#RivetingReviews: West Camel reviews HUNGRY FOR WHAT by María Bastarós

There is violence at the heart of everyday life; such is the lesson that this collection of powerful stories seems to teach. Whether it be in the life of a worker at a meat factory, at a suburban eclipse-watching party, in a department store at Christmas or in the aftermath of a disappointing birthday, brutality is never far away.

What marks this collection out, however, is the random nature and the unavoidability of this violence. In the volume’s central story ‘Notre-Dame Gone to Ashes’, a young woman does:

something stupid. Something so pedestrian, so inelegant, so clichéd, as getting caught up in a love triangle with an authority figure: an art history professor at the university where she was an undergraduate and whose faculty she later joined as a pre-doctoral fellow.

The story does indeed follow a pedestrian, inelegant, clichéd route: the woman falls deeply in love and the professor promises to leave his wife and family; but when the affair is exposed he cuts all ties with his lover. The woman’s subsequent breakdown is long and deep, and results in a spell in a mental institution. Her recovery takes her to the Pyrenees, where she immerses herself in the natural world and finds herself renewed, almost reborn. Then, on a hike into the mountains, she crosses paths with a bear:

She remembers Notre-Dame, the spire’s demise, the skies of Paris filled with smoke. And just before the first swipe slices her skin from shoulder to hip, it occurs to her that there’s a very important lesson here, a metaphor for something, which she must surely learn.

And there the story ends. It’s a device Bastarós uses across the collection, each story ending with some kind of question mark or ellipsis. When a woman is forced by her husband to say whom she prefers between him and her father, we do not find out her answer. In the title story, an office worker’s rotting sandwich turns the work fridge into a jungle into which she leaps. In ‘Birthday Girl’ the young protagonist’s wish that her cold and distant mother meets a harsh fate is granted – but to what end?

Bastarós is posing questions in each of these elegantly turned stories – the imagery always well chosen and the register assured, in Kevin Dunn’s well-poised translation. But she eschews answers – which is perhaps an answer in itself. Violence is both random and inevitable – even the greatest and oldest buildings can burn to the ground. I wonder what new work the reopening of Notre-Dame will provoke from this fascinating author?

Reviewed by West Camel

HUNGRY FOR WHAT

Written by María Bastarós

Translated by Kevin Gerry Dunn

Published by Daunt Books (2024)

December 2024 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

West Camel is a writer, reviewer and editor. He edited Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction 2015 and is currently working for Orenda Books. He has written two novels, Attend and Fall. He is the editor of the Riveter magazine and the #RivetingReviews for the European Literature Network.

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