Reading the fiction of award-winning Spanish author Sara Mesa frequently means engaging with power dynamics, for Mesa intentionally toys with cultural clashes to feather distress into her novels and stories. In Four by Four, originally published in 2012 and translated into English in 2020, the disappearance of a scholarship student at a college otherwise populated with the offspring of the elite sets off the action. Scar, from in 2015 and translated for Anglophones in 2017, uses an online relationship to dissect domination and obsession. And Among the Hedges, released in Spain in 2018 and translated in 2021, details the clandestine friendship between a 50-year-old man and a 14-year-old girl. Within these tales are suggestions of urban violence, fat shaming, gaslighting, drug use, and talk of pedophilia.Yet unlike contemporaries merely out to shock while tackling divisive subjects, Mesa’s prose never feels exploitative. Instead, it succeeds thanks to the author’s unfiltered and honest view of the world, and in the just-released story collection, Bad Handwriting, translated with aplomb by Katie Whittemore, Mesa continues to pilot readers through explorations of unease to spotlight life’s dark corners.
Initially published in 2016, the collection consists of 11 stories, and throughout, characters are presented with circumstances that rattle their comfort. Take, for instance, “Just a Few Millimeters,” which opens with a biology teacher visiting her severely disabled teenage student at his messy home to conduct an exam. The boy cannot speak, cannot move his limbs, and uses subtle eye movements to signal a liaison when attempting to communicate. Mesa begins the story in these environs to place the teacher, who doubles as the story’s first-person narrator, at a disadvantage in an unfamiliar space. The woman feels like a fish out of water despite her position of authority, and this sensation transfers to the audience, granting Mesa a sneaky inversion of situational control. A similar emotional appeal runs through the opening pages of “White People,” the collection’s longest story. Here, a young woman leaves her parents to visit her sister, Mariola, in Cárdenas. Her parents are upset that she will not be around for the Christmas holiday, yet the protagonist continues her journey, for she knows that Mariola is secretly pregnant, and she intends to help her out with the baby’s adoption. When she arrives in Cárdenas, however, she checks into a hostel and is unsettled by the new environment that she sees as beneath her. The audience likewise scrambles for purchase, latching onto the protagonist as the lone element of consistency from scene to scene.
“Just a Few Millimeters” takes on the power of teacher over student, or lack thereof. As the narrator initially comments on the boy’s appearance — including his “squashed, deformed body” and “almost-flattened skull” — the queasiness of the encounter intensifies, so much so that, days after giving the boy his exam, when the school’s principal tells the teacher that the student plans on attending the class’s planned sex education lesson in person, it’s easy to initially understand the teacher’s objection. “White People,” on the other hand, contemplates the power associated with gender, as well as that of race. Mariola decides against putting her unborn baby up for adoption, which leads to an act of violence, yet more interestingly, the story is told through the voice of Mariola’s sister, and it contains copious examples of casual racism.
In these two stories, Mesa’s bold use of characterization stands out. Where lesser authors shy away from shaping unlikable protagonists, Mesa leans into their flaws and abrasive tendencies, sinking her audience into the sludge of humanity and capturing a truer sense of the world. The teacher narrating “Just a Few Millimeters” is a nervous wreck, an overthinker who cannot see past what she considers correct. She tells her story in a series of long, complicated proclamations that encourage the reader to barrel through with worried energy. To wit, here is the story’s opening sentence:
“The first thing I got when I walked in, the first impression, I mean, was of being someplace extremely alien and heavy and dark, a sense that went beyond the closed doors and low ceilings and huge quantity of accumulated junk in the entryway as well as in the hallway that the woman immediately invited us to come through, you wouldn’t call it clutter, no, it wasn’t that, but more like a lack of space, and of course the need for all that junk, equipment, to be more precise, oxygen tanks and stretchers and other orthopedic devices I don’t know the names for, in addition to all a home’s usual effects — a shopping caddy, folding stepladder, shoeboxes, cleaning products — all kinds of things heaped everywhere because the dwelling, and this I’d already sensed from outside, was rather small.”
