María Bastarós likes to bring her short stories to a moment of crisis then leave them hanging in mid-air: a shotgun-wielding husband confronts his wife and her lover; a father discovers his twin teenage daughters having sex with his boss; an encounter between a girl and a gang of boys teeters on the edge of assault. These are endings that might, in other hands, leave a reader feeling cheated and wanting three more pages, but Bastarós is so good, her stories so darkly compelling, that personal predilections evaporate in the heat of her talent.
Bastarós has published four books in Spain, but this is her first appearance in English (translated by Kevin Gerry Dunn). Set mostly in the lonely, arid landscapes of northern Spain, where the desert “plays games that no one understands”, and swallows the careless whole, the presiding mood of these tales is dread. Bastarós’s characters – jilted lovers, seekers of revenge, daughters plotting against mothers, disaffected office workers – are all waiting for the axe to descend. Almost invariably, it does. It is a moral universe, I suppose, but one that operates according to an ominously occluded – or perhaps just cruel – logic.
