A Working Woman
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A provocative new novel from the author ranked among Granta’s “Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists”
Globally acclaimed as a relentless innovator and a meticulous explorer of the psyche’s most obscure alleyways, Elvira Navarro here delivers an ambitious tale of feminine friendship, madness, a radically changing city, and the vulnerability that makes us divulge our most shameful secrets. It begins as Elisa transcribes the chaotic testimony of her roommate Susana, acting as part-therapist, part-confessor as Susana reveals the gripping account of her strange sexual urges and the one man who can satisfy them. But is Susana telling the truth? And what to make of the story that follows, where Elisa considers her own life failures, blending her literary ambitions with her deep need for catharsis? And then, one last surprise makes us question everything we have just read. Masterfully uncovering the insecurity that lurks just beneath the surface of every stable life, A Working Woman shows Elvira Navarro’s strength for mordant storytelling and breathtaking insight into alienation, confirming her status as one of the leading voices of her generation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Navarro's brilliant mindbender of a novel opens in Madrid with the story of Susana, who describes her physical affect as "red-faced blondeness, my coming-apart-at-the-seams way of speaking, and a pair of eyes whose futile, terrifying ship-wreck said it all." Susana places a personal ad for a sexual partner and winds up with a gay dwarf named Fabio with whom she plunges into an affair almost nihilistic in its intensity. Susana tells all this to her roommate Elisa, a struggling writer and editor with problems of her own. Elisa spends her nights exploring the ruined grounds of an old prison and the dilapidated outskirts of Madrid, and her days editing a ponderous memoir by the widow of a famous Spanish writer, all the while fending off an undisclosed psychiatric ailment. As she tries to adjust to her new medication, which distorts her already fragile sense of reality, Elisa becomes increasingly fascinated by the more willful and dramatically unhinged Susana, especially after she discovers her roommate's curious pastime of making idiosyncratic maps of Madrid, and becomes fixated on the idea of exhibiting Susan's work at a gallery. Together, Susana and Elisa set out to combine their artistic endeavors, only to become ensconced in each other's madness in the process. Navarro's exceptional novel defies easy interpretation, culminating in a breathtaking and surprising ending. The author is especially skilled at crafting the details and peculiarities of her two characters' psyches, and the result is a singular novel of art, friendship, and lunacy.
