Margarida is trapped in Mas Clavell, a farmhouse in the Catalonian mountains, with Bernadeta. Bernadeta is dying in an annoying way, with “deep, raspy snores”. Margarida herself has been dead for some time. Rather than ascend to heaven, she has been “dragged downstairs by the ghastly, insufferable women of the house”. Irene Solà’s teeming third novel, I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness, follows these women, both dead and alive, as they prepare for a party. They cook and scrub, tell stories and make fart jokes. The novel begins at dawn and ends at night, but the historical era jumps around without warning. Now the viceroy’s men are arriving on horseback. Now a teenager is calling everyone a “dumbass”. Now local women are fleeing from Nazi soldiers. Characters shape-shift as much as the timeline. A he-goat becomes a bull, then a cat, then “an unusually long, skinny man with the toes of a rooster”. Now the viceroy’s men are demons, dragging Margarida into a “sea of blood”.
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness references Mrs Dalloway, and shares the modernist interest in formal experimentation and action that unfolds over a single day. Instead of tracking interior sensation, Solà presents a seemingly inexhaustible slew of bodily description, held together by the opaque, vindictive logic of a folk tale. There are wonderful lists: of the different kinds of shit on the mountain, of cheese-making equipment, of body parts fondled by hands in the dark. I read the book twice in quick succession and every time I opened it, I found something to savour. The prose has the demonic excess of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
Here is a list of key descriptions of central characters, as translated from Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem. Bernadeta, who was born without eyelashes, is “ugly”. Joana, the woman from whose “entrails” Margarida was “ripped”, is also “ugly”. Bernadi, Margarida’s father, is “ugly as a wart”. Her sister Blanca is a “deviant” with no tongue. Marta (“ugly”) spends her youth looking out of the window trying to catch “the curled shape of an ugly man in a storm”. As an infant, Marti was “ugly as a scowl”. Even unborn frogs are imagined as “ugly”.
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The novel explains that this “darkness” is the result of a botched pact with the devil. A long time ago, Joana met a bull so black that even “the flesh inside his eyes was black”. She gave the creature her soul in exchange for a “full man”. But then Joana claimed she’d been wronged. Her new husband, the heir of Mas Clavell, was missing a toe and therefore not “full”. The devil returned as an “ugly, haggard, bald man” and doomed Joana’s descendants to be born with something missing. For two of them – one missing a liver and one an anus – this is fatal. For the novel, the curse is a vibe killer. Anything can happen in its world, and yet what does happen is strangely predictable: more, different suffering. The characters, without agency, don’t develop. Rather, they are punished.
Perhaps there is more to the novel’s apparent scorn for its characters’ rural damnation. Perhaps it wants to show that the natural world’s capricious, disruptive energy gives the lie to human fatalism. Solà’s serious attention to the nonhuman makes most contemporary realist literary fiction feel narrow and timid, wilfully deaf to the other forms of life with which all human drama is interdependent. Her second novel,When I Sing, Mountains Dance, is a tender human love story that turns on moments where human and nonhuman come into contact. A roe-buck, a field of chanterelle mushrooms, tectonic plates: all meaningfully participate in the development of an elegant plot. I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness compares all its humans to animals: Blanca has a “bovine” face, Joana’s is like a mare. Sometimes, the connection is illuminating. But more often, the emphasis on urges and ugliness reduces and simplifies both human and animal, rather than opening them out to one another’s complexity. Bernadeta scrapes “toast with her front teeth, like a rabbit”. Margarida turns her head away, “repulsed”.
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness by Irene Solà, translated by Mara Faye Lethem, is published by Granta (£14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy atguardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.