Other Voices
Reviews
By Cory Oldweiler
Most of us would admit (perhaps grudgingly) to having voices in our head at times. Mine can be complimentary, but are more often frustrated or critical, such as the one currently questioning whether it’s wise to go on record about having voices in my head. I’m being a bit facetious because the voices I’m referring to are really just bit players in an internal dialogue, an ongoing conversation—sometimes one-sided—between me and what I rationally know to be other parts of myself. People suffering from psychosis are not always able to make this distinction, however, leading them to believe that the voices in their head are originating outside of themselves, a terrifying and destabilizing delusion.
Novelists and other artists who create life for a living must often manage voices that emanate from somewhere between the familiar internal observer and the hallucinatory external entity, voices from characters clamoring for attention maybe or an idea simply yearning to be born. The protagonist of Spanish writer Elvira Navarro’s 2023 novel Las voces de Adriana, newly available as The Voices of Adriana (2025) in Christina MacSweeney’s English translation, is contending with a chorus of voices crying out from across the spectrum. Her subconscious is questioning how best to care for her father after he has a stroke. The social media personalities she got hooked on while avoiding her PhD thesis continue to occupy space in her IRL imagination. And in her free time, her mind wants nothing more than to fixate on fictionalized characters spawned by the dating misadventures of her father’s friend Martina.
Barely audible beneath this cacophony are other voices that may or may not be as benign, voices that Adriana hears but will not heed. They represent facets of her maternal grandmother, her mother, and her past self that she doesn’t want to acknowledge for fear of what they will say about their subjects, and in turn what those messages will mean for her future. The existence of these voices makes Adriana question her mental health at times, speculating that these voices might be part of her inheritance, “that they might be the same ones that had haunted her” maternal grandmother, who developed dementia late in life before finally “losing her mind altogether.” Adriana wants to confront her own fears but is “uncertain about giving in unconditionally.”
Structurally, Voices of Adriana is about process, with the first two sections depicting Adriana’s inability to write the oral history of “her maternal world” that makes up the novel’s third section. The three pieces are thematically linked, but in terms of story, they could almost be enjoyed separately. The first section centers Adriana’s father, who is mentioned later on but has little to do with the revelations of those sections. This part of the narrative is disheveled, like Adriana’s mind as she revisits the handful of years between her mother’s death from lymphoma, when Adriana was thirty, and her father’s stroke and initial recovery. After he completes three months of rehab in a nursing home, Adriana feels “his happiness [has] dwindled.” He has cut back on his in-home caregivers to save money, started smoking again, and stopped exercising. Adriana is worn down, her energy drained by “Lady Death and Lady Manipulator—two deities of the darkness that had begun to surround her during her mother’s illness.”
After her mother died, Adriana and her father, with whom she had always enjoyed an easier rapport, distracted themselves from their grief. Adriana chipped away at her philosophy thesis, sleepwalked through a repetitive romance, and started writing fiction—“both a necessity and an escape.” Her almost seventy-year-old father, to whom it “never occurred” that he’d outlive his “sergeant-major of a wife,” dove into the dating pool, eventually matching with nineteen app-approved partners over four years, including the previously mentioned Martina.
Milestones in Adriana’s personal life coincide with her parents’ health crises, making it harder to find space for herself. A week before her mother revealed that her cancer had metastasized, Adriana’s only long-term relationship ended abruptly when her partner, an unnamed “bearded man,” walked out on her just as he had his then-wife three years earlier. Having successfully managed to complete her thesis while grieving her mother, Adriana lands a teaching position in the Madrid suburbs, only to be called away by the news of her father’s stroke days later. Much of the subsequent year was spent on the road, traveling back and forth between the capital and Valencia, 200 miles to the east. It took her six months to finally buy a bed frame for her apartment.
One underlying theme that could easily get overlooked in the quotidian episodes of the first section is the probity of writing fiction based on the lives of strangers. Adriana does this liberally. In fact, it is the only thing she is able to do early on. She doesn’t necessarily weigh in as to whether or not such behavior is ethical, but she does admit that the lives of those she has never met are “easier to deal with and more fun.” A couple excerpts from these fictions are included, set off in italics; aside from adding a touch of verisimilitude to the story, though, they don’t add much to the novel. Appropriation—or, to use less charged language, who is entitled to tell what tale—is a hot-button issue for novelists these days, as well as for those non-novelists who believe (mostly incorrectly) that it is their place to tell novelists how they should write books. The subtle presence of this consideration in Voices of Adriana is intriguing in light of the pushback against Navarro’s 2016 novel, Los últimos días de Adelaida García Morales, which saw the real-life husband of Morales write an op-ed accusing Navarro of “stealing” his late wife’s life.
