Alana S Portero’s debut novel La mala costumbre, or Unhealthy Behavior, begins at an depth of 11 and barely lets up. The primary time the protagonist falls in love, aged 5, is together with her neighbour’s bloodied corpse after he has plunged to his loss of life in a drug-induced stupor. He’s a fallen angel to her: “I merely yearned with my whole soul to kiss one thing so pretty and helpless.”
This juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane runs all through the remainder of the novel, from its title to the various secondary characters, every of which is assigned a legendary double: the abusive man who lives throughout the corridor is Bluebeard, his daughters Girl Godiva and Joan of Arc. Portero’s background as a historian lends these parallels depth and perspicacity, elevating what would possibly in any other case be an unremittingly bleak story into a better realm. Because the protagonist will get older, she spends her nights within the arms of “dragon-men”, who’re “tall, darkish, and potbellied”, in an try to search out the self-worth that’s denied her elsewhere in life.
Since its launch final yr, Unhealthy Behavior has grow to be a runaway bestseller in Spain, profitable prizes, vital acclaim and international rights offers. Set in Eighties Madrid, within the “brutal, tender” neighbourhood of San Blas, the novel follows a trans lady’s gradual, painful journey in direction of self-acceptance. Its characters are stunning, tragic males whose lives are destroyed by medication and violence, and headstrong, resilient girls who look out for each other. The narrator – who rejects her beginning identify however doesn’t reveal what she is named post-transition – is at first repulsed by the “grotesque” older trans girls she encounters, however with time finds solace and mentorship within the metropolis’s outcasts and misfits; she is taken below the wing of a few sensible, world-weary trans intercourse staff, one in all whom might or might not be a cannibal.
Pedro Almodóvar is an apparent reference level: he’s talked about within the textual content and one of many chapters is titled Volver (“to return”, just like the 2006 movie). The director himself has endorsed the e-book, saying: “I urge you, learn Unhealthy Behavior to completely grasp the diploma of adversity, ache, and hazard endured for the advantage of rising up trans.” He’s proper: the novel units out in clear, emotive language the on a regular basis struggles – exterior but additionally inner – confronted by trans folks. Lots of the sequences describing the protagonist’s psychological turmoil, as she meticulously maintains a facade that she is aware of is slowly destroying her, are extremely affecting.
The immediacy of the prose is evidently an asset, although the colloquial tone would possibly work higher within the unique Spanish; within the translation, by Mara Faye Lethem, sure phrases come throughout as inelegant or pompous (“friggin’”, “I’d shortly cross the edge into the slumberer’s nice past”). When it really works, the writing is putting and lyrical: mud is described as “the breath of time selecting our issues so we don’t neglect it’s operating out”, an previous lady’s giggle is “like watching the bark on a very tough pine tree change angle”. A scene describing Madrid’s Christmas rituals – “that tacky, exaggerated aura that suited it so properly” – is especially evocative.
The novel’s tendency in direction of the overwrought (as befits a narrator who admits an ongoing infatuation with Morrissey) might do with variations in tone to make key scenes hit extra potently. However the truth that a e-book like this will, amid rising world hostility to trans lives, achieve such traction is extremely heartening. When the narrator transforms herself “right into a goddess”, head held excessive, it seems like a hard-won victory.
Kathryn Bromwich is the writer of On the Fringe of the Woods (Two Greenback Radio)
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