MOTHERS DON'T, Basque-language translation of very difficult subject

MOTHERS DON'T
KATIXA AGIRRE (tr. Katie Whittemore)
Open Letter Books
$15.95 trade paper, available now

August 2025: 40% discount on all Open Letter titles written or translated by female-identifying artists. (Discount is applied automatically at checkout on publisher's website and applies to all hardcover, paperback, and ebook editions.)

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A mother kills her twins. Another woman, the narrator of this story, is about to give birth. She is a writer, and she realizes that she knows the woman who committed the infanticide. An obsession is born. She takes an extended leave, not for child-rearing, but to write. To research and write about the hidden truth behind the crime.

Mothers don't write. Mothers give life. How could a woman be capable of neglecting her children? How could she kill them? Is motherhood a prison? Complete with elements of a traditional thriller, this a groundbreaking novel in which the chronicle and the essay converge. Katixa Agirre reflects on the relationship between motherhood and creativity, in dialogue with writers such as Sylvia Plath and Doris Lessing. Mothers Don't plumbs the depths of childhood and the lack of protection children face before the law. The result is a disturbing, original novel in which the author does not offer answers, but plants contradictions and discoveries.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Seeing Motherhood, that uncriticizable cult, as a prison exclusively populated by and designed for women, is very culturally risky. Think I'm exaggerating? Call Motherhood a "sacred cow" in public.

Crowds will gather. Trouble will brew. The speaker will be set upon from every point of the cultural compass. Like saying "religion is evil, a force for the worst people to do the most intentional damage to the greatest number of others" it results in much, much shouting about it from those alleging they most value the freedom to express ideas freely. Feminists will decry the insult perceived in comparing a woman to an animal, a Hindu will shout about colonialist appropriation of a cultural symbol, a mother will complain she is misunderstood....

I know this from experience.

That reality told me Author Agirre was on to a winner in this journalistic investigative thriller of a wealthy woman's "inexplicable" infanticide. I'm going to have to contextualize all of that: by definition, all things pertaining to mothers and motherhood are domestic; a story that centers a journalist investigating a crime in front of us is journalistic; a story involving the uncovering of the "why" of a violent crime no one wants investigated is a thriller. That exactly none of these things are present in their essential forms makes this literary fiction; that the center of the story is absolutely, essentially, irreducibly about femaleness's exclusive biological function, unshared and unshareable with men makes it feminist.

The entanglements do not stop there. This is a web, and it is meant to be. Meanings are massively interwoven: Do these women have a relationship, or is it a case of scraping a connection? Does our journo using an extended leave, not to care for her own child but to write about the infanticide as it travels through the legal system, suggest her fascination might be rooted in some envy? Her old connection is an artist, married to a wealthy man, possessed of an au pair...her own Swedish man isn't wealthy but she has resources many would envy just by giving birth there. Her story is of a difficult birth, a lot of time away from her child, permaybehaps escaping the overwhelming, extinguishing identity Mother, instead of drowning her child in a bathtub.

The story, in pop culture and true crime, is as old as the state of Motherhood. Sometimes it's just too much. Some people aren't interested in doing this lifelong job. Some aren't suited to it. And the less we talk about it, the more women fall into a life they do not want to lead because they had no external guidance to consequences, alternatives, solutions. Tragedies come when people, all of us, refuse to talk through the realities of life. That leaves us all at the mercy of myths. Myths arise to address needs; myths also get crafted, honed to serve as weapons. One thing is certain: The Cult of Mother is incredibly old and powerfully supported, and only a brave soul says, "No."

These kinds of stories tell us about a tragedy arising from the myth remaining unchallenged. That ought to be enough to send all y'all scurrying out to get a copy. I hope it will. For me, this was an above-average reading experience that didn't quite reach the pinnacles I always hope for a read to reach. As a translation of a translation, I wonder if that might be it. Translator Whittemore does a creditable job but I'm...unthrilled. Pleased. Contented. Unthrilled, though, and I am absolutely the audience for this tale. My own mother should never have had me, or any other child, because I can tell you her laziness was the only reason she never killed me. It was easier not to vaccinate me and to ignore my physical problems.

Not kidding. Being female does not mean a person is automatically suited to motherhood.

So, well, do I recommend the read? Yes. It is stylistically interesting, it tells a story I think many will find very involving and will invest their energy into while receiving ample rewards.

It will entertain, it will inform, it will offer rewards. The sale price, had I paid it, would feel very well worth the investment.

