Overview

Nestled among rugged mountains, in a remote part of Catalonia frequented by wolf hunters, bandits, deserters, ghosts, beasts and demons, sits the old farmhouse called Mas Clavell. Inside, an impossibly old woman lies on her deathbed while family and caretakers drift in and out. All the women who have ever lived and died in that house are waiting for her to join them. They are preparing to throw her a party. As day turns to night, four hundred years' worth of memories unspool, and the house reverberates with the women's stories. Stories of mysterious visions, of those born without eyelashes and tongues or with deformed hearts. But it begins with the story of the matriarch Joana who double-crosses the devil, heedless of what the consequences might be.I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness is a formally daring and entrancing novel in which Irene Solà explores the duality and essential link between light and darkness, life and death, oblivion and memory. ""A heady, exhilarating, compact tale that seems as old as the Catalan mountains and as fresh as a newly plucked chicken... Exuding a kind of alt-magical realism, the novel refuses to distinguish between bewitcher and bewitched: this is its triumph"" ― Financial Times ""I read the book twice in quick succession and every time I opened it, I found something to savour."" ― Guardian ""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

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9781803511399

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Reviews

A heady, exhilarating, compact tale that seems as old as the Catalan mountains and as fresh as a newly plucked chicken... Exuding a kind of alt-magical realism, the novel refuses to distinguish between bewitcher and bewitched: this is its triumph * Financial Times * I read the book twice in quick succession and every time I opened it, I found something to savour. The prose has the demonic excess of a Hieronymus Bosch painting... Solà's serious attention to the nonhuman makes most contemporary realist literary fiction feel narrow and timid, wilfully deaf to the other forms of life with which all human drama is interdependent * Guardian * 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 Irene Solà is unlike any other writer - she storms her own path, setting fire to all our preconceived notions of what a novel can do while she goes. I adored this book -- Daisy Johnson Solà first distinguished herself with the equally enchanting When I Sing Mountains Dance, and her fascination with folklore returns to create another novel as beautiful as it is wicked and often filthy * Big Issue * Irene Solà's masterful new novel is an incendiary exploration of bodies and memory... This is writing which revels in fecundity in all its forms. To say it depicts nature red in tooth and claw is understatement writ large... A highly literary novel... Solà's imagery is beyond arresting - it burns itself into your retina as you read * The Skinny *

Author Information

Irene Solà is a writer and visual artist. She is the author of the novels The Dams, When I Sing, Mountains Dance and I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Towards Darkness, and the poetry collection Beast. Mara Faye Lethem is a writer, researcher and award-winning translator. Her recent translations include books by Irene Solà , Alana S. Portero, Jaume Cabré and Pol Guasch.

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