Points of Confluence

Michael Knapp reviews “The Voices of Adriana” by Elvira Navarro, translated by Christina MacSweeney.

By Michael KnappApril 19, 2025

• Fiction

THE VOICES OF ADRIANA, Spanish novelist Elvira Navarro’s latest offering to be translated into English by Christina MacSweeney (originally published in Spain in 2023), is a stunning metafictional excavation of familial inheritance in three parts. The first and longest section tracks the rapid decline of the eponymous narrator’s father. A charming, congenial widower, he had been enjoying a “sudden, happy, second youth”—a period during which he’d had “nineteen partners in four years”—prior to a severe stroke. Adriana, in the “late stages of a doctoral thesis that she was finding incredibly boring,” spends most of her intellectual energy exaggerating and inventing “extensions to anecdotes” her father relayed about his online dating escapades prior to falling ill. In this section, these “extensions” take the form of uncanny short fiction woven into the text (one revolves around a Galician witch whose potions can, apparently, cure any physical or spiritual ailments). What Adriana really wants to write about—never mind her thesis—is her deceased mother. Yet every time she tries, “the impetus [is] swiftly replaced by one of those anecdotes, easier to deal with and more fun than her maternal universe.”

Part two sees Adriana inch closer to her matrilineage in a strange, impressionistic section about her grandmother’s home. By far the shortest of the book’s three sections, it renders the family’s house as a corporeal entity—one Adriana experienced as “an enormous body, the body that saw her birth, usurping that of her mother.” She is as much “an extension of the house” as she is of “family memory.” Adriana’s childhood home has amassed invisible—but, to our narrator, palpable—baggage from its inhabitants over time: “An echo remained of what no longer existed,” writes Navarro, “of its density. Dark matter.” There’s a ghostly air—a personification of absence reminiscent of the Ramsays’ summer house in the similarly short, famously experimental middle section (“Time Passes”) of To the Lighthouse (1927): “What people had shed and left,” writes Virginia Woolf, “those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated.”

In what might be read as a further Lighthouse parallel, the third and final section of Navarro’s novel deals most explicitly with Adriana’s familial legacy. As the protagonist embraces the nagging pull of her maternal world, Navarro produces a dizzying, polyphonic barrage that, depending on your perspective, either expands the possibilities of storytelling or exposes its limits, as the characters grow aware of potential flaws in their characterizations. “The words I use here aren’t mine,” says the mother, following a lengthy story about her childhood. “I’m beginning to wonder who is behind all this.”

Much like a parent’s progeny, each section serves as both a rejection and an extension of its antecedent. The narrative doesn’t necessarily move forward; it spirals outward, encompassing more of Adriana’s ancestry as it goes. After all, writes Navarro, “we are points of confluence for everything that precedes us”; we are always filled with our “loved ones” and “the ghosts of the past.” Inheritance, then, seems an inadequate word for our connection to the deceased: not only are we receiving things from our relatives, but—like Adriana’s grandmother, whose dead brothers are “entombed in her body”—we’re also carrying them with us.

The idea that ghosts from the past aren’t just memories—that they’re entities unto themselves and their loved ones serve as their earthly vessels—has a whiff of mysticism that might repel some readers. Navarro’s two previous novels translated into English, A Working Woman (2014; tr. Christina MacSweeney, 2017) and Rabbit Island (2019; tr. MacSweeney, 2021), saw characters walking similarly fine lines between delusion and reality; in them, Navarro often deployed the language of psychoanalysis to adjudicate their grasp on reality. But her latest demonstrates little interest in pathologizing such psychic abnormalities. When Adriana’s grandmother shows signs of dementia, for example, Adriana doesn’t attribute the symptoms to any kind of madness—instead, she wonders if her grandmother might be hearing “the same [voices] that had haunted her.” These voices used to visit Adriana as a child sleeping at her grandmother’s home, voices she was “certain [were not] any form of psychosis, just communication with the past, or possibly with something that was in the bedroom.” In this way, the book sets aside conventional psychoanalysis to probe, in nondiagnostic terms, the depths of one woman’s consciousness and explore her creative process as she attempts to give voice to her matrilineal line. The voices she finds are, somehow, both out of reach and embedded within her own.

