There’s been a wonderful response so far to my call for suggestions for my year of reading nothing new. Translators have been particularly forthcoming, proving once more how central they are to championing the circulation of texts between languages. Already, my TBR pile is teetering under the weight of many new additions, several of which I hope to feature on the blog this year.
First up is a title translated by Samantha Schnee, founding editor of Words Without Borders. She tweeted the following: ‘It’s a novel called LANDING by Laia Fabregas which was published by the wonderful but sadly now defunct HispaBooks back in 2016. They found a lot of hidden gems so their list is worth a look.’
The premise to Landing (most of the opening chapter of which is available to read here) reads like a thriller: a man and a woman sit next to each other on a flight from Barcelona. After the man dies during the descent, the woman takes a box from him that he was planning to give to his son in the Netherlands. The narrative that follows, told in chapters alternating between his and her perspectives, pieces together what led them to this point and how their brief encounter changes the woman’s life for good.
Yet, although the book opens with a bang, this is a not a high-stakes page-turner. It is the writing, rather than the premise, that captivates and compels. Interior and intimate, the narrative brims with insights that are almost breathtaking in their succinctness and directness: ‘how difficult we can make things for ourselves when we don’t have the nerve to say what we’re thinking or what’s going on;’ ‘In a flash I understood why he was the way he was, he had lost his father too young, which is why he’d had to make himself more important than he was.’
The unfurling of the female protagonist’s story and character is particularly fascinating. Early on, we become aware that the lens through which we are looking in her chapters is skewed or perhaps blurred. We learn that she has been told by her boss at the tax office that she ought to be more sociable and that she is engaged in some kind of search. Her distinctive, thrawn take on the world around her is by turns disarming and disconcerting. But it is only gradually that the extent of her trauma and isolation is revealed.
In the course of the narrative, there are some beautiful and quirky philosophical reflections and diversions. I particularly enjoyed the presentation of Ana Mei Balau, a polyglot whose work involves discovering untranslatable words, inventing equivalents in other languages and then receiving royalties for their use for the first few years they’re in circulation. Similarly, the depiction of the artistic journey of Willemien, the man’s dead wife, is wonderfully realised, illustrating a point reminiscent of Susan Sontag’s argument that art shouldn’t represent ideas and submit to interpretation but simply be.
In the face of such subtlety and richness, the demands of the plot can occasionally start to chafe. It is as though the story outgrows its premise – wanting, like Willemien’s art, simply to be rather than to explain itself – with the result that events can occasionally feel a little contrived or forced. A couple of times, the female protagonist tells another character information without letting us in on the secret, leading to a kind of collapse of the fourth wall where we become aware of Fàbregas choosing to withhold details so as to maintain tension. ‘Sometimes the reasons that two people come together are completely circumstantial. But all that matters is what happens next,’ the male protagonist observes. But that isn’t all that matters. Not in this novel, at least. Indeed, what happens becomes increasingly secondary to the rich, interior worlds Fàbregas reveals.
The timing of the book’s original publication may have something to do with this. When my first novel, Beside Myself (about twins who swap places in a childhood game and get trapped in the wrong lives), came out in 2016, narratives that alternated between perspectives to excavate trauma and explore secrets were relatively common. The age of the psychological thriller was upon us. A year later, Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine – to whose title character Fàbregas’s protagonist bears more than a passing resemblance – would take the anglophone world by storm.
But in 2011, when Landen hit the shelves in Spanish, this sort of storytelling was far less prevalent – in English-speaking circles, at least. As such, the concept may have felt more radical and organic than it does now. It may also be that there is greater tolerance in hispanophone literature for withholding information in plain sight.
Though they might read as criticisms, these thoughts aren’t meant negatively. If anything, this experience proves how powerful this novel is: the things that would make this book compelling in most writers’ hands become secondary and slightly awkward on account of the quality of the writing. Fàbregas doesn’t need to employ such mechanisms to convince us to stick with her.
Fifteen years after it appeared in Spanish and eight years after Schnee’s translation was published, Landing remains resonant. It is a book that explores distance in all its forms – in language, in culture, in memory and in our most intimate relationships. It is compelling in spite of rather than because of its premise – a humane, wise and addictive reflection on peopleness that slips by so effortlessly it almost seems to read itself.
Landing by Laia Fàbregas, translated from the Spanish by Samantha Schnee (Hispabooks, 2016)
This year I’m reading nothing new. I’m only featuring titles on this blog published no later than 2020. If you have an older title from elsewhere that you think I should consider, please send me an email (ann[at]annmorgan.me) or leave a comment below.
