THE CRACKS WE BEAR

A Chilean woman loses her mother, gives birth to a daughter, and attempts to understand the fragile threads that bind generations in this slim yet sturdy novel.

Laura, an art history professor, lives a comfortable life in 21st-century Santiago with her partner, Felipe, and their newborn, Antonia, but Laura’s late mother, Esther, was a communist who fought against a repressive government and took her then-adolescent daughter to visit Cuba. Now Laura, who is clearly experiencing some postpartum depression, alternately ruminates on her faults as a mother and her dislike of her new role: “Motherhood hit me blindside,” she says. She makes some halfhearted attempts at going out with single friends but finds she’s more interested in thinking about Esther than she is in smoking weed or sleeping with a woman named Daniela. Her memories of her family’s time in Europe (her mostly absent father, Michel, is French) and of her longtime friend Blanca’s kind, bourgeois parents swirl around the void Laura feels from her own mother, whose revolutionary dreams were subsumed by parenting and teaching. “My mother could never wrap her head around the idea of working less,” says Laura, at once proud and ashamed of herself for reducing her own course load. When Esther grew ill from cancer, she told Laura bluntly, “You have a house, and you have your things, and you’re going to be fine, don’t cry.” Toward the end of the novel, Laura asks the visiting Michel for directions to Esther’s childhood home. When she and Felipe and Antonia make the trip, Laura has a realization that may or may not make things better for her little family. What remains true are her therapist’s words about relationships, that they’re “full of cracks…pieced back together over and over again.”

A straightforward voice guides a complex exploration of upheaval—political, maternal, and familial.