative Writing and Literature.
Language
en_US
Source
This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/11401/77326
Publisher
The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
Format
application/pdf
Abstract
Kerry Anderson's novella, The Pinochet Clock, takes us on a dreaming tour of urban Chile, where loss hangs in the air like the smog. Sophie,the newly arrived, 26-year-old English teacher, is a lost girl who hopes to lessen the weight of her boyfriend's death by embarking on a quest to find the Chilean father she never knew. What she finds is a people scarred in ways large and small by the mass disappearances and loss of the Pinochet years. Old men stuck in their Pinochet ways, women imprisoned in their traditional marriages, youth who seek to lift the heaviness of the past with partying, sex and anarchy; and ex-pat Americans bumping and bungling their way through all the color and exoticism. As Sophie seeks to heal her emotional barrenness by bathing in sensory overload, she careens along like the cheap buses she takes. She looks for affection with all the hunger of a stray dog and slips in and out of sex and friendship as impulsively as she switches between her American and Spanish languages. Kerry has done a fine job of describing the sensuality of both setting and relationships. Sex is harder to write about than it looks and she handles Sophie's intimacies with a nice combination of empathy and heat. The writing climbs to its apogee with Sophie's description of what it would be like to live on a Valparaiso cliff-side: a lover with whom to eat avocado and adopt a dog and " everything would be simple and he would never die." It is simultaneously an urgent call to life and, finally, an acknowledgement of death. | 145 pages
Recommended Citation
Anderson, Kerry, "The Pinochet Clock" (2015). Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions). 3146.
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/3146