Blood Red

In award-winning Ecuadorian author Ponce’s first novel appearing in English, an unnamed narrator whose marriage is coming apart explores her sexuality and tumultuous state of mind in language so visceral you can taste it. The breakup is occurring not for the usual reasons, even with affairs on both sides, but because she is tired of waiting for something better to happen. Initially, she throws herself into an affair with a man living in a sort of mossy cave, with the sex here (as elsewhere) described in unabashed, moment-by-moment detail. After aimless drinking and drugging, she imagines that she has hit and killed an older man (despite a lack of evidence) and ends up at a retreat, followed by more affairs, particularly with a man she’s befriended through correspondence. Strikingly, the swoop of mostly unparagraphed narrative is at once intensely interior and intensely physical (and not just regarding sex; “I felt like it was snowing inside my fingers”). But finding what she wants isn’t easy.