Mesa (as well as Whittemore in her sharp translation) employs commas, stammers, self-corrections, and em dashes to deposit the reader in the protagonist’s overworked brain. As the pages accumulate, this technique makes for the establishment of a rather difficult character, yet the author’s dedication to the teacher’s worldview adds a sliver of sympathy for the woman. Even as she tries to explain why the student should avoid the sex education session, there’s something pathetic about her rambling opinion, so focused on the concrete and never on the emotional, that it keeps the reader by her side, feeling sorry for her lack of empathy:
“The talk had a practical element, it would be focused on preventing unwanted pregnancy — we’d had a few in our high school already — and sexually transmitted diseases, and would address responsible intimate relationships in general, so in my opinion it was an absurdity — ‘an absurdity’ I said, but quickly corrected myself — a mistake to bring a boy who would, unfortunately, never get to have a go at sex — maybe I said ‘be with a girl’ — and having him there would be very uncomfortable, it would be baffling, even for him, which was why it had to be avoided, the visit had to be cancelled, it was a mistake, I repeated, a mistake.”
The characterization tactic in “Just a Few Millimeters” is evident in every sentence, and by the end, once the disaster the teacher predicts comes to pass, it’s easy to see how she brought chaos upon herself. She substituted the authority engrained within her as a teacher with paranoia, and thus let a manageable situation spin out of control. In “White People,” conversely, Mesa works in a subtler manner, edging her narrator closer to outright racist remarks over the length of the story. From the jump, the protagonist refers to the physical attributes of everyone she encounters, from noting that Mariola’s boyfriend “was a dark guy, thin, with a teeny-tiny ring in his ear” to commenting that the woman running the hostel was “a big, light-skinned Black woman — a mulatta, that was the word.” These observations are noticeable, particularly since the title of the story winks at race, yet they are easy to read past without major red flags, for the story of Mariola, her pregnancy, and the violence about to occur are enough to command attention. Soon, though, remarks on race and skin tone pile up. The narrator assumes a fight she hears is between two “Chinese people who shrieked as if they were stabbing each other.” While walking outside, she observes “a few Romanian guys, very dark-skinned, with their gold molars” who “rubbed their gloves hands together and murmured among themselves in their strange language.” And near the story’s conclusion, the tired narrator gives herself fully over to uttering slurs. Standing in the doorway of a nightclub, she describes the clientele in the following way: “They were spics, spics like there were everywhere in Cárdenas. They passed by me and went inside: a group of squat men and women, dark, with flat foreheads and wide teeth.”
What makes these final slurs so damning is the way they juxtapose with the actions of the protagonist, who spends most of the story attempting to help her sister, acting as a self-sacrificing, loyal sibling. She aims for nobility early on, and this establishes a connection with the reader that allows for easy dismissal of the characters initial critiques of those she faces. So when Mesa drops any restraint in the story’s final paragraphs and lets loose the character’s true nature, the effect is powerful, and it compels the reader to reevaluate their feelings toward the narrative as a whole.
Bad Handwriting addresses several other power dynamics beyond these two stories. “Mármol,” “Papá Is Made of Rubber,” and “Cattle Tyrants” take on the struggles of children with adults, death, and wealth. The excellent, harrowing “What Is Going on with Us” focuses on workplace authority, fracturing its timeline to chronicle the interactions between a seedy business bigwig and two much-younger female employees. In “‘Creamy Milk and Crunchy Chocolate’,” the power of guilt rears its head after a traffic accident kills two elderly walkers. And the fabulously meta closing story, “Mustelids,” plays with the control storytellers hold over their readers. In it, two coworkers wander a museum while on a business trip, and one admits to the other that he has read her published book of stories. He tells her that he doesn’t understand how she can write so often about “suicide and depression and incest.” He wonders why all of her characters are, in his opinion, bitter and selfish, while she presents herself as a perfectly normal coworker. “Why do they have to be like that?” he eventually asks. “Is that the type of people you come in contact with? That you live with every day? Is everyone like that?”
The female coworker tries to explain that she sees herself atop on a metaphorical tightrope, always wobbling over an abyss, and that writing is her escape. She says that while she conjures danger, “in giving form to horror” via fiction, she is able to stop “its realization.” It is a powerful statement, and it is one, I believe, that might double as a reason to celebrate writers like Sara Mesa, for in books like the successful Bad Handwriting, she is unafraid of letting the elements we sweep under the rug take center stage. Mesa urges her audience to meet the unlikeable head-on. In doing so, she allows us to see just where our reflections hide in the frightening world of reality.
[Published by Open Letter on July 26, 2022, 208 pages, $15.95 paperback]