When I started reading this book I was completely at a loss, I wasn't expecting anything... but It was breathtaking. This book makes you feel cold and numb,it makes you feel like youre Estela's body and feel what she feels, to think what she thinks.
I can guarantee that you will be a completely different person after you finish reading the book.

The only negative:
It was a really slow book and took a long time to finish

This is, by the end, a powerful story of resistance and confrontation set in Chile but the pacing in the first half is slow and for a book of only 200 pages, it took days for me to finish it. I've seen this categorised as a literary thriller which is not where I'd place it: for me this is a politicised narrative about class, capitalism, agency, violence and how forms of resistance may differ.

The story arc cleverly and self-consciously plays with our expectations: 'Estela Garcia, forty years old, single, domestic worker' tells this story to an invisible and sinister audience - we wonder whether she's in court or being interrogated by the police as she addresses her listeners behind a glass wall - and, interestingly, we are aligned with that audience as we, too, listen to her tale.

We know that a girl-child dies and so it's easy to jump to the conclusion that this is a [book:Lullaby|35437614]-type story but, like [author:Leïla Slimani|8555975], Zeran is more politically aware than that and situates the narrative amidst a nexus of concerns about class, labour and on a spectrum of power and powerlessness.

I was especially struck by the use of voice as a marker of control and how Estela wields mutedness to withdraw from a system that renders her all but invisible, only to reclaim her voice towards the end as an instrument of transgression and rebellion flung against invisible authorities - even as she knows her agency is all but illusory, an assertion of selfhood that has no traction against the powers stacked up against her.

It's a shame that it takes so long - about half the book - before this tale really gathers momentum: I'd considered not finishing it because of that glacially slow start but am very glad I persevered as the second half jumped up hugely in my estimation. So a definite recommendation from me, but maybe be patient with the beginning.

Clean is a tense novel narrated by a maid in a locked room, telling her side of the sequence of events that left her there after the death of the daughter of the house. Estela moved to Santiago and found a job working for a well-off middle class family, a doctor and his lawyer wife and then their newborn daughter. She describes how over the seven years, things began to go wrong, always alluding and building up to the death of the girl.

This is a book that unfolds with dread, like a nightmare, as Estela narrates what it is like to work as if invisible, unless she does something wrong. As her life is contrasted with that of the family she works for, she argues that this didn't cause resentment, but as death starts to impact them, it becomes hazy as to exactly what is happening. The book leaves as many questions as it answers, trapping Estela and her narrative in a limbo in which the reader can interpret, but not know for sure. One notable thing is how isolated Estela is, even with the backdrop of political change, and how much her story is about her isolation, not just the 'present' of the narrative in which she is locked in a room. In a way, you are locked in with her, forced to see the disgusting side of the family and the work Estela does, and it seems to give her some kind of purpose to be narrating, even though without any kind of response, there's no real sense anyone is actually listening to her.

Clean is ideal for fans of literary thrillers, weaving together class and domestic work in Chile with a memorable character who is an invisible woman, a forty-something maid. It is especially enjoyable to get this kind of narrative instead of the many thrillers centred around the perspective middle class characters and families, and in that way it reminds me of fiction like the film Parasite, using class and wealth disparity as part of the tension in a thriller.

I honestly did not know what to expect with this book, but this was even more twisted than I had expected. Creepy take on sex and class and labor -very enjoyable.!