rocky41_7

A couple weeks ago I finished book #3 on the "Women in Translation" list from my library. This book was Dogs of Summer by Andrea Abreu, translated from Spanish by Julia Sanchez. The book description is:

It’s summer, 2005, and our ten-year-old narrator is consumed by thoughts of her best friend Isora. Isora is rude and bossy, but she’s also vivacious and brave; grownups prefer her, and boys do, too. That’s why sometimes she gets jealous of Isora, who already has hair on her vagina and soft, round breasts. But she’s definitely not jealous that Isora’s mother is dead, nor that Isora’s fat, foul-mouthed grandmother has her on a diet, so that she is constantly sticking her fingers down her throat. Besides, she would do anything for Isora: gorge herself on cakes when her friend wants to watch, follow her to the bathroom when she takes a shit, log into chat rooms to swap dirty instant messages with strangers. But increasingly, our narrator finds it hard to keep up with Isora, who seems to be growing up at full tilt without her—and as her submissiveness veers into a painful sexual awakening, desire grows indistinguishable from intimate violence.

Dogs of Summer is a stream-of-consciousness style novel told from the perspective of a 10-year-old girl living on the Canary Islands. We never learn her name; we only know her by the nickname she's called by her best friend, Isora, who terms her, in English, "Shit." 

 

To be upfront, this is a deeply unhappy book. Isora and the narrator live in poverty on the edge of a tourist village, where rich visitors from the Spanish mainland stay during the summer months and where the narrator's mother works cleaning houses. The atmosphere throughout the book is true to its title: it feels like the hot, humid, oppressive days of late summer (the "dog days"). There are many moments of childhood joy, like splashing around a scummy pool with a neighborhood friend or recounting telenovelas with dolls, but there is also a deep discomfort that pervades the entire novel, which is not a complaint—I think it's exactly what Abreu intended.

 

The narrator finds herself in the uncomfortable position of noticing that her only friend appears to be maturing faster than she is. She notes how Isora already has breasts and pubic hair, and how she likes to draw the attention of boys, and knows things about dieting and money. The narrator stands on the cusp of understanding difficult things about the world—class consciousness, queerness and homophobia, the abusive nature of diet culture—but she's just barely still in the shelter of childhood, which makes her a fascinating perspective. 

 

She is not yet old enough to call herself a lesbian, or even to truly recognize the sexual component of her attraction to Isora, but it is budding rapidly. By her own admission, the narrator barely knows who she is without Isora. 

 

From relatively early in the book, it's easy to see there cannot be a happy ending for Isora and the narrator's relationship. The narrator is almost obsessively attracted to Isora, Isora's interest in the narrator that way is possibly there, possibility not—but her interest in boys certainly is, and there are heavy-handed hints throughout that the girls do not live in an accepting community. You have the feeling throughout, as we follow the girls' sometimes tumultuous relationship, that it is barreling towards a miserable end. There is no version of this story that ends with the narrator and Isora a happy couple accepted by their community.

 

My only true complaint with the book was the ending. It felt like a cop-out, given the above, as if Abreu couldn't figure out how to end it, or how to resolve the girls' codependent relationship. 

 

The narration of the novel is visceral, not shying away from the grossness of childhood, puberty, and being human in general. There is nothing that seems to be enough to really repulse the narrator, especially if it involves Isora. In this way, it feels very honest and raw, which suits the awkward time of life the narrator is in, not fully in childhood anymore, but also not fully in the throes of puberty yet, and the awkward wording perfectly fits the narration of a child. It feels in some ways like the last dregs of her innocence, before she's forced to confront too many ugly realities about the world.

 

On the whole I thought it was well done, but do mind your trigger warnings with this one, it deals with some heavy subject material.