In Layla Martínez’s debut novel Woodworm (Two Lines Press, translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott), the haunted home is as alive and whole as the characters themselves. It is a pile of bricks that “leaps on whoever comes through the door and twists their guts till they can’t even breathe.” Told through the perspective of three women, Martínez reflects on the inherited intergenerational trauma that is often instilled by parents and grandparents, and in the case of Spain, by the Franco regime. The novel’s language is tight and succinct—nearly as suffocating and unrelenting as the space itself, with bouts of dark humor throughout. Aside from the women living amongst each other in the microcosm of the home, they also live amongst a macrocosm classist society that condemns their existence and treats them as inferior, further abetting the desire to get even.
Most recently, Woodworm was nominated for the National Book Award Longlist for Translated Literature. We discussed Layla’s reaction to this news, the complexities of translation, and how writing a novel offers a pathway to exorcize anger, frustration, and trauma.
Layla and I connected via email and spoke in Spanish throughout our correspondence. The translations from Spanish to English are my own.
Alia Spartz: Congratulations on the recent nomination for the National Book Award Longlist for Translated Literature! Was this something that you were expecting? What were some of your initial reactions/feelings when you found out?
Layla Martínez: Thank you so much! It was a huge surprise, I was not expecting it at all nor could I have even dreamt it. Before me, only one other Spanish author was nominated, and no one from my country has ever won. In Spanish, only Isabel Allende has won the award, so I never could have imagined the nomination. I found out only when one of the editors from Two Lines Press emailed me. The email came in when it was eleven at night in Spain and I was reading in my bed and ready to go to sleep. I looked at my phone to set my alarm and suddenly I saw it. My first reaction was to think, it can’t be the National Book Award, it has to be another award with the same name.
Regarding translation, can you describe the relationship and the approach that you took with Woodworm and working with both Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott?
Before Woodworm, I only had experienced translations of my short stories. Woodworm was my first experience working with translators from different countries. There were some very curious anecdotes: for example, I had to send the Arabic translator several photographs of Spanish cemeteries because Catholic cemeteries are quite different from Muslim ones. The Czech translator was determined to remove a sentence from the novel that says, “it was beautiful like a volcano,” because she said that volcanoes cannot be beautiful and that no one in the Czech Republic would understand that comparison. With Sophie and Annie, it was very simple. Their only doubts were about some of the typical localisms of the Spanish region where the novel takes place. There were words that don’t even appear in the dictionaries and that many Spaniards don’t know either, so it was completely logical that Sophie and Annie wouldn’t know those localisms. I think that they have done a brilliant job, as the nomination also shows. I was worried that the translations wouldn’t be able to reflect the rhythm of the novel well, which is sometimes difficult due to the absence of commas, but in their case, the result was perfect.
Narratively speaking, Woodworm is a novel that is situated in place—as readers, we begin in a house and we end in the house, the home serving as a developed character with needs and memories and nightmares and history. Did this novel always begin with the idea of a “living” home? How did you refine/adjust this setting as you continued writing?
Woodworm began as a story that had the wardrobe as the protagonist—the same one that appears in the novel. The idea came to me while I was spending a few days at my grandmother’s house. The room I usually sleep in when I visit has a wardrobe that doesn’t store everyday clothes but important family items instead, like my grandmother’s wedding dress, the suit my grandmother has prepared for her burial, or the religious clothing that my uncle wears for Easter (with those strange hoods that the Ku Klux Klan later copied, changing their meaning). The door of the wardrobe often opens by itself and there is a mirror inside, and every time I opened it and suddenly saw myself reflected in the mirror, I had the feeling that I was going to see someone else behind me.
My grandmother’s house, which is the house in Woodworm, is charged with strange energy. Nobody wants to sleep there alone, and it is common to have this feeling of being accompanied even if you don’t see or hear anyone. When I handed the story to the publisher, who had commissioned it for a collective anthology, I thought that there was much more to tell—not only about the wardrobe but about the whole house, that feeling of the shadows being alive in the house had to be told. Also, I am big fan of the horror genre, and it is common to see this idea of living, haunted houses that are almost another character, not just a pile of bricks. So, in horror I found the tools to convey the feeling of the strange atmosphere that exists at my grandmother’s house.
Your prose is sparse, unrelenting, and at times, humorous. How did you think about balancing these elements together to create a specific tone that carries us throughout the novel?
