A book a day: Leyre Arrue: Saturn Returns

Original language: Español

Year of publication: 2023

Valuation: recommendable

Fifteen stories ranging in length between five and fifteen pages make up the first book of stories by the San Sebastian native Leyre Arrue, published by the Irundarra publishing house Alberdania, with more than twenty years behind her and a catalog in which new and unfamiliar coexist. such new voices of Basque narrative with texts translated into Basque by already established international authors.

I’ll stop talking and focus on Arrue’s appreciable debut. The fifteen stories that make up Saturn Returns They are carried out by more or less young women whom the author places in various situations of daily life (family and couple relationships, moves, deaths, etc.) and are also mostly narrated in the first person.

Hence the initial “Instructions for Dying” is surprising, a shocking beginning in the form of a possible biography built on imperatives. Is a life reduced to this? Well it could be, hey. In any case, such a level of risk or daring will only appear, I believe, towards the end of the book, in “Carnivores” (there is a breaking point in the story that makes realism jump into the air, leaving everything “lost” ), in “Five Ways to Do Your Hair”, a kind of micro-essay on women’s hair, or in “Boats for Rent”, a story of friendships and bridges to be blown.

Therefore, what we could describe as a melancholic realism with some touches of Woodyallenian humor predominates. A good example of the latter are “A wall or an egg flan”, a story about love and its choices, about agreements and disagreements, or “Wastewater management” (one of my favorites), in which the author talks about a kind of post-coital depression with a hopeful and poetic ending.

Other of my favorite texts would be “Tandem”, about small big changes, “Abstract painting”, about different forms of grief, or the very very Donostiarra (some people out there will say that it’s a no brainer) “Saturn Returns”, which navigates between evasion and memory, between evasion and reality and which is as melancholic and evocative, in tone and setting, as a song from Family or Le Mans.

In summary, the interesting debut of an author who, although she is related in concerns and themes with other authors of her generation, opts for a look, an approach and a tone, generally far from the crudeness that characterizes this new wave. .