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The closer Adriana comes to confronting her maternal line, the more experimental and ambitiously metatextual the book becomes. Fellow Spanish author Enrique Vila-Matas has called Navarro the “true avant-gardist of her generation.” Yet that disposition is only hinted at in the opening section: by Navarro’s standards, part one not only reads as stylistically conventional but also hits on some of the author’s familiar themes.

Money, for one, is a common concern of Navarro’s—she’s a shrewd analyst of class. The Voices of Adriana isn’t as explicitly political as some of her previous work (A Working Woman addresses the fallout of the Spanish economic crisis), but it does detail the increasing financialization of end-of-life and elderly care, a profit-oriented system that quickly drains the father’s “meager financial resources.” Rehab isn’t covered by his social benefits; there’s a Kafkaesque quality to a healthcare industry that won’t grant Adriana’s father a supplemental allowance because he has a “good pension.” Meanwhile, we watch medical costs and everyday expenses “eat up” the entirety of that very pension.

These economic constraints prompt Adriana to take on her father’s care, a role she feels has been “forced on her.” And, at the same time as she’s taking on a caretaker role she doesn’t want, she’s also composing a thesis she doesn’t like. Accordingly, a pervasive ennui plagues Adriana in the opening section—an “exasperating emptiness” mirrored by Navarro’s affectless prose. While Adriana’s surreal short stories offer refreshing flights of strangeness, a cool indifference permeates the overall atmosphere. This feeling is amplified by Adriana’s liminal state—her doctoral studies are done, yet her thesis remains unfinished—and she seems content to prolong this transitional phase as she succumbs to a nascent nihilism. She takes an almost perverse pleasure in her stagnation: “Was it possible not to learn anything [in life]?” she wonders, retreating, as she often does, to the endless scroll of social media. She “rarely [finds] anything interesting” online, but the hollowness itself seems to be the point since, Adriana reminds us, she’s not “trying to reach any conclusions about social networks.”

When the “din” of the internet grows tedious, her thesis “suddenly become[s] a refuge.” Throughout part one, Adriana oscillates between academia and Twitter with an equal level of apathy, content in knowing that conclusions gleaned from either “say more about herself than the world in general.” Any convictions about philosophical theory or TikTok, even about her father—“all the conclusions she came to about him,” writes Navarro, “were only related to herself”—are flattened into one thing: self-projection.

Adriana’s entire being is enveloped by this flatness. She is “burdened by a strange form of emotional paralysis” that, we learn, took hold following her mother’s death—not, as one might reasonably assume given the narrative’s structure, upon her father falling ill. It’s a sly authorial move, then, to open with the father; indeed, the entire first section—titled “The Father”—is something of a feint. Navarro has called this book a “metafictional examination of the literary process,” and here we see a key feature of that process at work: procrastination. Overcome with grief, Adriana is stalling. She’s very consciously putting off her ultimate project—which emerges in the final section, “The Voices”—by trudging through her thesis, mindlessly scrolling Twitter threads, and embellishing her father’s dating stories.

This, I admit, might not sound like the most thrilling read. In its least successful moments, The Voices of Adriana’s opening section reads like a low-stakes Künstlerroman. Adriana deals with familiar issues related to grief and creative stasis, and, like much of the world, she self-medicates with a healthy dose of social media. Initial skeptics may be further scared off by the second section, “The House”—the fleeting, impressionistic work of countryside gothic-in-miniature about Adriana’s late grandmother’s home. But for those who stick with The Voices of Adriana, there is an exhilarating payoff to be had.

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“The Voices” alternates focus between Adriana, her mother, and her grandmother in a chorus of family tales that are at once sharply divergent and deeply interconnected. The first two sections follow the titular character in close third person; here, however, the narration shifts to rotating first-person perspectives that all flow through Adriana. “The Voices” is both culmination and inception. Its arrival ushers in the long-awaited climactic moment in which Adriana finally confronts her matrilineage, yet it also traces the initial steps she takes toward devising a new form for representation, especially as it pertains to communicating the stories of the deceased.

