The Whitest Day
(El día más blanco)

The Whitest Day is poet Raúl Zurita’s melancholy and merciless autobiographical examination into his childhood and early years, with a sidelong glance at the harshest parts of Chile’s recent past. Episodes at home and at school give way to scenes from his sexual initiation in the 50s, and as the child becomes a young man he is introduced into his country’s political life, and is changed forever. In this exceptional account, first published more than 15 years ago and in a new edition revised by the author, everything seems to be taking place in the mind of a dying man, where the past becomes the present: the periods and the faces, the desires and the nightmares, biography and history, body and landscape, life and death.