The voices of Adriana

A Spanish writer and philosophy scholar grieves her mother and takes care of her ailing father in this uneven offering from Navarro (The City in Winter). Adriana is preoccupied by everything but her unfinished thesis. She frets about her widower father's ill health following a stroke and fixates on his daily habit of searching for hookups on dating apps. Adriana looks half-heartedly for love herself, drifting from one short-term relationship to the next and remaining hung up on an unnamed colleague known as the "bearded man" who abandoned his wife and children for Adriana before leaving her three years later. Much of the novel meanders, just as Adriana meanders through her life, but it greatly improves in the final section, which comprises three narratives ostensibly written by Adriana as part of her thesis, including that of her mother's stifling childhood and later career as a pediatrician, her grandmother's loveless marriage to a local medical assistant and farm owner during the Spanish Civil War, and Adriana's infatuation with the bearded man. Navarro's metafictional exercise intrigues, even if it doesn't always hang together. (Feb.)

When she was working, Adriana opened Twitter every half hour. There was rarely anything interesting. But even if she only took a quick look, as if skimming the timeline was a sort of reflex action, she'd sometimes find a tweet that seemed to be a response to her own thoughts; so, for example, one morning when she was reflecting on her father's illness, she came across: "Death stalks your whole life. You can't escape it. Why not become its apprentice?" It was an advertisement for a videogame in which death has an apprentice. She clicked on the link to view the cover. The Grim Reaper, with the look of a pissed-off pixie, carried a gleaming scythe and was surrounded by zombie-like, blue spirits with sunken eyes. In those images, the spirit and putrid flesh merged in an agreeable sort of way. Putrefaction of the body continued into the Other World, where it makes no sense. Excerpted from The Voices of Adriana by Elvira Navarro All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.