Let me start this review by saying how unique, beautiful and memorable Solà’s writing is. I had the pleasure of discovering her previously translated to English book When I Sing, Mountains Dance with a bookclub and I am eternally grateful that, first, the bookclub put this book on my radar and two, that I had a chance to read and discuss it with other readers. It has since become one of my favourite books.
But getting to I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness, it is a beautifully and poetically written short novel weaving mythology and stories from the Pyrenees in Catalonia, Spain. Originally written in Catalan and translated by Mara Faye Lethem it is a masterpiece of poetic prose and incredible skill in language from both the author and the translator. The book follows the women of a secluded farmhouse throughout many generations as well as through one day, the storytelling cleverly meandering between the two timelines, blending them together as well as blending the world of the living women and the past lives. In the passing of one day we are introduced to two women, one on her deathbed and the other watching over her. We slowly get to meet the youngest of the family line as well as all that came before them. The book centers the lives of women who put through difficult circumstances may turn to the devil and carry the burdens of the family, men and terrible events with whatever means they have. The lines of reality are crossed early as the children are born without vital organs, body parts or with mysterious abilities, as the devil reappears and the house is bursting with all of the stories and time happening at once.
This book is an experience like no other, it is best read patiently, with attention to the beautiful language and extraordinary storytelling. If the title itself makes you curious, you should definitely give this book a read!

Thank you to Granta Publications and NetGalley for the eARC!

I was hooked, lined and sinkered by the book’s title, but then I started to read.
Sounded like a string of magic mushroom hallucinations, with scores of weird women and poo and gore galore. It was like taking a rabid quill for a walk through a Bosch landscape.
Not at all sure what it was all about, if anything.
Sorry to say it did not interest me enough to persevere all the way through.

Grimy, confusing, folkloric fever dream. Strangely compelling and guttural. I'm still not entirely sure what I've just read but I enjoyed the journey.

I Gave You Eyes And You Looked Towards Darkness was my first of Irene Sola’s novels, and I feel I hit the bull’s eye discovering her work. As an advocate for folklore as a necessary cultural expression—so often overlooked, ridiculed, or disregarded—I was immediately engrossed by Sola’s ability to blend so many different themes into an eerie family saga(ish). Every page emits otherworldly secrets rooted in Catalan tradition, drawing readers into a narrative that lingers long after the final line.

Set against the rugged backdrop of the Catalonia mountains, an old farmhouse uncannily watches as the scum of bandits, ghosts, beasts, and demons festers in its soil and air. The story follows a matriarchal family surrounded by many secrets and a cursed legacy that challenges time. Bernadeta is a crone lying in her deathbed when her family and caretakers wander around preparing to throw her a party to celebrate her passing. Told in daring prose, Sola blurs the lines between years—please ignore the book's description or you'll get a spoiler of how many—creating a hypnotic/psychedelic journey that begins with the matriarch Joana trying to double-cross the devil. Needless to say, the devil was not happy, cursing her family for generations to come.

In just under 200 pages, Sola delivers a literary horror that is both atmospheric and richly textured. Drawing from Catalan folklore, her tale oscillates between foreboding and satiric tones, injected with the magical realism of classics like One Hundred Years of Solitude—with a darker twist. The similarities manifest through the numerous characters and generations that at times felt confusing, as there wasn’t much character development or contextual backstory. Although the successive introduction of characters initially felt disorienting, I soon stopped focusing on the individual pieces of the puzzle and realized that this is not a "traditional family saga novel" but rather a twisted exploration of deeper themes and traditions.

The prose is both brutal and evocative, breathing life into her many unlikeable characters, immersing the reader in the dreadful, mysterious, and folkloric narrative that provides moments of both dark humor and discomfort. The author’s note further exposes the many folkloric inspirations and historical events by providing intriguing context that enriches the overall experience. While some may find the convoluted story and the maze of names and generations challenging, these very elements ultimately contribute to the story’s thematic richness. This novel is a must-read for any reader of literary horror, especially those who appreciate layered narratives.

Overall, I Gave You Eyes And You Looked Towards Darkness stands out as a unique novel in the literary horror genre. Though it might not entice every reader, Sola’s distinctive blend of folklore and dark satire makes it a must-read for anyone interested in seeing how contemporary authors are reshaping horror into something both literarily accomplished and compelling. I’m already looking forward to following her future works, and I've already got her highly praised debut novel, When I Sing, Mountains Dance.

