Punctured Diary

Two intimate, perceptive novellas about learning to see anew from a fresh voice in Latin American fiction

In Punctured Diary, Mercedes Halfon finely crafts two stories, each following a woman as she navigates a personal crisis and attempts to reorient herself, both physically and psychologically, in a changing world. The title novella is told through the journal entries of a young Argentine writer who follows her lover to Berlin—and through a summer of discontent—finding herself only after she’s been abandoned in the foreign city. In the second novella, a woman with a hereditary eye condition faces her fear of going blind as she cares for her aging mother, discovers she’s pregnant, and reflects on the work of doctors, inventors, philosophers, and artists whose own struggles with sight made them visionaries.

Journeying through the mind and the quotidian, Halfon illuminates the human urge to find new ways of seeing that can shift and shape the narratives of our lives.