#RivetingReviews: Eleanor Updegraff reviews I GAVE YOU EYES AND YOU LOOKED TOWARD DARKNESS by Irena Solà, translated by Mara Faye Lethem

In Irene Solà’s fantastical third novel, animals reign supreme. From the woods that surround the remote Catalonian farmhouse where old Bernadeta with her ‘lizard lids’ lies dying, they come to stalk the pages: wolves, owls, foxes, spiders. The house, too, is a creature, with an ‘entrance … damp and dark, like a throat’ and ‘a pantry as purple and cold as a liver’; even the darkness is ‘fidgety’. When a child is born not breathing, she is held ‘upside down like a rabbit’. In one particularly visceral scene, a young girl’s first sexual experiences are interwoven with a description of her grandmother skinning and gutting a goat. In a narrative ostensibly about humans – four hundred years of history told through one line of women – there seems sometimes to be not much that’s human at all.

And yet it is this – the emphasis on the bestial, the natural world, the beauty and savagery beyond the farmhouse walls – that gives the novel its impetus, that speaks to a deeper understanding of being human. I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness features generations of women, each of them lacking in some way (eyelashes, memory, the ability to feel pain) who nonetheless give life, again and again: to children but also to prophecies, knowledge, loyalty. The human/animal dichotomy is softened here into concomitance, mirroring those other pairs that exist: order and chaos, light and dark, life and death.

Solà leans heavily on folklore and fable, citing her inspirations in an author’s note, and there is indeed a fairy-tale quality to the novel: the lonely house, the old woman surrounded by ancestral ghosts, a structure that follows the passage of the sun from dawn until night. Characters relay stories to one another, only to become figures in legend themselves, and it’s hard sometimes to imagine any modern context for events, though in fact Bernadeta is dying in the present. Add to this the shifting perspectives of women whose lifetimes didn’t include cars or mobile phones, and the familiar becomes ever more distorted, uncertain – these objects now a ‘horseless carriage’ and ‘little mirror’ (in which Bernadeta’s descendants fail to see their reflection). 

Dystopian would be the wrong word for this novel – it feels too ancient, too primeval for that – but it carries an end-of-days spirit, delivered in its urgent prose. Time, we sense, is running out, and not just for the dying woman. In Solà’s vivid imagery, which could seem built on free association yet is in fact precisely wrought, adjectives tumble over one another, clamouring – like the ghosts at the window – to be heard. At other times, she brings us up short, with a simple line of description that suggests language itself has been exhausted: Joana’s bull is ‘All black, like the blackest thing’. 

Through this unsettled and unsettling linguistic current, Mara Faye Lethem proves an expert navigator; her translation is sharp and glittering, imbued with an intangible, deeply felt rhythm that makes it entirely possible – perhaps even desirable – to swallow this surreal, writhing, brilliant novel in one breathless sitting.

Reviewed by Eleanor Updegraff

I GAVE YOU EYES AND YOU LOOKED TOWARD DARKNESS

by Irene Solà

Translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem

Published by Granta (2025)

September 2025 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

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Eleanor Updegraff is a freelance writer, editor and literary translator born in London and now based in
Vienna. Her translations and writing have appeared online and in print, including in No Man’s Land, Lunate, Panel and Stanchion.

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