Fiction
March 2020
small red women
by Marta Sanz
A novel about the dead and the disappeared, for whom the search still endures, and against a far-right that has never left and turned into a universal threat. A noir novel that prolongs the possibility of the political novel. Paula Quiñones arrives in Azafrán as a volunteer to help locate civil war mass graves. Little by little, she integrates herself into the community and gets to know its power dynamics, governed by a family whose patriarch has just turned one hundred years old. The story becomes obscured, and the village becomes a threatening space in which Paula’s discoveries begin to put her in danger. Who were the dead that Paula is looking for? Who do the voices, that chase her like a tragic chorus of kids and women, belong to? A novel about economic and cultural violence, and about violence against women, that dissects accounts of memory. «Sanz has few possible competitors in her generation. If someone is called to remain in posterity, it’s her (…) She has talent, brightness, and nerve. It's literature in its pure state (…) With each narration that carries her signature, the miracle of good literature is produced» (Ángeles López, La Razón). «small red women—like so, in lowercase—is a subversive game that becomes a homage. The story of Paula, a middle aged inspector who arrives in the imagined location of Azafrán to work on a project of historical memory (…) The far-right’s boom in Spain and around the world has given this story an unexpected urgency. Or maybe not so unexpected (…) The novel takes from many genres and at the same time transcends them, manipulates them. But, like the previous two parts of the trilogy, it bathes in the noir and plays with it» (Juan Carlos Galindo, El País).
