So much of literature is built on the reader’s ability to surrender to the work. Fiction, especially, requires the suspension of disbelief and has to maintain that suspension over many pages. And every so often, you come across a writer who does all of those things, who pulls you in, keeps you there and still leaves you wanting more. Elvira Navarro is such a writer.
Navarro’s newest novel The Voices of Adriana (Two Lines Press, translated by Christina MacSweeney) is a three-part exploration on how we derive meaning from our experiences, from our histories, both personal and societal. Each part of the novel is centered on what Navarro calls an “emotional inheritance.” Part one is focused on Adriana caring for her ailing father who also is addicted to online dating. In this section, Adriana embeds stories and poems to help cope with her reality. The second part features a more retrospective Adriana, recalling details of her childhood home, the novelty of “finding beauty where none existed, before any notion of beauty had been instilled in her.” The novel culminates in part three–a polyphonic narrative told through the perspectives of grandmother, mother and daughter. Through utilizing multiple perspectives, we are able to see the ways in which intergenerational trauma is passed on and the ways in which we may break free from past cycles.
Navarro and I spoke about the job of a writer, our current state of hyperconnection and the fact that most things in this world are paradoxical–everything contains a mixture of truth and lie, light and darkness. Elvira and I connected over email and spoke in Spanish throughout our correspondence. Her answers have been translated from Spanish to English by me.
Alia Spartz: Christina MacSweeney, who translated Voices of Adriana, has also translated a couple of your previous works, which include A Working Woman and the short story collection Rabbit Island. How has your relationship changed and developed over the years?
Elvira Navarro: Christina is a translator with whom I’ve maintained an excellent relationship with, and I’ll never forget when, for the translation for A Working Woman, she came to Madrid to walk through the same neighborhoods the protagonist walks through to get a better sense of those streets. Her generosity and curiosity are virtues that say everything about the seriousness and commitment she has to her work. Over the years, I’ve found her dedication to her work as a translator so admirable.
A central theme in Voices of Adriana is the act of creativity–writing or creating as a means of understanding. Through writing stories, Adriana is able to make sense of the world around her, specifically her father’s deteriorating health and the grief of her mother’s death. Could you speak to how her stories allow the reader closer access to Adriana as a character?
Adriana contains both a Scheherazade and the sultan who wants to kill her. She is paralyzed, almost like the living dead, because she feels that the disappearance of her family foretells her own. Her way of combating this feeling is by inventing stories through the lives of others. And isn’t that what we writers always do? We build our fictions, our narratives based on what we see. We are like magpies, stealing things, but also like witches, casting strange spells. The spell, the enchantment, is a beautiful metaphor for the construction of meaning. Having a sense of purpose is necessary to live, even when we think that nothing in this world makes sense. But humans create it, this meaning; they have been telling themselves stories since the beginning of time. All cultures have mythical tales that attempt to explain the inexplicable. And that is what we writers continue to do: invent meaning.
The first part of the novel feels steeped in the present, especially with the mention of apps like Tinder, Twitter and Meetic. To you, what role does the internet play in the novel?
We have incorporated the internet into our inner lives. Before its arrival, we had the radio or the television, but both mediums were more limited. However, now we go everywhere with our phones. We take them to bed, to the street, when we’re with family or friends. We use it in the car or when riding public transportation. We even use them in the bathroom! Our way of being with others, and especially with being alone, is now shaped by this compulsive hyperconnection, where social media often plays a leading role. So I thought about introducing this compulsion into the novel as if it were an internal dialogue, as if what Adriana reads on Twitter (X today) were part of her own mental process. In the case of dating apps, their function in the novel mirrors their function in real life: for Adriana’s father, who is obsessed with finding a girlfriend, the apps are useful for meeting one woman after another. This eases his loneliness while simultaneously turning others into something almost consumable–used and discarded.
