Rabbit Island

November 16, 2020
The stories in Spanish writer Navarro’s arresting collection (after A Working Woman) are set in and around present-day Madrid, but the characters often find themselves in a more surreal terrain. In the title story, a man releases 20 rabbits on an uninhabited island in hopes they will eat the eggs of the birds whose excrement, noise, and dirty feathers are preventing him from enjoying the few nights a week he camps there, a plan which devolves into a grotesque, cannibalistic situation. In “Strychnine,” a paw grows in the young protagonist’s ear. It starts out as a red swelling, but by the next day the appendage hangs “below her breast” and has “sprouted toes with small mouths.” In “Myotragus,” Navarro imagines an encounter between a predatory nobleman and a cold-blooded (now extinct) goat that lived on the island of Majorca. While some stories feel overly impressionistic, with too little plot, the most daring in the collection are unsettling and memorable. Navarro showcases her ability to lead her characters from relative normalcy into nightmare terrain in starkly elegant prose and with a winking sense of humor.

January 1, 2021
Spare in pages, Navarro's collection of 11 short stories prove dense with disconnection, dysfunction, and dismay as families fray, couples sunder, and animals are brutalized. Set between the seemingly familiar and elusively surreal, Navarro's tales unsettle readers through oneiric landscapes. In "Rabbit Island," a non-inventor who doesn't create installation art nonetheless populates a small island with a filthy river with white rabbits to deter the resident birds, causing, of course, horrific results. Slaughter looms in "Myotragus," which features an elephantiasis-impaired archduke with a penchant for hunting young flesh. A woman's ear grows an extraneous paw in "Strychnine," while a not-husband not honeymooning after a not-wedding observes that he might be turning into an insect in "Gums." Estrangements drive "Gerardo's Letters," in which a troubled couple travels to a bug-infested hostel; "Regression" depicts the fickle relationship between two girls; "Paris P�riph�rie" is about a map-resistant wanderer who's maybe meeting or leaving a lover. Named one of Granta's magazine's "Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists," Navarro--adroitly anglophone-enabled by award-winning Christina MacSweeney--distinctly proves her inarguable facility with short fiction.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.