I find it very curious when readers tell me that they found the story to have moments of humor, because that was not my feeling while I was writing the novel. I wrote it in a state of anger, very angry because I had discovered that what my family had told me was not true. My grandmother had always told me that her house had been a wedding gift from my great-grandfather to my great-grandmother, but the truth is that it was more of a trap than a gift. After the wedding, my great-grandfather violently mistreated my great-grandmother. I also discovered that the money used for the construction of the house was obtained due to my great-grandfather prostituting women, so the house had a long history of violence that I had not known. To write Woodworm was to exorcize that anger, passing it onto the characters, who are also very angry.
You utilize a shifting point of view as a narrative device and via these changes in perspectives, you create the history of this family—specifically, through the female family members and their actions. The grandmother, the matriarchal emblem, serves as a sort of locus point where energy gravitates towards. Did the idea of intergenerational history and trauma always play a role in the scaffolding of this novel?
My first idea was to have the story told only by the granddaughter. The grandmother appeared as an important character but not as the narrator. However, as I progressed through the first chapter and thought about the structure of the novel, I realized that each one of the female characters should tell their own story, that who is telling the story is important. Before I started writing Woodworm, I looked for novels that featured nannies as protagonists, since several women in my family have worked as nannies. However, I could hardly find any. If I am remembering correctly, I only found two after many months of searching. The nannies sometimes appear as secondary characters and, on many occasions, as evil or villainous (like the murderous butlers in mystery novels), but never as protagonists. This is because nannies have never written their own stories and because, to those who wrote them, who were, and still are, to a large extent, well-off people, the nannies were invisible. They did not care what happened to them.
Regarding intergenerational trauma, yes, it was something very important from the beginning. I think that people who come from poor families inherit nothing but trauma—no houses, no land, no jewelry—so this idea of how the violence that one person suffers passes onto the next in the form of trauma, is something that obsesses me. In the case of my family, intergenerational trauma was linked to the class and gender violence that the women in my family experienced, also to the repression during the Franco dictatorship. All that pain is still there and is part of the way you educate the next generation, so the wounds are still open.
There are elements of class and societal differences throughout the novel. The granddaughter is a nanny to a boy who eventually goes missing while in her care, and we eventually come to find out that she caused his disappearance. Specifically, on page 128, you write, “When I used to go into her bathroom I’d stare at those little pots of powder that cost a month’s wages . . . and wonder how many months how many years I’d have to work to afford all that how much snot I’d have to wipe off her stupid brat and how many times I’d have to let him pull my hair to be worth as much as the contents of that make-up bag.”
Can you speak a bit to how you wanted to juxtapose class structures within this novel and between these two families?
In cities, you rarely meet the privileged classes if you are not part of them, but in small regional places, you see them regularly, you work for them just as your father, your grandfather, and your great-grandfather worked for them. A few years ago, there was an investigation in the city of Florence that discovered that the rich families were the same for five hundred years. In five centuries, hardly anything had changed. In the case of Spain, there is also the issue of the dictatorship, which lasted for a very long time, and which had the support of the upper classes. The family that appears in the novel, the Jarabo, are a royal family. They were very important to the dictatorship—the father became the Minister of Justice for General Franco in the last years of his dictatorship, so he is directly responsible for the execution of activists who fought to end the regime and establish democracy. I wanted his real name to be in the book as an act of justice because those responsible for the dictatorship were never tried or held accountable for what they had done.
In your acknowledgements, you thank your maternal grandmother “for letting me tell the story of her house and her family” and your mother for “believing in revenge.” What kind of artistic guidance did you receive from these influences? How do you continue to incorporate your own history into your work?
The real part of my family history in the novel has to do with the building of the house and with the characters of my great-grandmother and my grandmother. I wanted their stories to be in the novel partly because of what I said before, because the stories of the housemaids are not usually told. I also included the supernatural elements that form part of the culture of the dead in that area. In my town, it is very common for dead relatives to appear to give messages, either to warn about something, to ask people to pray for them, or simply to say that they are fine and not to worry. This whole culture of death, as well as forms of popular magic such as wax dolls or the evil eyes, which are mixed within Catholic beliefs in this regional area, are disappearing because the population is very old and young people no longer believe in those things. So including all of this in the novel was also a way of preserving it, so that it would not be forgotten.
Alia Spartz is a Mexican-American writer. She received her MA in Latin American Literature from UC Davis and is currently an MFA candidate in Fiction at the University of San Francisco. She lives in the city and is currently at work on a novel. You can find her on instagram @aliaspartzzzz
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