Written by Elvira Lindo, En la boca del lobo (Seix Barral, 2023) is the story of an unorthodox love affair between 11-year-old Julieta and her mother, who is deranged and in a bad mood. luck, ( p.31), only 16 more. The two immigrated to Valencia from the La Sabina district of Ademuz with their grandmothers. We meet them when their grandmother, an enormous tailor nicknamed “La Chanel de Benimaclet”, inherited a house in town and will spend the month of August there. What at first seems like a costumbrist plot about the loss of childhood and the transition to adolescence, the author’s characteristic use of irony and humor, soon turns into a complete, deep life story for both of them. As several characters living in the town, they are all perfectly intertwined in history, all going beyond the emptied framework of Spain.
In a mix of the authentically perceptible, the use of the diminutive suffix -ico as a feature of the region’s speech (“solica”, “delgadica”, p. 32), or simply a single coverage point in the town, a heavily used hole that fills with water when it rains (p. 46), which, like some characters with different points of view, does not seem quite real: “Everything is understood, late” (p. 101), its own literary space is constructed with a halo of legend and traditional fairy tale, in which it lives with the news of the present, but also with the debts of the past ( p.51), where “scandals last as long as they last a lifetime” (p.243) and under the seeming superficiality of everyday life, where there is a whole mix of life feelings from hatred, misunderstanding, maternal love, love as a couple. breakups, infidelity, heartbreak, abuse, fear and death, and even hope.
Elvira Lindo delivers an up-to-date story with characters perfectly fictionalized and defined throughout the story (the love triangle of Emma, Leonardo and Virtudes is impressive); when the pandemic, where the elders of the neighborhood live, and their children directed and managed from afar, and then everything and everyone worsening, has long passed. But inspired by an existentialist novel, because “part of life is spent dreaming of the future. […] and another chapter recalling the past” (pp. 200-201) and seeking a certain vital transcendence: “I want the world to remember that I was once something and still cling to what I am” (p.197) ), quote from Mary Shelley; Along with the basic ideas of the thematic and structural framework of the novel with references to Joseph Conrad: “The living have ghosts as well as the dead” (p.247).
With all this, a risky first-person narrative plot is produced by Juliet, who occasionally hands over the bat to other characters, always filtered by her own voice, followed by a very good progression and a perfect ending. I was reading and guessing at times what was going on or could happen, but of course, subject to a master storyteller who, like the good guys, is always a trump card. So much so that, when combined with the deepest emotions, starting from something sensitive like the fragility of life and the helplessness of a child, the result cannot go beyond a complete emotion.
And why should you read this novel? Because it is not easy to enter the realm of metafiction convincingly, and here Elvira Lindo achieves it quite literally, because this novel is a perfectly resolved risky bet; because it is a vital element to chat with ourselves, to know the effect of the past on the present in the construction of our lives, to understand ourselves and to be a little happier despite the discomfort it gives us.