We are probably always sick and don’t know it. And although as a child Ella had thought they were trying to scare her with all those stories of what a body can suffer, only later has she understood that those stories were nothing but a gloss. Because the strangest thing is to live. So much can go wrong, she thinks, looking away from her book to check the bag of urine and its changing color.

Combining the fragmentary style of Renata Adler/Jenny Offill with the temporal interlacing style of Emily St. John Mandel, “Nervous System” is a novel focused on not so much a plot as a theme: the frailty of human bodies and the anxiety produced by this frailty. Each of the book’s five chapters takes on the medical issue of one member of a family, whose history gradually becomes clearer. And each of these five chapters is titled with an astronomical term, reflecting connections the author is presumably attempting to make between the very intimate and the very distant, the organic and the inorganic, which I’m afraid I didn’t cotton on to terribly well on a first read (not that there’ll be a second one).

Most of the chapters feature an unclear cause and progression of illness. The protagonist’s nerve and spinal pain, the boyfriend’s gastrointestinal problems, the brother’s too-frequent bone fractures, the father’s bleeding and infection. Only the mother’s has a clear diagnosis: cancer. The father and mother are medical doctors and so have commentary to offer throughout. The effect is to make the reader highly aware of the fragility of these bodies we inhabit, and the brief good fortune we are (hopefully) enjoying with them generally working as they should.

The novel will keep most readers at a distance through its various characteristics: the fragmentary narrative, the time hopping, the emphasis on theme over plot, the characters not given names (the partial exception of “Ella” and “El” due to Spanish pronouns becoming English proper nouns in an interesting translation choice).

One way the novel brings astronomy into the text is through the protagonist’s (“Ella’s”) failed attempts over many years to finish her dissertation in that field. In the meanwhile she teaches to mostly uninterested students. In one fragment that seems to be Meruane using symbolism that I feel on the edge of grasping but that just keeps slipping away, Elle is lecturing on the black hole at the center of our galaxy before taking leave to be with the mother during her cancer surgery:

Don’t panic, she told her students on her last day before taking a week off to be with the Mother in her surgery. Don’t be scared, she repeated, our black hole, unlike others farther away, is largely asleep, she told them, quiescent, she said, we’ll all be dead before it wakes up and devours us.

Hmm, I think. Sounds interesting, and ominous, but there’s some connection here I’m not quite getting, I fear. Maybe you will. ( )

Struggling with her dissertation, a woman wishes that she could come down with some sort of injury or disease that would buy her some time away from teaching to finish it. When she becomes ill, leaving her too tired and unable to concentrate to work on it, it's hard for her to not see some sort of cosmic karma at work. This starts out seeming like a novel about how a woman deals with life with a chronic illness, but that's not what the author is interested in, turning to a larger exploration into the ways our bodies can fail, whether through injury, accident, disease or simply aging.

There's a lot less plot and a lot more ambiguity to this novel than I enjoy. I'm not entirely sure what Meruane was doing here. There were some interesting moments, but far too often, something interesting happened and is brushed aside for something less interesting. I'm glad the Tournament of Books pushed me well out of my comfort zone, but I'm happy to be back in it now that I've read this one. ( )

There are aspects of this novel that I enjoy, like Meruane's use of time and place ("country of the past" and "country of the present," designations that mean multiple things and that remind me of how I reckon time by which city, state, house I lived in) and the way the world and culture and history manifest within the characters' bodies, but the flow is too disjointed for me to lose myself in the story as I'd have liked. ( )

This book focuses on a young (for most of the book) woman whose mother died during her childbirth. Her older brother has never forgiven her, her stepmother is the only mother she has ever known, and there are younger half-sibling twins. She is working toward a PhD in Astronomy in the (probable?) US. The rest of her family is still in Chile. Her father has financed her studies, but no one else knows this. She lives with her boyfriend who is some sort of archaeologist.

The story has very short sections and bounces around, telling the story. Much has to do with illness--her father and stepmother are doctors. Her brother's broken bones, her own mysterious illness, the many cancers. In between these stories we hear about her dissertation, memories of her childhood, and more.

This was fine--I very much enjoyed the first half more than the second. It got long and tiring and repetitive. ( )