My heart is in distress

This novel progresses through thirty-eight small consecutive chapters, without titles or divisions, but the author simply places a number at the beginning of the first line of each chapter, so that the confession does not break apart and the song does not fragment. A unified voice, a long monologue that envelops dialogues and delivers them to us stamped with her fingerprint, framed by her own narration. What the successive chapters depict is an exclusion, or rather a strange negation, experienced by two citizens of the large city of Bordeaux, whether truly or as an illusion. Both are high school teachers, seemingly model figures or so they believe. A slip-up they do not understand what it is, a negative trait that characterizes them and causes their social standing to diminish. In this novel, there is precision in observation, a medical and poetic record at the same time, reminiscent of Kafka’s "Trial" according to some critics. A mixture of rebellious awareness, guilty awareness, and ill intent, the author holds her manifestations with a surgeon’s scalpel. There are many symbolic encounters in it. Everything passes through the body, so the author admits her difficulty in dealing with abstractions. She stated in an interview about the novel: "When the narrator feels that things are slipping out of her control, her body itself slips away from her. She thinks that her bloated belly comes from reaching menopause, and her surroundings believe she is pregnant, while in fact she has become subject to the power of food."