Lonely characters who know they are lonely, immersed in a silent fog of tedium and fatality, populate the stories in the new book by the original writer from the city of Huelva (Andalusia).
In the blurb on the back cover, the editors at Random House use, among other words, the word ‘isolation’ to define the nature of the nine stories that Elvira Navarro (Huelva, 1978) presents us with in ‘La sangre está cayendo al patio’. Well, back covers are not always accurate (in fact, they do not always seek to be accurate, if by that we mean telling the truth), but this one is: the characters in this oppressive book move between isolation and loneliness, showing contemporary life as a muffled and neglected phenomenon. And if all this sounds very gloomy to the reader, that's how it should be: Navarro is a writer who is not interested in jokes, fads, or concessions.
‘La sangre está cayendo al patio’ is a book quite impervious to both the literary trends that have been central over the last five years (body, desire) and some that are emerging (I am thinking of the reinterpretation of the mystical). That is to say, of course there are bodies and desires, since there are stories and protagonists who embody them, but Navarro's concerns work in a particular, very recognizable way, directly connected to what remains her best (and, above all, most important) book, ‘La trabajadora’ (2014).
