20 Jan / Rabbit Island by Elvira Navarro, translated by Christina MacSweeney [in Booklist]
Spare in pages, Elvira Navarro’s collection of 11 short stories proves dense with disconnection, dysfunction, and dismay as families fray, couples sunder, and animals are brutalized. Set between the seemingly familiar and elusively surreal, Navarro’s tales unsettle readers through oneiric landscapes.
In “Rabbit Island,” a non-inventor who doesn’t create installation art nonetheless populates a small island in a filthy river with white rabbits to deter the resident birds, causing, of course, horrific results. Slaughter looms in “Myotragus,” which features an elephantiasis-impaired archduke with a penchant for hunting young flesh. A woman’s ear grows an extraneous paw in “Strychnine,” while a not-husband not honeymooning after a not-wedding observes that he might be turning into an insect in “Gums.”
Estrangements drive “Gerardo’s Letters,” in which a troubled couple travels to a bug-infested hostel; “Regression” depicts the fickle relationship between two girls; “Paris Périphérie” is about a map-resistant wanderer who’s maybe meeting or leaving a lover.
Named one of ’s magazine’s “Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists,” Navarro – adroitly anglophone-enabled by award-winning Christina MacSweeney – distinctly proves her inarguable facility with short fiction.
Review: “Fiction,” Booklist, January 1 & 15, 2021
Readers: Adult
Published: 2019 (Spain), 2021 (United States)