I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness: A Novel

Summary

Dawn is breaking over the Guilleries, a rugged mountain range in Catalonia frequented by wolf hunters, brigands, deserters, ghosts, and demons. In an old farmhouse called Mas Clavell, an impossibly old woman lies on her deathbed. Family and caretakers drift in and out. Meanwhile, all the women who have lived and died in that house are waiting for her to join them. They are preparing to throw her a party.

It all begins with Joana, Mas Clavell’s matriarch, who once longed for a husband so powerfully that she summoned the devil to fulfill her wish, only to try to double-cross him, heedless of any consequences. As day turns to night, four hundred years’ worth of memories unspool, and the house reverberates with raucous laughter, pungent feasts, and piercing cries of pleasure and sorrow.

I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness is an audacious and entrancing novel in which the line between the dead and the living, past and present, story and history are blurred. In it, Irene Solà draws on oral tradition as well as art, literature, and fairy tales to tell a completely new kind of story.

“In the spirit of Ágota Kristóf and Juan Rulfo, I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness is forged from the deepest and truest stories about the perversity of the body, the sheer drama of the natural world, and the vengeful side of the divine. A fecund and daring book.”—Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X