OF SAINTS AND MIRACLES, family tragedy that creates a folk hero

OF SAINTS AND MIRACLES
MANUEL ASTUR (tr. Claire Wadie)
New Vessel Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: This mesmerizing novel opens with a fratricide in a beautiful if impoverished region of northern Spain.

The perpetrator, Marcelino, lives alone in his parental home where he recalls having doted on his baby brother and sought to protect their mother from their father’s drunken rages. Author Manuel Astur’s poetic language and seamless blend of lyricism with the grotesque renders this book a treasure for the reader that includes the mother’s bewitching tales about the sun, the moon, and an invisible horse-drawn carriage of death. Glimpses into other villagers’ lives reveal a community that gathers to slaughter pigs for feasts and to confront a mysterious plague of white worms.

The mountainous green of rural Asturias is as much a character as these residents, from whom Marcelino flees to the wild peaks after his brother’s slaying, becoming a cult hero as he evades authorities. Of Saints and Miracles is a sensuous portrayal of an outcast’s struggle to survive in a chaotic world of both tragedy and magical splendor.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: What startled me most was being in medias res, knowing the murderer from the get-go and the inside out. That is a subversion of expectations that made me stick to the tale as it was being told. Normally I read murder-themed stories while looking for clues and hints from the off. I was made to think a different way about this true-life tale.

It worked in this read's favor, as the way the story's written is a joy to read:

When you see a weed in the vegetable plot you pull it out. When you've got more chickens than you need, you wring the neck of one and chuck it in the pot. When some dog mounts your bitch and she gives birth to a litter, you choose the best puppy, put the rest in an old potato sack with some stones and throw the sack in the river. When an apple tree no longer bears fruit, you cut it down and chop it up for firewood. When the grass in your field gets too long, you cut it, gather it up and store it in the hayloft. When a man in a suit comes and shows you some papers and tells you some stuff about mortgages and wants to take away your vegetable plot, your hens, your bitch and your fields, you defend yourself. Even if this man in a suit is your brother. And they can call you a revolutionary and talk about you on TV and in the papers and say who knows what about the oppressed peoples, or the last remaining guerrilla, but the truth is simpler, it's always simpler. And the truth is that you have to do what you have to do.
–and–
(Marcelino/)Leno's mother told him to give the little old lady a kiss. She smelled of cookies, earth, and bleach. Then she gave a toothless smile like a baby magpie and made a gurgling sound as if she had sand in her throat. She gurgled some more and his mother understood, even if he didn't. That was about all he could remember of the old world. The yellow smell of human piss and past lives filled with misery. A white washbowl with a tear shaped chip in its enamel, glowing in the darkness like an apparition. A one-eyed ginger cat asleep at the old woman's feet. A tatty old oil cloth on a rickety table. A few empty hooks, blackened by grease over the years. A handful of dried ears of corn tied up in a piece of cloth. Shadows dancing on the filthy wall. That's about it.

You like it, you don't...I don't think anyone can make much of a case that this isn't a robust storytelling voice. The way the voice comes across in telling this sad, brutal tale of a simple man solving problems he doesn't understand as best he can suited this reader as well as anything could.

The fearsomeness of committing a fratricide is never far from Marcelino's mind.

You see, this wound hurts just as much as yesterday’s wound, which hurt as much as the one before, and the one before the one before that, and as much as the first wound, the original wound that the first man feared. And though this wound is bleeding in the same way as all wounds bleed, and blood has always been the same, this wound thinks itself unique.
–and–
Death is never heroic. Life can be, but not death. Death comes to us all, but we know that if a woman watches over us on our deathbed, we’ll go to heaven.
–and–
All the dead are good because they are no longer alive and can therefore be imagined. As with fools and saints, we can lie about them because they can't defend themselves. They are a tale with countless morals, in illustration of whatever you like, a myth to be molded. The dead don't belong to the dead; the dead are ours.

These are simple thoughts, basic, grounded—even rooted—in the life of a man who has no sophisticated veneer to hide his innocent belief that the world can, and must, be made to make sense. Even or especially when it doesn't. Marcelino, based on a man called Tomasín whose life ended in exactly this concatenation of nightmares, becomes a symbol of the distant and rural province of Asturias's resistance to the rapidly modernizing economy of Spain after Franco's 1975 death. No one who's ever had a credit card or a cellphone contract won't, in some small way, fail to comprehend this desire to see someone stick it to The Man. No one whose family is normal won't, in some small way, recognize the urge to commit murder of a sibling who's just done you dirt.

