A character driven foray into the interior life of an 25 year old anthropologist who has travelled from Britain to Spain to take her mother to a specialist clinic for a mystery illness. The novel is hot and heavy, with ethnographic and philsopical meandering taking the place of a larger narrative in a similar wallflower style to Virginia Woolf or Ariana Harwicz. This is exactly my favourite kind of writing, it reads like a big gush of thoughts untamed by stillness.
The overall themes covered here are motherhood/daughterhood/womanhood, dysfunctional and dependent familial relationships, obsession, identity, language, desire, time and memory, and the meaning of life. The characters and the setting are relatable, with no frills or romanticisms. This small Spanish town is hot, it smells, theres an incessant dog barking and the sea is full of Medusa’s (jellyfish). Yet, it is also magical and sensual and free. There is also the reoccurring motif of breasts in every chapter (breast shaped buildings, naked breasts, breastfeeding).
Cranes from the desalination plant sliced into the sky. Tall undulating dunes of greenish-grey cement powder lay in a depot to the right of the beach, where unfinished hotels and apartments had been hacked into the mountains like a murder.
Sophia’s feelings of displacement in both her life, body and language lace the entire narrative with an overtone of confused sadness. She reflects upon her inherited patriarchal language of Greek being tied up too intimately with being abandoned by her father, whilst her mother tongue of British never quite encompasses her whole self. Generational memory and pain is explored through Sophia’s relationship with her mother, and with Ingrid later on.
I told her the beach was desolate and that I had been staring for two hours of a pile of gas canisters. It was my special skill to make my day smaller so as to make her day bigger.
I also really enjoyed the easy way in which Sophia’s sexuality is portrayed throughout the book - without apology or judgement. Her sexuality is a simple extension of herself, and it is very beautifully written.
I am pulsating with shifting sexualities. I am sex on tanned legs in suede platform sandals. I am urban and educated and currently godless.
I’m rating this one 5/5, because it really does tick all my boxes - however, as always it won’t be for everyone. Don’t come here looking for a grand narrative with lots of peaks and troughs, this one is for the more existential readers out there.