The voices of Adriana by Elvira Navarro

Adriana’s voices
by Elvira Navarro

How is the world reordered after a death? How much is there in any existence of reparation for those who preceded it? What voices inhabit us?

Adriana, the protagonist of this story, faces several griefs while caring for her sick father. She has also become a voracious spectator of other people’s lives thanks to social networks and a shy consumer of love experiences through a dating app, but that only accentuates her feeling of stagnation. The fear of breaking with inertia that has lost its meaning often comes from the ghosts of the past, and yours ends up fiercely breaking through a house that once embodied the entire universe and a grandmother and a mother who recount some tragic events. .

Elvira Navarro offers the reader her best work with this novel in three movements about memory, loyalty to the mandates of ancestors, the increasingly spectral nature of our present and death. It also deals with what remains when the people we love are no longer with us. The result is an extraordinary, moving and bold book.

Elvira Navarro (1978) has published the books The City in Winter (CdT, 2007), The Happy City (RH, 2009) and The Last Days of Adelaida García Morales (RH, 2016). With The Worker (RH, 2014), a pioneering novel in narrating the decomposition of the current subject as a consequence of the social and economic changes caused by the crisis, she became one of the leading voices in contemporary literature in Spanish. She was awarded the Jaén Novel Prize or the Andalusia Critics Prize, and in 2010 she was part of Granta magazine’s list of the twenty-two best Spanish-language narrators under thirty-five years of age. Her previous book, Rabbit Island (RH, 2019), was nominated for the National Book Award for Foreign Literature in 2021. Her work has been translated into English, French, Swedish, Italian, Japanese, Serbian, Korean and Turkish.