Author Astur set out to tell us a story of a world, an old one, that is losing its battle to remain as it is. A world that pays attention, not compound interest. A world where Marcelino, salt of the Earth that he is, can be so in tune with Life that it becomes Art before his fulfilled eyes:

Just as a sun-soaked stone radiates heat for a while after nightfall, there is a point on still summer evenings whe objects appear to shine, as if to give back part of the generous daylight they've received. In such moments, Marcelino would stop what he was doing — clod of earth on the hoe, spade sunk deep in the hay, scythe dripping with fresh green blood — to stand up straight, wipe his brow with the back of his hand and contemplate the valley below. Everything would be gleaming, chiming like a bell of golden light. He would let his eyes fill with sky.

And so, as the sun set on that July evening, Marcelino stopped and contemplated. The house, the stilt granary, the cart with its shaft reaching skyward, the dry straw, the ears of corn, the cows in a single spine coming home along the track, the dog’s bowl, the rusty drum among the nettles, the axe in the tree stump, the woodchips and the logs, the sawdust on the ground, even the moss that hugged the stones in the walls of the small vegetable plot, even the trees in the nearby woods and the mountain peaks: everything shimmered, silhouetted against the deep-blue sky, in which a single bright star heralded the coming of a new age. Everything, that is, except the large bloodstain in the sawdust, and his brother’s body, both so dark they seemed to trap the light, as if the black ink that was slowly flooding the valley was seeping directly from them, saturating the sky and drawing the shapes of bats, which began to dance around the yellowish light of Cobre’s lone street lamp.

We go into this read certain murder is Wrong, murderers must be caught and required to suffer punishment; and come out without such a comfortable Certainty. Did Marcelino do wrong by killing his wicked brother? Yeah. Was he Wrong, was his action a rip in the fabric of society?

Dunno about you, but I came out of this read not at all sure. Read it soon, tell me what you thought.

NIGHT BOAT TO TANGIER, apples never fall far from trees now do they? Longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize

NIGHT BOAT TO TANGIER
KEVIN BARRY
Doubleday
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the dark waiting room of the ferry terminal in the sketchy Spanish port of Algeciras, two aging Irishmen — Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond, longtime partners in the lucrative and dangerous enterprise of smuggling drugs — sit at night, none too patiently. It is October 23, 2018, and they are expecting Maurice’s estranged daughter (or is she?), Dilly, to either arrive on a boat coming from Tangier or depart on one heading there. This nocturnal vigil will initiate an extraordinary journey back in time to excavate their shared history of violence, romance, mutual betrayals and serial exiles, rendered with the dark humor and the hardboiled Hibernian lyricism that have made Kevin Barry one of the most striking and admired fiction writers at work today.

THIS CAME TO ME VIA MY LIBRARY'S I.L.L. PROGRAM. THANKS Y'ALL!

My Review: Sunsets are biblical, nighttime flowers are dull amethysts, quiet rubies...a tiny, sultana-faced man in lilac slacks and a blazer beneath a pompadour appears, to no story affect...London's bones limned against weak and apologetic light...this is a beautiful read.

The story is horrible, two men...Maurice and Charlie...whose love of their loucheness and their criminality and their addictions, their love for each other that excludes all the women they adore so helplessly and whose lives they casually, violently ruin, seek their daughter.

No. They aren't gay. The woman they both adored for a time had a baby and, well, who knows whose she really is.

Their awfulness is, in their fiftysomething selves, incredible and unforgivable. Their time in the Bughouse... smoky-grey brick Victoriana carrying the misery of three centuries...detoxing from heroin addiction is not enough to make the difference in their shared past. Their shared room, twin beds, no hint of physical intimacy they're Irish fagawdsake. No one in this book touches except for fucking or killing. People die, have died rather; these men haven't but they know they will. Soonish.

But they are themselves to the end. Does one wonder that Dilly, the desperately sought daughter, left and doesn't wish to be found? One does not. But neither does one feel their hunger to see her again, their desperate desire to connect to Life, is out of character. The way they seek to accomplish that connection is both toxic and perfect. They only know each other in this world. They came to do this desperate thing together. They'll leave together, they'll make whatever there is to be made of breathing after life is over.

I will be a bit let down if this book does not win the 2019 Booker in twelve days. No, strike that, I'll be jawdroppingly stunned and not a little pissed off. Beautiful, poetic, smooth phrases telling hideous, deforming agonies in stertorously breathed oxygen-poor oceans of wreckage aren't common and neither should they be. A diet of these stories would put me in the Bughouse to breathe the smoky-grey brickdust of bygone agonies.

But when they appear these highly luminescent scimitars, curved to the reader's psychic throat, should get the fearful praise and nervous acknowledgment that Charlie and Maurice have always commanded.