I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness - by Irene Solà (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Dawn is breaking over the Guilleries, a rugged mountain range in Catalonia frequented by wolf hunters, brigands, deserters, race-car drivers, ghosts, and demons. In a remote 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.

As day turns to night, four hundred years' worth of stories unspool, and the house reverberates with raucous laughter, pungent feasts, and piercing cries of pleasure and pain. It all begins with Joana, Mas Clavell's matriarch, who once longed for a husband--"a full man," perhaps even "an heir with a patch of land and a roof over his head." She summoned the devil to fulfill her wish and struck a deal: a man in exchange for her soul. But when, on her wedding day, Joana discovered that her husband was missing a toe (eaten by wolves), she exploited a loophole in her agreement, heedless of what consequences might follow.

I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness is an audacious and entrancing novel in which the lines 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.

Review Quotes

"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

"This novel about, well, everything, is fine-tuned to a kind of astonished and astonishing connectivity that's an act of revolutionary revitalization."--Ali Smith, The Guardian

"I wish I could live forever inside its pages. A book that feels like a channel, a vessiel, almost beyond the category of literature."--K-Ming Chang, The Millions

"In the shocking, seductive novel I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness, the devil is no match for the wits and wiles of ferocious women."--Michelle Anne Schingler, Foreword Magazine (starred review)

"An author's note at the end lists a deep collection of sources that range from a memoir of the Spanish Civil war to cookbooks encompassing all kinds of Catalan stews. Many of the sources deal with medieval feminine knowledge and Catalan folklore, including the tale of a woman outsmarting the devil that the premise of I Gave You Eyes is based on. The research doesn't feel like a history lesson though. Instead, Solà bridges these old legends to the present with her unforgettable family of characters, of whom at least one is based on a real historical figure from her home town of Malla."--Joe Stanek, Chicago Review of Books

"Irene Solà's exhilarating novel mixes folklore, history and the supernatural in a heady brew. . . . Solà's imagery is unexpected and uninhibited, matched by Mara Faye Lethem's unerring translation. "--Catherine Taylor, The Financial Times

"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."--Billie Walker, Big Issue

"Solà's imagery is beyond arresting - it burns itself into your retina as you read. . . ."--Alistair Braidwood, The Skinny

"Despite its interest in absences, I Gave You Eyes is a story of startling plenitude. . . . Solà's latest novel asks you to follow her across the line between the living and the dead, to hold fascism and goat husbandry together with light slanting across a kitchen floor."--Molly MacVeagh, Full Stop

About the Author

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 Toward Darkness, and Beast, a poetry collection.

Mara Faye Lethem is an award-winning translator and author of the novel A Person's A Person, No Matter How Small. Her recent translations include books by Patricio Pron, Max Besora, Javier Calvo, Marta Orriols, Toni Sala, and Alicia Kopf.