“In other words, the women’s minds, forced to take in so much horror and unable to take more, had managed to turn out the lights. If the women were telling the truth-and there were some who doubted this, who thought the women might be malingering because they wanted attention or were hoping to collect disability-the only explanation was psychosomatic blindness. Further tests showed that their brains were normal as well. “The doctors who examined the women-about a hundred and fifty in all-found that their eyes were normal. Others suffered from blurred or partial vision, their eyes troubled by shadows and pains.
She was not the only one who appeared to have cried herself blind. One woman, who never again saw her husband and three children after soldiers came and took them away, said that she had lost her sight after having cried every day for four years. Most had seen family members murdered in front of them.
Many of the women had been raped or tortured or otherwise brutalized. Before fleeing their homeland, they had witnessed the atrocities for which the Khmer Rouge, which had been in power from 1975 to 1979, was well known. “During the 1980s, in California, a large number of Cambodian women went to their doctors with the same complaint: they could not see. “The rapturous reception has stunned Nunez, 67, who has been quietly writing and publishing books for the past 23 years.”Īlter, Alexandra.”With ‘The Friend,’ Sigrid Nunez Becomes an Overnight Literary Sensation, 23 Years and Eight Books Later.” The New York Times. (Writing in The Times, Dwight Garner called Nunez ‘a crisply philosophical and undervalued novelist.’) “And yet despite her acid critique of writers and their discontents, or perhaps because of her dead-on depiction, Nunez has won over the literary world with ‘The Friend.’ The novel, an acerbic but often poignant exploration of love, friendship, death, grief, art and literature, received this year’s National Book Award for fiction and drew euphoric reviews from critics, who hailed it as a subtle, unassuming masterpiece. Book of the Month:The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (2018)
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