THE WONDERS

Prizewinning Spanish poet Medel’s debut novel examines the lives of three generations of women in Madrid with an unsparing eye.

A series of interlocking narratives about María, Carmen, and Alicia—all working-class women who find themselves in the capital city for varied reasons—the novel traces transformations in Spanish life, culture, and politics from the end of the Franco era to the 21st century. The lives of Medel’s three protagonists, however, remain tied to their troubling economic circumstances, and a telling epigraph from Philip Larkin (“Clearly money has something to do with life”) provides a clue to the direction the women’s stories will take. A teenage pregnancy forces unmarried María out of her family’s modest provincial home to the city, away from her baby, Carmen, and into a series of demanding, physically exhausting jobs. Carmen’s apparently good fortunes turn after the suicide of her debt-burdened husband, and she and her school-age daughters struggle in the aftermath. Alicia, one of Carmen’s daughters, is haunted by her father’s death and floats through life with a lackluster retail job, stultifying marriage, and a habit of picking up random men for brief, distracting sexual encounters. Economic insecurity forces all three to compromise dreams and life choices, and some notes of their lives echo in the others (albeit in ways unrecognized by the women). The 2018 Women’s March in Madrid frames the beginning and end points of the novel and allows Medel to bring some of her major players together on one stage even if they are acting in their own dramas. The translation from Spanish of Medel’s unvarnished look at three constrained lives is unsentimental and direct.

Money changes everything (if you can get your hands on it).