<b>Rating: 3.5/5</b>

Domestic horror and a visceral quality to the writing make this a difficult, suffocating read full of myths and folklore and so many women it can be a bit confusing to follow. The folklore, the multiple women thwarted and the relentless on and on and on of lives lived quietly and in suffering. There are powerful descriptions and wonderful stories, in this short and brutal exploration of life and death and everything in between.

I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness
by Irene Solà
Translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem

Dark, dark, dark, but cunning and explicit and titillating, this book is an assault on the senses.

Set in 'Mas Clavell', a farmhouse in the Guilleries of Catalonia, this is one of the weirdest stories I have read in a while, but I haven't been able to look away.

As Bernadeta awaits death, the household prepares a party, but it's the women who went before her that are doing the prep. During the day that the novel is set, they are slaughtering and stripping, soaking and searing, stewing and seasoning, and as the feast is coming together, each of their stories emerges.

Going back several generations, the narrative unspools in the style of oral history, personal accounts mixed with hearsay, folklore and mythology, stories of devils and witches, curses and spells, bandoliers and rebels, but most of all, the women who stayed put, layering upon each other, preserving the lifestyle and traditions.

There are some truly horrific and brutal passages describing butchery (not just of animals), but told with humour and the dead pan manner of those that have seen too much. You'd think it would be difficult to read, but somehow, the tone is pitch perfect.

Part ghost story, part horror, part fairytale, this is a testimony to the sustaining power of women, their urges, their silent suffering, their resilience, their care, their sisterhood and their storytelling.

It's so short, but somehow it crams in four hundred years of history.

Thanks to #Netgalley and #Granta for providing an ARC for review purposes.

I need more time—which I don't have—to think about how the novel used its less than 200 pages. It did a lot. The closest I came to understanding it was the collapse of the past and present, rendering the difference between the mythical, the dead, the dying, and the living uncertain, to say the least. At times, the novel was deliciously disorienting. The mythical, deep past plays a key role, so nature teems with aliveness, albeit not the light kind. It's a goose bump-inducing, pleasurable read. I just wish I had read it in an appropriate season, late autumn, instead of during the first heat-wave of the season, but the climate is a-changing and guess who's to blame.

"Because in the morning a naive woman could believe that the night was ending. But night never ended; it merely waited, hiding, and always returned"
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I've been a bit out of sorts of late. A small missing piece in the machine that makes us operate and live happily in the world feels out of alignment. A loose bolt, a worn washer, a trip in the circuit. Like with all technology and machinery that I struggle to comprehend, I will wait and let time do its unseen magic. 
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In the same way, I'm not entirely sure what was going on in this book. Lost in a setting that both felt painfully real and at the same time ethereal. I'm not even particularly confident in outlining the book because much of it went over my head, or perhaps somehow into my heart. It is deeply poetic with a real strand of folklore running through it. I struggled with the range of characters that wandered languidly through the book. What was happening was at times confusing but somehow deeply beautiful. 
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This is a visceral book, filled with bodily fluids, blood, guts and humanity. At times it is also darkly humorous. The scene in which reticent parents unwilling to approve a marriage where cursed to fits of uproarious farting, was particularly laugh inducing. This is a powerful book about generations of women, toiling on the land and in a world that is deeply violent towards them. I loved it, but I can't really say why I particularly loved it. I can't even really say I understood most of the book. At times I was completely confused. Yet, somehow I very much liked this book and I'm keen to see what Sola does in the future.
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This comes out on the 5th June, and a big thanks to Granta and Netgalley for allowing me an advanced sneak peek.

Thank you to NetGalley and Granta for providing me an eARC to review!

I want to preface this by saying I'm a Lapvona fan so I don't mind gross and weird but this was just really not my thing.

The literary style I found incomprehensible, and just when I thought I knew what was happening the perspective would shift and someone would poop and I'd be lost again. I thought the idea of ghosts trying to interpret modern life interesting, but those glimpses felt so fleeting in the haze of longwinded descriptions of boring or gross stuff it couldn't keep me going.

