📖 🇪🇸 #60: A Spanish coming-of-age book

Elisa Victoria on growing up in the '90s

Welcome to Bookmarked, a weekly newsletter following my journey as I read one book from every country. If you like the sound of my project, I’d love it if you shared Bookmarked with a friend.

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Set in Seville in the early ‘90s, Elisa Victoria’s Oldladyvoice is narrated by a Marina, a nine-year-old girl who is spending the summer with her no-nonsense grandmother while her mum receives treatment for a serious, unspecified illness. Marina is a delightfully frank narrator who oscillates between being too shy to ask her neighbour out to play and bombarding her grandmother with lewd questions about everything she shouldn’t be interested in: sex; violence; poo.  

“Grandma, do you think you were good in bed?” I ask after a few seconds’ thought.

“What do I know, honey, that’s not something you can know, the people I slept with would have to tell you.”

“Yeah but I can’t ask them.”

“True. It’s too bad, honey. Your grandpa would’ve liked to meet you.”

Marina’s relationship with her grandmother is extremely endearing and together they spend the summer contemplating the complexities of life, death, and everything in between. Like Marina, her grandmother has absolutely no shame. “She’s seventy-two, pot-bellied, and has no regrets,” Marina explains. “Until recently, the only thing that ever embarrassed her was her own smile in some of the photos where she looks happy. But last year she put her false teeth in for the first time to go to Expo’ 92, and since then she’s been feeling invincible.”

Although this is a character-led book, Victoria does a great job at building suspense around Marina’s mother’s mystery illness. There’s something particularly heartbreaking about the way Marina babbles on about Sailor Moon, the Smurfs, and Chabel dolls and her grandmother lusts after Felipe González while Marina’s mum flits in and out of their lives, her future hanging in the balance.

Over the course of this project, I’ve read a few truly brilliant books with child narrators—Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening and Deepa Anappara’s Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line immediately spring to mind. Though I was charmed by Marina, I often found myself feeling unconvinced by the maturity of her voice. On more than one occasion I thought Marina’s internal monologue read like an adult reflecting on her prepubescence, rather than a nine-year-old talking in the present. Take Marina’s thoughts on being expected to wear a bikini top at the beach, for example:

I wish I could be fully grown, a young lady already, and skip this whole awkward, embarrassing process. Since I turned nine, it just keeps getting harder... What makes me mad is that I’m supposed to be ashamed when I think the shame has more to do with other people. It’s a feeling they make up and force on you, pointed and cruel.

Nonetheless, Oldladyvoice is a fun, nostalgic read that’s full of sharp observations about the minute of daily life. I may not have been entirely convinced by Marina, but I enjoyed the book anyway.

Oldladyvoice by Elisa Victoria, translated by Charlotte White (And Other Stories, 2021 / Blackie Books 2019)

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More books by Spanish authors:

• Permafrost by Eva Baltasar, tr. Julia Sanches

• The Frozen Heart by Almudena Grandes, tr. Frank Wynne

• The Body Hunter by Najat El Hachmi, tr. Peter Bush

• Brother in Ice by Alicia Kopf, tr. Mara Faye Letham

• World’s Best Mother by Nuria Labari, tr. Katie Whittemore

• My First Bikini by Elena Medel, tr. Lizzie Davis

• Four by Four by Sara Mesa, tr. Katie Whittemore

• Rabbit Island by Elvira Navarro, tr. Christina MacSweeney

• The Winterlings by Cristina Sánchez-Andrade, tr. Samuel Rutter

• The Dinner Guest by Gabriela Ybarra, tr. Natasha Wimmer

What have you read recently?

If you’ve read a brilliant book in translation or you’d like to pass on a recommendation, I’d love to hear about it! For this project, I’m focussing on contemporary fiction and short stories, with a preference for female authors—but I’m always happy to venture further afield for a good recommendation.

You can get in touch by replying to this email or leaving a comment. I’ll be featuring your recommendations in upcoming newsletters, and I’ll keep a growing list here.

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Bookmarked is written by Tabatha Leggett. If you know someone who would enjoy this newsletter, please forward it to them!