[Graywolf Press; 2025]
Tr. from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem
In Irene Solà’s I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness, characters are defined by lack. Margarida, who we meet twiddling her thumbs by a deathbed, is missing a quarter of her heart. Blanca, her sister, is missing a tongue, and Blanca’s daughter, Àngela, can’t feel pain. Bernadeta, the woman on her deathbed, has no eyelashes, and her daughter, Dolça, who is the offspring of the devil, is conspicuously lacking the goat tail hers by patrilineal right.
We learn the reasons for these absences fairly quickly. Joana, the family’s matriarch, had prayed and prayed for a husband. She had consulted the usual sources, (God, the Virgin, Saint Anthony) but they had left her alone and unmarried “to bolt like lettuce.” In her desperation, she looks elsewhere, offering the devil her soul in exchange to “a full man” with “a patch of land and a roof over his head.” When Joana discovers her new husband, Bernadí, has only nine toes, she is overjoyed. He’s not a full man! She can keep her soul! But after each of her children is born with something missing (the short-lived heir, memorably, lacks a “bunghole”) it becomes clear: the devil has gotten his revenge.
Despite its interest in absences, I Gave You Eyes is a story of startling plenitude. Unfolding over the course of a single day, the novel follows the ghosts of each woman who has lived and died in Mas Clavell, a manor house in the Guilleries mountains of Catalonia. As they prepare for Bernadeta to join them among the dead, “dawn” gives way to sections like “morning,” “midday” and “night,” and four hundred years of stories run together. The novel’s temporal expanse emerges gradually, a dateless collage of metaleptic reference: some red berets in the woods, a bombing in a nearby town. Margarida appears to have been the wife of an infamous seventeenth-century bandit, while Dolça seems to have lost a lover to the Second World War and Bernadeta’s final hours are interrupted by facetiming Auntie Carme. The narrative is at its weakest in these scenes of the present, as the ghostly free-indirect narration strains to account for new technologies. Smartphones are “little mirrors” that house magicians and emit “contused light.” When a visiting caretaker tells her children that “supper was all ready, in a Tupperware container in the bag, and they could heat it up in the microwave,” Solà follows it up with an obligatory, Margarida-inflected, “whatever those words meant.”
Mostly, though, the effect is deeply satisfying. The fuzziness of narrative time gets balanced by earthy descriptions of the pleasures and indignities of having a body. Bernadeta licks jam off toast and gets some in her mustache. Margarida gives birth “like an animal,” “covered in sweat, streaming blood and filth.” Blanca watches pigs have sex with fascination, looking at the sow’s “wet, protuberant slit,” and the boar’s “dangly pink bit.” There is a glorious description of turnips in walnut sauce. I have never read a novel with so much farting.
This committed embodiment is all the more impressive given the fact that most of the characters are ghosts. Like the ghosts in Solà’s prize-winning When I Sing, Mountains Dance (also translated by Mara Faye Lethem and released in 2023), this novel’s ghosts are vigorous. They may even be the same ghosts: When I Sing’s Joana also has a penchant for pissing on crosses, and its ghostly Margarida also seems fairly bitter. But When I Sing switches perspectives every chapter, and so we only get a brief glimpse of those spectral women gathering mushrooms. The women in this novel are at the center of the narrative, and as Solà lingers over their overlapping lives, she also gives us an extended portrait of their domestic labors. Over the course of the novel, they take a kid from the pasture, kill it, separate the “skin from the filmy white fat of the flesh,” and then throw the skin “a short distance away, hairy and dry on one side, damp and greasy on the other.” They make blood fritters and forcemeat and fill the halls with an aroma so pungent that the living members of the household begin to suffer. Even in death, the work of cooking and cleaning and navigating intrafamilial tensions continues.
A feminist experiment in multi-temporal narration, I Gave You Eyes feels like a progression from the stagy perspective shifts of When I Sing. When I Sing begins with the sudden death of a young white man called Domenec. “More than half of history, literature, or even folktales,” Solà explains, “are all, in some way, Domenec’s story. But I wanted to do something different with this novel, so, on the second page of the book, these clouds release a lightning bolt, and the lightning bolt hits Domenec’s head, and he dies.” The message, she says, is that “we already know Domenec’s story, and what we are going to do in this novel is tell other stories.” The chapters that follow are overtly experimental: mushroom P.O.V.s, personified mountains illustrated with line drawings of subducting plates, and accounts of human sexual congress as witnessed by a dog. I Gave You Eyes is tame by comparison, non-human narrators traded for the more traditional modernist constraint: the narration of a single day.
But instead of a retreat from experimentation, Solà’s continued investment in the minutiae of lives that mostly go un-narrated feels even fresher here. The men in this novel exist at the periphery, drifting in and out of household life while the women are mostly “left alone with all the burdens. With children to raise and fields to sow.” Margarida’s husband is convinced that this dynamic is a product of fundamental gender differences. “Women cling to places, attaching themselves,” he says, “tying themselves up like dogs. To the past, to homes, to children, to things.” Solà’s achievement is in making these attachments feel expansive, lavishing such detail on the never-ending work of social reproduction that it becomes the central story.
This expansiveness is largely a product of how we see characters through each other’s eyes, their memories pushing the boundaries of the confined space of the narrative present to foreground the labor of continuity. When Bernadeta has her eyes closed, for instance, she hears “rain drumming against the roof. The goats bleating. Marta’s distant footsteps coming up the stairs, crossing the parlor” and entering the bathroom. Then there’s the sound of “hot, vigorous, regulated water inside the house mixing with the clattering of rainwater. Rampant, colossal, and cold. Dolça gave birth in the morning and would die that afternoon. But Bernadeta didn’t cry, so as not to scare her.” Here, Bernadeta listens to her granddaughter shower, remembering her daughter’s death while waiting to die herself. Generations of care unspool over a few sentences, the present tense shower giving way to the past tense “gave birth” and the foreclosed future of “would die.”
With its narrative blurriness, I Gave You Eyes is an occasionally frustrating read, particularly if you are, like me, inclined towards making character family trees or trying to map extratextual historical events against diegetic generational time. But blurriness is also key to Solà’s authorial wager. “When I am working,” she has explained in interviews, “I always imagine a reader that really wants to be there. I imagine a reader who excited and willing to play… I never imagine the reader as someone who cuts your wings as a writer, or someone who needs help.” Solà’s latest novel asks you to follow her across the line between the living and the dead, to hold fascism and goat husbandry together with light slanting across a kitchen floor. “I gave you eyes and you looked toward the linear progression of history?” she seems to say, “that one’s on you.”
Molly MacVeagh is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Wake Forest University. She’s working on a book about metabolism and the contemporary novel.
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