The second section of Voices visits Adriana’s grandmother’s house, where Adriana spent her preschool childhood being raised by her grandparents. It’s a beautifully written section, and particularly evocative for anyone like me who has fond, foundational memories of their own grandparents’ homes. The novel has few passages that deal explicitly with the physical world, but they are all outstanding, including one here describing the drive between Valencia and the province of Badajoz, where the grandmother’s home is located. MacSweeney carries the reader along by starting most every sentence in the passage with a preposition or conjunction, linking the discrete impressions of the desolate, rain-deprived countryside before delivering the hammer blow tying the land to the fates of Adriana’s mother and grandmother: “Plundered, wretched, feeble, as happens to the terminally ill.” Another of MacSweeney’s most memorable passages describes the many Proustian triggers the house holds for Adriana: “Every one of her cells still harbored those footsteps, the aroma, the air, the sensation of the house with its nuanced meanings.”
The novel’s final section is a dialogue between the voices of Adriana, her mother, and her grandmother. Here Adriana pushes back against the criticisms made years earlier by her therapist, who told her that she didn’t talk about herself honestly and instead relied on “small lies, omissions, or exaggerations so as not to appear dull.” She opens up about her relationship with the “bearded man” and how the poems she wrote trying to cope with his loss ultimately led to processing the loss of her mother, and how her pain at being abandoned in her personal life lay “at the root of the voices of [her] mother and grandmother.”
Those two voices speak of losses far more consequential in the grand scheme of things than the end of Adriana’s relationship, which she knew was “destined for failure because each person [saw] only their own desires reflected in the other.” Adriana’s mother speaks of being pressured to succeed by her grandfather, being let down by her father, and feeling trapped in a far-from-perfect marriage. Adriana’s parents were from different worlds, “the bootstrapper and the princess,” and while he made career sacrifices to follow his wife where she wanted to go, neither ended up with the life they thought they wanted. Adriana’s grandmother grew up “the daughter of local gentry,” meaning when Franco’s revolution began in the late 1930s, her father was imprisoned, her two brothers killed. The sorrow never really let up: Her husband betrayed her professionally, with a failed medical practice, and personally, with the family’s maids. She gave birth to five children and endured a greater number of miscarriages. Her youngest child had Down syndrome and his early death “almost froze” her heart. She clearly hid a lot of this during her lifetime, but Adriana eventually learned the truth and endows her grandmother with strength, having her say, “You all think nothing ever hurt me, but the thing is that you don’t acknowledge the existence of God.”
The three women tell independent stories, chiming in without rhyme or reason and developing episodes from their own tales without acknowledging anything the others are saying, except that Adriana’s mother and grandmother both start to complain that words are being put in their mouths—a neat example of the author censoring or questioning her own work and her license to tell another’s story. The mother says, “These aren’t my words, this isn’t my voice.” The grandmother asks, “But what does the person who’s putting words in my mouth know about what affection was for us?” Adriana, too, questions her own words, specifically the earlier “bad poems” she wrote to the “bearded man,” poems she calls “puke,” which must be avoided for its sentimentality: “I don’t believe in catharsis as the motor of a text, or not the prime motor.” Eventually these poems become increasingly introspective and deeply moving (or perhaps I just like bad poetry, who can say).
Many of the women’s disappointments in life result from men betraying or mistreating them. Given that men in power have for millennia pointed to women hearing voices as evidence of hysteria or insanity—think the Salem witch trials or Joan of Arc—Navarro’s novel can be seen as reclaiming a woman’s right to interrogate her own mind. It also speaks to how we create narratives for ourselves in order to survive what life throws our way. That Adriana continues to acknowledge the uncertainty of these stories, even as she finally finds the strength to tell them, is a powerful admission of our need to grow and adapt. We can’t always know how we should face what lies ahead, but we need to heed the advice of any voices that are willing to help.
Cory Oldweiler is an itinerant writer who focuses on literature in translation. In 2022, he served on the long-list committee for the National Book Critics Circle’s inaugural Barrios Book in Translation Prize. His work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Star Tribune, Los Angeles Review of Books, Washington Post, and other publications.
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