A Furious Oyster

On a street of jacarandas in Santiago de Chile, a scientist in her laboratory analyses an intriguing set of data. Storms in the city are not only meteorological events, but generate a certain force that permits the dead to intervene in human lives before definitively passing on. Now the poet Neruda has appeared on the machine's radar, and the scientist is compiling a dossier dedicated to the writer. Her documentation includes Neruda's visits to Santiago as well as other fragments of his consciousness produced by the storm - lost memoirs, an erotic dream, impressions of the poet from the afterlife.From beyond the grave Neruda helps his followers, observes a budding romance, comforts a grieving hotel owner and sends literary enemies on a wild goose chase to the south of the country. The title A Furious Oyster comes from a line in Neruda's poem 'El desenterrado' [The unburied], in which the poet imagines the Spanish Count of Villamediana rising from his tomb to visit the earth, the 'furious oyster' of his ear once more able to hear the living.