Elvira Navarro was listed as one of Granta's "Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists" in 2010. The 10 surreal, occasionally humorous and tender stories in Rabbit Island are sublime walks through a melancholic blood-flecked dreamscape.
An author seeks an "aura of serene iciness" for her writing, while a paw slowly grows from her earlobe, in "Strychnine"--an autobiographical warning to Navarro's audience. In the titular "Rabbit Island," a man alters an uninhabited island, with gruesome consequences. The result is a compelling take on cycles of colonialism and environmental degradation. Meanwhile, "Regression" comments on marginalization by marrying near-fugue states with the nature of cities and the often-ahistorical memories and vagaries of youth. A man in the sinister "Notes on the Architecture of Hell" questions reality while secretly following his brother, whose mind is like a "tangle of overlapping strata," around the haunted streets of Madrid.
In "Paris Périphérie," a woman with a muddled sense of direction declares loss of memory "frightening" as well as "liberating." Navarro both indicts and reveres the function of memory. And in "The Top Floor Room," another woman is transforming, finding comfort in being a "nocturnal animal" in the streets as a "cierzo [blows]." Place is again invoked as characters break free, for better or worse, from accepted realities and constraints.
Navarro's characters seek larger meaning, often flirting with or downright plunging into cruelty to produce connections, seize control or merely be anywhere other than where they are. Unsettling and full of ghosts, Rabbit Island lays bare the remarkable heart of a hungry and somewhat terrifying philosopher. --Shannon Hanks-Mackey, writer and editor