The structure of the novel is split into three parts: the first centered on Adriana tending to her father after a stroke, the second is more retrospective in nature, with Adriana describing what it was like to inhabit her childhood home, and the third being polyphonic shifts in perspective from the daughter, mother and grandmother. How did you decide on this structure? What influenced your decision?
The novel narrates three very different emotional inheritances, which are reflected in three distinct tones. These three tones create a formal interplay of contrasts. Each one is consistent with the different types of inheritances: the father’s, which is light, playful, humorous and structurally much more complex as there are stories embedded within the main story and temporal jumps. In this part, the legacy is still open, as Adriana’s father has not passed away. I wrote this part as an homage to Family Lexicon by the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, where her family members are affectionately caricatured.
Then comes the section about the house, where the style is more evocative because it narrates a space filled with experiences–the space of the past, inhabited by the ghosts of memory.
And finally, there are the voices of the daughter, the mother, and the grandmother: one living and two dead, forming a sort of chorus charged with heightened emotional intensity. Here, Adriana writes on behalf of her mother and grandmother, but they rebel; they don’t want their voices or memories taken from them because memory is essentially fiction. That is to say, it can never be faithfully or exactly transmitted–it’s impossible because the events have disappeared, leaving only narratives about those events to which we no longer have access. And often those narratives are contradictory, partial, inaccurate or even entirely invented. This is why the women in the final section challenge one another and call each other into question.
In Part II, you write: “Adriana seemed to perceive a truth there: that more than individuals, we are points of confluence for everything that precedes us.” In essence, we are vessels of lives and experiences that have come before us. What role does intergenerational history and trauma play in the novel?
The role of intergenerational trauma is essential in the third part of the novel and it responds to machismo: there’s a grandmother who didn’t have the power to make decisions over her own life, corresponding to a time in Spain when there was a dictatorship with a nationalist and Catholic ideology. During this period, women, especially in rural areas, received a very poor education with a manipulative, infantile and obscurantist idea of religion and God.
Then Adriana’s mother lives through the transition from dictatorship to democracy, which means more freedom for women: in fact, she can finally study and work, becoming financially independent, and then Adriana embodies the present.
But as you rightly point out, in the novel we don’t just see this personal trauma, but a broader one caused by the Spanish Civil War. In this sense, I wanted to break away from certain reductionist clichés about the war. To explain: it’s common in fiction to present the defeated as victims and the victors as executioners in any way, including the Spanish Civil War because that’s how it is in global, historical terms. It’s an indisputable fact: some won, others lost, and those who lost were annihilated in many ways. However, if we look at the micro-history, the dialectic between victors and vanquished becomes more complicated. I think it becomes impoverished when a narrative is created where there are no victims among the victors and no executioners among the vanquished. Reality is much more complicated when we look at individual stories. In the novel, I present victims who were on the side of the victors.
There is a meta-fictional element in Part III of the novel where the characters are aware of an author’s presence. At one point, you write from the mother’s perspective: “But I’ll say it again: these aren’t my words, this isn’t my voice.” What was the motivation behind including this awareness?
Memory is fiction. It is involuntary fiction. When we recount episodes from our past, we don’t intend to lie, and yet things never happened exactly as we remember them. This fact becomes more complex when what we narrate is the story of other people, for example, our mother or our grandmother, as happens in the novel. In these memories of Adriana’s ancestors, how much truth is there? We cannot be sure, although Adriana doesn’t intend to lie to us, she wants to tell us about an emotional inheritance that has conditioned her and herein lies the paradox. And that paradox begins with language, with the words we use to tell the experiences of others which are our own words, not those of others. Adriana, the narrator, is fully aware of this usurpation, and she points it out to the reader, as if saying, “Hey, don’t trust what I’m telling you!” But at the same time, what she’s telling us is her deepest truth. And I believe the world to be a bit like this–there is nothing that isn’t paradoxical, that doesn’t contain a mixture of truth and lie, of innocence and guilt, of light and darkness. Everything always goes together.
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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