Elvira Navarro

GRANTA 113: THE BEST OF YOUNG SPANISH-LANGUAGE NOVELISTS

In this dense, taut extract from Elvira Navarro’s novel, a couple have reached the end of their relationship, run beyond who they once were and into a dark place of threat and mysterious insect infestation. The female narrator watches the fraying and spinning away of their last fragments with a kind of precise anguish. The piece is subtly moving, troubling, crafted to detonate in unusual places.

The pair are penned together in the kind of liminal place they used to like: a grim hostel with a subterranean keeper: it’s slightly sordid, slightly dangerous, slightly challenging – a combination which might once have sparked intimacies, levels of pressured awareness, new forms of touch. Now Gerardo and the nameless woman are simply alone in company, a reminder of the woman’s loneliness and a projection of its future extent. Gerardo regulates his own comforts, drifting further and further from the narrator as she becomes increasingly aware of her own dissolution, the loss of who she used to be with him, the terminal breaking of their mutual respect and the intolerability of what they are. Physical details threaten and frustrate, pain is present and yet deadened – it is possible to ruminate over its extent, even as it spreads and sinks – the narrator is both hideously awakened from her previous life and dreaming into another, a tunnelling bewilderment into shadows. – A.L. Kennedy, Best Young British Novelist 1993 and 2003

Each of our contributors answered a questionnaire on their influences and the role of the writer in public life. Here are Navarro's answers:

Name the five writers you most admire at the moment (any period, language or genre).

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Bernhard, David Foster Wallace, Ana Blandiana and Marguerite Duras

Have you published literary criticism?

I write literary criticism for Qué Leer magazine and for a group blog called La tormenta en un vaso (storm in a teacup)

Which languages do you read in?

I read well in French and Catalan. And, with a dictionary by my side, in English.

Do you have your own web page?

I write two blogs: Periferia which is a kind of work in progress about the neighbourhoods of Madrid, and Blog de Elvira Navarro, where I post some of the work I’ve done for the press.

Is your fiction your sole source of income? If not, what else do you live off?

I make my living mainly from running creative writing workshops. I’ve also won some awards with monetary prizes.

Should writers play a role in public life beyond the publication of their work? If so, in what way?

Working with language is working with ideas, which means that, like it or not, the writer exerts an influence on public life – even if it’s on a very small scale. That said, I don’t think that he or she can think a priori about the way in which this influence should be exerted. It’s one thing for the ideas of a book to enter, from their own genesis, into dialogue with other ideas, and another very different thing for there to be an agenda that the writer must proclaim in his or her work. That would be the end of thought.