MaAria Bastaros likes to bring her short stories to a moment of crisis and then leave them hanging: a husband with a shotgun confronting his wife and her lover, a father discovering his twin teenage daughters having sex with his boss, a girl-boy encounter that veers into assault. These are endings that, in the hands of any other author, would leave the reader feeling cheated and wanting to read three more pages, but Bastaros is so good, and her stories so darkly engrossing, that personal preferences disappear in the heat of her talent.
Bastaros has published four books in Spain, but this is his first in English (translated by Kevin Jerry Dann). The stories are set mainly in the lonely, arid landscapes of northern Spain, where the desert “plays games no one can understand” and swallows the unwary whole. The mood of the stories is one of horror. Bastaros’ characters – abandoned lovers, people seeking revenge, daughters plotting against their mothers, disgruntled office workers – are all waiting for the axe to come down. Almost without exception, the axe comes down – a world that we think is moral, but which operates according to a sinister, closed, or simply cruel logic.
Bastaros keeps us off balance right from the start. The opening story, “Adult Dinner,” depicts a girl attempting to recreate a romantic meal favored by her late father and mother. Instead of foie gras, she uses wedges of roughed cow cheese dusted with chocolate powder. In place of baby eel, she uses chipotle sticks topped with raw garlic. It seems simple and adorable, but the complexity of the act becomes clear when the mother returns home with her psychotherapist boyfriend, who effortlessly deciphers the aggression in the girl’s behavior.
She succeeds in driving him out of the house, but she has little opportunity to rejoice in her victory: the next morning her mother takes her out for a drive down a highway “longer and emptier than the little girl had imagined.” They drive not only into the desert, but beyond the boundaries of reality, and the story ends with an unexpected and ritually antagonistic scene between mother and daughter.
At this point, not knowing what’s going to happen next is part of the fun of the book. Some stories, like “Shotgun Time,” read like the alcoholic, violent, desperate characters of Fernanda Melchor’s novels transplanted to Spain. Bastaros’ writing has a similar strength and ability to convey domestic squalor, like the stench of the van that transports her protagonist to her job at the slaughterhouse, “sliding down her throat in a lump, like a wad of gum, a tangible thing she could chew and spit in someone’s face.”
The more I immerse myself in Bastaros’ world, a world geographically fragmented and with characters that move from one story to another, the more I am reminded of Silvina Ocampo, the Argentine writer who produced a prolific body of macabre fiction between the 1930s and 1980s. The malevolence that Bastaros’ stories exude, their use of child protagonists, their perversion of the domestic milieu, their sense of slipping between reality and stranger, inexplicable spaces, and the related inability to predict where the next sentence will lead, are all traits that these writers share.
Towards the end of Ocampo’s life, when she was compiling her first collected works in English, her translator says that she insisted on choosing “her cruellest stories.” Perhaps Bastaros would approve. There is a provocative boldness to her work that may be off-putting to some, but it impresses me. The final story, and one of the best in the collected works, “The Fire-Lighters,” tells of a gynecologic nurse who falls in love with a baby. “He fell in love at first sight, as people do in the movies, with an entrancing passion. The problem was that the object of his misguided affection was abhorrent.”
This unwanted but undeniable blow propels him from Spain to the Yukon, where he finds some kind of answer to his problems in nature. It’s reminiscent of the book’s other standout story, “Notre Dame Gone to Ashes,” in which the protagonist, a rejected woman, quits her job, spends time in a psychiatric hospital (reminiscent of Anna Kavan’s stories set in psychiatric hospitals), and finds self-knowledge and peace in nature. But this is Bastaros’ story, and that’s not all she finds there.
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