Etchepare — Mario Bellatin

A novel about the power of literature and the tension of authorship, from literary master Mario Bellatin. Two siblings live in a psychiatric center. Their communication is complicated: he is deaf and she partially hears thanks to an operation. Using a small computer that she always wears around her neck, they manage to overcome this obstacle. But it is not the only one: the colony is frequently attacked by stray dogs that often kill its inhabitants and devour them. A failed writer arrives one day to give a literary seminar based on Lydia Davis' novel The Cows. The man, a certain Bellatin, proposes to the inmates that they write a book together in a week, a joint work that looks as if it was written by a single person. This story, written by her and read by him, moves between different worlds and is at the same time fiction and reality, an incest, a besieged ship: whatever the inhabitants of the psychiatric center imagine, thanks to the power of literature.