The Cracks We Bear

Chilean writer Infante’s penetrating English-language debut centers on a woman coping with the challenges of new motherhood while reflecting on her late mother. While her baby daughter sleeps, Laura, who has postpartum depression, goes through a box of her mother Esther’s memorabilia, “unsure of what it is I’m hoping to find.” As the novel progresses, Laura attempts to understand who Esther was before her death from cancer when Laura was 18. Cold and emotionally distant, Esther left Laura with an emptiness that’s “difficult to name... as if an organ has been removed from our bodies, leaving a hole in its place.” Told in vignettes and fragments, the narrative alternates between Laura’s distress in the early months of motherhood; trouble in her marriage to Felipe, which reaches a breaking point when she asks him to move out; and a vivid depiction of the turmoil following the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile as Laura pieces together memories from photographs (“There’s Esther running with me in her arms, my little legs bouncing and banging against her hips. She throws her leather jacket over my head so I can breathe despite the cloud of tear gas the police fired into the crowd”). This slim and subtle work packs a stinging punch. (Nov.)