Ruled by relativity: A review of Lina Meruane's NERVOUS SYSTEM, trans. Megan McDowell

 
 
 
 
 

In Lina Meruane’s novel Nervous System, doctoral student Ella struggles to write her astrophysics dissertation. She’s been writing too long, conjuring equations she fails over and over to solve. Desperate, Ella wishes to get sick so she can stay home from teaching and finish writing her dissertation. Her wish triggers physical symptoms that doctors are unable to diagnose, and Ella grows increasingly aware of her body and the systems that comprise it. Ella’s hyperawareness of her own nervous system highlights the systems that characterize her life: personal relationships, place, and language.

The characters in Nervous System exist in relation to each other. They are named only for their relationships to Ella: the Father, the Mother, the Boy Twin and Girl Twin. The doctor, the nurse. In fact, Ella thinks of her boyfriend El as “her antiparticle ... her positron, the counterpart to the electron she has been” (39). The characters in Nervous System exist as a system, orbiting each other, tugging on each other’s fields of gravity. There are no proper nouns in the novel, and the characters are defined not so much by their individuality as by their relationships to each other—these relationships give them definition. They are who they are because of who they are to other people.

Ella relates to place the same way she does to people. Like the unnamed characters that form her social system, place in Nervous System is both allegorical and literal. Ella takes a plane to fly between her “country of the past” and “country of the present.” These countries exist literally as separate spaces on a map. But they are never named—they exist relative to each other. What matters is how Ella relates to them, that they represent past and present. Ella “was still in the city of the present to finish the doctorate that would launch her into the future in the country of the past” (146). Past and present countries form the spatial system Ella moves through.

And Ella experiences space in language. The narrator refers to Ella’s “country of the past” as her “preterit country.” Framing Ella’s relationships to the past, and to place, in terms of the “preterit” tense links these relationships to a system of language. The image I enjoyed most in Nervous System is Ella’s recurring struggle to use her phone’s voice-to-text feature. When she dictates a message to her family in Spanish, the phone renders that message as nonsense in English. And when she attempts to send a text in English to her partner El, the phone renders that message as nonsense in Spanish. “Ella wanted to send him a conciliatory message, but her phone transcribed it in the wrong language: Ahí jopo yo slip well, hay labio” (153). These failed translations are funny, and they draw attention to language as a system of signifiers: word for image, sound for idea.

Ella struggles to harness this system each time she tries to write her dissertation. “She’s done nothing but jot down useless formulas and string together words ... [She] doesn’t understand ... what she was thinking about when she wrote down those scrambled phrases that now seem unconnected” (25). Ella’s struggle to write shows how difficult it is to make meaning within systems of language—she fails to decipher even her own sentences. Language is a system of relationships we use to relate to ourselves, other people, and the world we live in. But in Nervous System, a phone that transcribes voice-to-text messages in the wrong language highlights the boundaries of linguistic systems. Ella slips between those systems, but her meaning sometimes gets lost in translation.

Ella engages with translation in voice-to-text, and I enter Nervous System through translation. McDowell captures the urgency of Meruane’s prose in sentences that are crisp, visceral, and consistently surprising. And McDowell plays with the boundaries between Spanish and English. She occasionally repeats phrases in both: “Could it happen again? ¿Podría repetirse?” (26). Or she embeds Spanish phrases inside English sentences: “Then we’ll eat that egg scrambled with salt, onions, potatoes, y un poquito de our teacher” (21). The narrator remarks that Ella “gets tangled up between two languages, the one she writes and the one she speaks” (52). McDowell as translator keeps Meruane’s original text close, the languages of Ella’s past and present merging on the page.

Ambiguities exist in the space between languages. In Meruane’s original text, “Ella” and “El” are named for the Spanish pronouns “she” and “he,” which emphasizes their existence as ambiguous components of the social systems that characterize Ella’s life. This ambiguity—whether “Ella” is a name or a pronoun—presents an impossible task for the translator. Ella is a recognizable name in English, and it is pronounced differently in English than in Spanish. To call the protagonist “Ella,” rather than “She,” grants more definition to Ella’s identity in English than exists in Spanish.

But only the narrator calls her “Ella.” Her partner, El, refers to her by nicknames—Electrode, Electronica, Electron—that reference her astrophysics work and the breakdown of her nervous system. The fact that characters do not call Ella by name highlights the importance of their relationships: this is a novel about systems. Systems are comprised of smaller pieces that work together as a whole. Nervous System places Ella at the center of a series of systems to explore how she relates to everything, and how everything relates to her.

Ella fails to write an equation that explains the universe, but she is living a sort of equation. The characters that surround her are variables—they exist in relation to each other. And it is the equation of Father + Mother + El, bound by laws of space and time, that governs Ella’s life. As Ella struggles to theorize a universe ruled by relativity, Nervous System depicts the stunning complexities of life in a world defined by relationships.

Morgan Graham is an English PhD student at the University of Minnesota. She has published work in Great River Review, The Evansville Review, and Perspectives on Undergraduate Research and Mentoring.

 
ReviewSalt Hillpoetry, review