Language—both its failures and its possibilities—sits front and center in these interweaving stories. The mother’s and grandmother’s sections are sporadically interrupted by misgivings about their own characterizations: “What’s going on with me and words?” Adriana’s mother asks, reflecting on the crippling pressure she felt to win an academic scholarship. “If I’d read Freud,” she says, “I’d have known the name my problem would have been given in early-twentieth-century Vienna: anxiety neurosis. But this isn’t a thought my voice should express. My voice has to be unaware of such things.” The grandmother has similar concerns: “I’m being made to talk in a way I don’t recognize,” she says; “my language is simpler, my head is simpler.”

The characters are aware that their portrayals feel flawed, yet Adriana appears unconcerned with rendering them “falsely” or “truthfully.” She contends that such a binary doesn’t actually exist, offering that “Truth and falsity are problematic concepts. False or true to what?” “True to life,” I wrote in the margins of my copy, soon crossing it out because, presumedly like Adriana, I’m baffled by what exactly that’s supposed to mean.

There’s a delicate dichotomy at work in “The Voices.” On one hand, Adriana is simply projecting herself onto her mother’s and grandmother’s stories. But Adriana is also, as we’re told, a “confluence” of her lineage; she is “interchangeable with any of her descendants.” Is it possible that the “self” she projects onto her family members is actually a conduit for those same family members? Adriana herself wonders if “characteristics [can] be transmitted up the line,” further complicating the relationship between narrator and subject. “Could my grandmother and mother have something of me in them?” Adriana asks.

Such ceaseless self-reflexivity is, occasionally, exasperating—there’s certainly an unevenness to Navarro’s latest work. Adriana’s thinking is ripe with contradictions: seemingly every one of her ideas is countered by its opposite, a dynamic that Adriana herself observes has become the norm “since her mother’s death.” There’s a healthy level of self-exculpation here; any incongruities in Adriana’s logic, Navarro seems to suggest, are an inherent by-product of grief. An absurdist strain is further detectable in Navarro’s capacity for paradox, as a key tenet of absurdism is an embrace of the world’s lack of stable meaning, its inherent contradictions. But in unmooring herself from any conventional literary form—conventions she notes don’t exist anyway because “there are too many competing definitions” to “know what literature is”—Adriana also liberates herself to write, as she describes it, “puke.”

“Puke,” says Adriana, “that’s the verb used to refer to something written in an emotional state that doesn’t make for good literature.” Her use of “good literature” here is sarcastic, derisive: Adriana’s “puke poems”—rambling, emotionally charged verses that appear throughout part three—are at the “root of the voices of [her] mother and grandmother”; they’re the “origin” of her latest writing, which has now moved beyond her hallucinatory, paternally inspired short fiction. Navarro’s never been one to shy away from the grotesque—her sensory descriptions, especially as they relate to smell and taste, are often gleefully revolting—and I was oddly gratified by the nauseating sensation she evokes in attempting to animate the dead. Puke is, obviously, disgusting; it’s also an honest, unvarnished look at what was previously residing inside. Producing “word vomit” typically connotes spewing something irritating, nonsensical, perhaps even vitriolic—often, though, buried within the waste is something remarkably candid.

This candidness can be terrifying—especially when it circulates, and whatever the story once was slowly morphs into something else. The grandmother, for one, “wasn’t afraid of anything, except the gossip in town.” As such, she lives in a perpetual state of secrecy—Adriana has never even heard the story of her great-uncles’ deaths during the Spanish Civil War. Still, as part of her matrilineal exploration, Adriana does share her imagined version of their final days with us, a rendering that possesses the kind of gruesome banality common to secondhand war stories. The grandmother, predictably, takes issue with Adriana’s telling, though she also admits that she “never knew how they were killed” and that “their bodies weren’t found.”

And yet their “deaths still burn inside [her]. Their undiscovered bodies rest in [hers].” The grandmother only buys cardigans and dresses with pockets so that she can carry their photos. In Elvira Navarro’s stunning, bewildering novel, our loved ones are simultaneously gone without a trace and present in every moment. “Just how far do the dead travel with us?” Adriana asks. The Voices of Adriana is an audacious metatextual attempt at finding out.