I am not really sure who the audience is for this but if you like poop and goat butchering boy howdy it's your lucky day!!

This was a haunting narrative that blended folklore, history, and the supernatural as it showed the link between memory, myth, life and death.

In I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness, Irene Solà conjures a raw, unsettling world where myth bleeds into reality and generations of women bear the weight of a centuries-old curse. Told through fractured voices—earthbound, spectral, even animal—the novel resists linearity, instead spiraling through time in a hypnotic, fevered rhythm. Solà’s language is visceral, physical, and strange, rich with rural Catalan texture and elemental force. This isn’t a comforting story—it’s a reckoning: with legacy, with pain, with what it means to inherit a body and a history. Daring, disorienting, and unforgettable.

for beginners, Mariana Enriquez meets (a little bit of) Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Gothic, folklorish...literally inviting ghost to gossip with you while u lay down and wait for death, and everybody is feasting outside.

And here kid, why you shouldn't make pact with the devil.

Someone and by that I meant another reader who read this particular novel by Sola had said : 100 years of Solitude, but make it Catalan. And I thought that was the most perfect way to describe and / or sum this up. I can imagine it could get overwhelming to some readers who may not be used to the heavy structure - long lines, long paragraphs - and all that framing grotesque, over the top absurd narrative with a Satanic, biblical tease on top of that. But if you can get over that or get used to that, you'll this quite a rewarding read. Can't say I loved every bit of it. Rendered me sort of breathless having read this quickly with very little breaks.

"What would Satan possibly be doing in Catalonia?"

Many thanks to Granta for a gifted copy of this!

One farmhouse in rural Catalonia witnesses the lives and deaths, triumphs and struggles, of generations of women. Weaving these narratives into hallucinatory and vivid prose, Sola forces us to confront what it means to be woman, family, alive.

A wild ride that puts you through a rollercoaster of emotions: disgust, despair, anger, awe, reflection. I immediately loved this book for its unflinching, raw depiction of female relationships, it really reached the heart of the matter for me.

Over time, this slightly waned in its effect - abstract sometimes veers into incomprehensible (and I am usually a lover of experimental and non-linear narratives!) As we span through the chronology if each daughter, the religious myth grows, contorts, deforms - it was, at times, hard to decipher or distinguish which women we were talking about (perhaps the point, but it didn't quite land, if so.)

That being said, this was genuine and heartfelt, violent and uncompromising - a narrative that is like scratching a scab. Definitely Carter-esque, this is earthy and rich with layers of meaning and revelatory takes on the female experience and gender - not for the the faint-hearted or squeamish!

Do you like fable-like books centring women and engaging with the mysterious and the eerie? You're in the right place. Rarely do I come across books as singular as this one - you are either going to really like it, because it is offering exactly what you think it would offer, or you are going to struggle to get through it. The lush, sometimes overtly so, prose is used to tell a multi-generational story of women, alive and dead, whose very being is tied to a crooked house in mountainous Catalonia. Told in a barely consecutive narrative, the story starts as an old woman lay dying, and another one watching over her. All of the women in this house are connected to the matriarch Joana, who made a deal with the devil and managed to trick him, only to be cursed back with a curse following her line generation after generation. As the men of the family keep dying and leaving their women, the women keep surviving, like the harsh plants of the mountains they live among.

Folk stories, witches, devils, Christianity and, of course, the Spanish Civil War, loom large in this book. I connected more with it once it started reflecting and commenting on the real events and the passage of time throughout the 20th century. On the scale of The Boy with the Black Rooster to Pedro Paramo, a novel it is in active conversation with, it is closer to The Boy than the masterpiece levels of Pedro it aims for. For me personally, as not a big fan of this type of book, it landed somewhere just behind Carrion Crow, a recent decent offering by Heather Parry. Sola's novel also, perhaps surprisingly, is in conversation with some of Ali Smith's work, and it did have echoes of the Scottish writer's passion for language. The fable-like storytelling behind this book makes it hard to connect to the characters and the story and see their troubles and concerns as alive and real.

If this is magical realism, there ain't much realism here, but if you like fable-like atmospheric books with a strong sense of place, this is for you. I personally struggled to get through it, but I appreciate the talent and the craft behind this one, it just wasn't for me.