I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness
Generations of women face the consequences of their dark bargains in Irene Solà’s wickedly sumptuous novel I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness.
In a prewar period of privation, Joana decides not to die hungry and alone. Persuaded to invoke the devil for help, she trades her soul for the chance at a whole man and a comfortable life. Later, securing a longer earthly stay by virtue of a technicality, she dooms her progeny to variations of being without: without the ability to feel love or pain; without organs or orifices; without speech or sense.
Because of the remoteness of their homestead and by nature of their infernal dealings, the women experience love and loss at a curious distance from the rest of the world, isolated from its wars and turmoil. Still, those who adore their men most lose them; those who think themselves most virtuous enact thoughtless cruelties. Violence is continual, but light seeps in intermittently too, as when two women determine to love “each other. In every possible way there was to love. Like the roe deer, delicately. Like the hens, obligingly. Like the ducks, with brute force.”
Written with ribald vibrancy and borrowing from Catalan legends, the novel trades between brutal scenes and defiant ones, marching toward its inevitable end, when the women’s spirits gather at the deathbed of Bernadeta, a granddaughter cursed with foresight and a long life. Some wait to greet her in the afterlife, while others hold onto old resentments, delighting at the possibility of witnessing divine comeuppance. Together, this appealing spectral cast slaughters a goat and stews in their memories, at last unafraid of what’s to come.
In the shocking, seductive novel I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness, the devil is no match for the wits and wiles of ferocious women.
Reviewed by
Michelle Anne Schingler
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