Vozdevieja (grown-up-voice), by Elisa Victoria

Blackie Books (Spanish), February 2019 – 256s pp.

Rights sold: And Other Stories (World English), Skarifima Editions (Greece).

In Vozdevieja, her first novel, the Sevillian writer Elisa Victoria (1985) looks at illness, sex or the passage of time from the eyes of a nine-year-old girl. A unique, tender and hilarious new voice. This is the story of Marina, a nine-year-old girl who sails through the long summer of Seville and her own uncertainties, with a capacity for expression and analysis that some adults ara far from reaching. At school they call her Vozdevieja (something we could translate as Oldladyvoice).

Elisa Victoria has managed to tell the terrible and wonderful dispersion of childhood. Marina, the protagonist, is at that point where kids start to dicover perversity without having lost the innocence or the need of protection, and the result of that salad of secrets, doubts and whims is a first great book.

It’s a very long and hot summer in Seville, in the 1990s. Marina doesn’t know if she wants everything to change or to stay the same. Because she still plays with dolls but she already noses around adult magazines. Because her mother is sick and she already imagines herself in a convent surrounded by orphans. Because everyone, also his father, insists on disappearing. Because her best friend is her grandmother, who cooks for her, combs her hair, tells her love for Felipe González, teaches her new nasty words and sews flower dresses for her.

Still, Marina is always hungry: for life, and for breaded steaks. Elisa Victoria has built an authentic and living protagonist and has let her fly through the pages of this book, a hilarious novel that exudes impudence and intimacy.

Telling things from a child's perspective isn’t an easy task, but when a narrator has found the right tone and athmosphere it has provided great milestones. This novel by Elisa Victoria has to be joyfully recorded joyfully as one.