There are two stories in this novel, but each one has been cut up, and the two sets of fragments shuffled together. They form a composite picture as frustrating, and as full of brilliant moments of illumination, as those church windows where conservators have reassembled the shards left behind by iconoclasts’ cudgels, making a collage of unrelated pieces. Here a saint’s hands reaching out in blessing; there the leering grimace of a snouted devil; a scattering of pieces of drapery lovingly executed; everywhere glimpses of sky, of dirt, of bright colour.
Spanish author Elena Medel is a poet, and she has a poet’s preference for the significant moment over the sustained narrative. In her first novel, she gives us vignettes of two women, each of whom moves to Madrid in search of a new start. María is Alicia’s grandmother, but they don’t know each other. In the final section they will meet, unknowingly, during the 2018 women’s strike, only to pass on by. Their lives echo each other – both of them abandoning ambition, worn down by exhausting menial jobs, both making do emotionally with mediocre men – but they are also opposites.
