(Blank Characters) A man and a woman decide to run away from the city and escape to the desert, carrying with them only two bottles of water and a blank notebook. Blinded by the sun, they fill their starving days reading to each other the chapters they’d written in white ink on the notebook: the day the parks and gardens had been permanently shut under lock and chain, the rewriting of a Buddhist text based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s book, Dhammapada, and Onetti’s The Brief Life; the possibility that someone may be living on the stairs of a building, the student who asks city centre clerks about the Soul of Santiago,
the murderer who blames Dimú for his crimes, the prophetic vision that Pythagoras had of the battlefields
of Rancagua and the night a messy oil spill could have been avoided by building an ark.
Caracteres blancos, young Chilean writer Carlos Labbé’s first short stories book is also a novel made up of stories that question whether swaying between delirium and austerity is the only way to speak one’s mind–starving in the desert– about love.