At Bloomsbury’s Conway Hall, home of South Place Ethical Society, where Orwell once spoke, the Poison Girls sang and whose proscenium arch exhorts “To Thine Own Self Be True”, I mingled with a very particular collective, producers of rare, recondite and marginal publications.
 
Here, uniformly anomalous, were creative ephemera, limited edition etched linocuts, esoteric and hybrid poetics, experimental and conceptual, stone lithographs, reconstructed images, single-story chapbooks, a “purveyor of slow dissemination” and hand-stitched, rubber-stamped paper pulp.
 
I rather liked the celebration of oddness. It made this one-man publishing enterprise, i.e. me and my books, who am incapable of defining my own genres, feel positively mainstream. They still did a better trade than me that day.

Three young women, a lone scientist dedicated to saving snails and two sisters who will try any means to win back their mother, have signed up as supposed nubile prizes in a bridal agency for visiting foreigners. The women’s impulsive kidnapping of thirteen bachelors using Yeva’s laboratory van is temerarious enough, but this is Ukraine, it’s February 2022, and as the old vehicle rumbles through the forest, the already off-kilter romance tour is sucker-punched by Russia’s full-scale invasion. And the narrative slides off like the van on winter ice.
 
This is, in effect, what happened to Maria Reva’s novel satirizing the exploitative trade in—allegedly—traditional, submissive Ukrainian brides.  She had to decide, halfway through the story, with the country of her birth suddenly at war, how to continue writing. The book, unsurprisingly, takes a radical turn. The narrative is abandoned, replaced by fictional correspondence between the author and her editor, with a magazine that objects to the gallows humour of an essay when this is precisely faithful to the conversations taking place in Kyiv’s air raid shelters, and a surreal conversation with Yurt Makers. Reva even tosses out a derisory happy ending and an Acknowledgments page, before the original story is taken up again, with the difference that everything has changed.
 
Russian tanks and infantry are streaming towards Ukraine’s major cities, already under aerial bombardment. Meanwhile, Reva still has Yeva and the two sisters with a bunch of foreign men locked in the campervan. And Yeva has a particular obsession with a unique snail for which she seeks a mate, lest it become one more endling. An endling being the very last living example of a species. Yeva, being asexual, knows what it is like to feel the end of a certain evolutionary line. The metaphor of the danger of independent Ukraine being eradicated does not need spelling out.
 
War is a natural habitat for the absurd. As the van lurches from one direction to another, so does the fate and narrative of its characters, including the hopelessly romantic Pasha, one of the trapped bachelors, a native-born Ukrainian who (like Reva, the author) has grown up in Canada.
 
Fragments of memory, or imagined memory, alternative versions of their attempt to rescue a grandfather in besieged Kherson, who refuses to leave his apartment, remind us that this is and can be is no normal storytelling. Is he the grandfather of the two sisters? Or of the owner of the bridal agency? Those who have read about her will know that we are really reading about Maria Reva’s own desperate concern for her own grandfather in that city, bombed and occupied by the Russians, before being liberated, and fighting still for its survival.
 
The changing versions of the story reflect the real uncertainty. What is certain is the women’s “shared blood” and a bond amidst the emergency.

Son muchas las cosas que me han gustado de este libro.
 
En el pasado, me ha costado mucho encontrar escritores españoles con los que conectar. He empezado libros en español y los he encontrado inaccesibles, demasiado literarios, o que intentaban impresionar demasiado, pesadamente irónicos, floridos o simplemente decepcionantes. Probablemente porque mi español no estaba a la altura. Con este libro, he encontrado a alguien y un estilo de escritura con los que me entiendo. Rosa Montero tiene claro lo que quiere comunicar. Tiene ritmo. Funciona.
 
Si me sitúan en un mundo que recuerde remotamente a Blade Runner, mi mente tiende a crear su propia atmósfera. El título por sí solo me atrajo, citando el inesperado y trágico discurso de Batty al final de su lucha, y la cita del Eclesiastés que precede la novela se reflejaba en las últimas palabras del humanoide (y me recuerda, de mi propio panteón personal, de mi propia memoria poco fiable, Take It As It Comes de The Doors: “Time to die.”)
 
De hecho, hay muy poco del desolado mundo de Deckard aquí, pero se mantiene la fuerte premisa de los replicantes con una esperanza de vida limitada que no les permite envejecer, acompañada de la igualmente poderosa y fértil imagen de los implantes de memoria y las preguntas sobre la identidad. Creada como una replicante de combate, Bruna Husky será a la vez formidable y vulnerable. También es detective solitaria, inteligente y escéptica pero empática, justo el tipo de personalidad que sabrá guiarnos por la acción y el razonamiento a lo largo de las páginas. Se tratará de supervivencia, intrigas, misterio, valentía y amor.
 
En lugar de Los Ángeles, tenemos un Madrid reconocible, que para mí es aún más íntimamente familiar. Montero hace muy bien una cosa en la que muchos autores de ciencia ficción caen en detrimento propio y ajeno. Tiene cuidado de no sobrecargar el entorno futurista—ni al lector—con demasiados cambios tecnológicos y sociales que pueden hacer sentir que el mundo es una fantasía privada del escritor que no tiene nada que ver con nosotros. Hay elementos e incluso seres nuevos, pero son pertinentes para la trama. Del mismo modo, los neologismos se mantienen dentro de una cuota manejable y comprensible.
 
Como muchas novelas sobre tecnohumanos que conviven con humanos normales, el libro tiene un ambiente algo existencialista y un tema subyacente sobre el racismo, por lo que Rosa Montero, naturalmente, aporta seriedad a la historia, pero sin ser tendenciosa.
 
 Confieso que tengo dudas sobre algunos detalles, sobre todo en el desenlace y el final, pero la historia y la caracterización son más que suficientes para que salga bien. Me quedo con una larga e interesante lista de vocabulario desconocido que buscar (palabras maravillosas como
engruñar, repantigado, oquedad, beodo, rezongar, quincallería!) y con ganas de leer el próximo reto de Bruna en El peso del corazón.
 
                                                                            *          *          *
 
There is so much I liked about this book.
 
In the past, I have had real difficulty finding a Spanish writer I can get on with. I have picked up books in Spanish only to find them inaccessible, too literary, or else trying too hard to impress, heavily ironic, or flowery, or just disappointing. Very probably because my Spanish just wasn’t up to it. With this, I found someone and a writing style I could connect with. Rosa Montero has clarity about what she wants to communicate. It has pace. It works.
 
Put me in a world even remotely reminiscent of Bladerunner and my mind tends to produce its own atmospherics. The title on its own drew me in, quoting Batty’s unexpectedly tragic, dying speech, and the prefaced quotation from Ecclesiastes was echoed by the humanoid in his final words (which always brings to my mind, from my own personal pantheon, from my own unreliable memory, The Doors’ Take It As It Comes:  “Time to die.”)
 
There is, in fact, very little of Deckard’s desolate world here, but the strong premise holds of replicants with a limited lifespan that will not allow them to grow old, accompanied by the equally powerful and fertile image of memory implants and questions about identity. Created as a combat rep, Rosa Montero’s Bruna Husky will be both formidable and vulnerable. She is also a lone detective, smart and sceptical yet empathetic, just the kind of personality to lead us by action and reasoning through the pages. It will be about survival, skulduggery, mystery, bravery and love.
 
Instead of L.A., we have a recognizable Madrid, which for me is even more intimately familiar. Montero does one thing very well that many SF authors indulge in to their and our detriment. She is careful not to overload the futuristic environment—or the reader—with too much technological and societal change that can make one feel that the world is a writer’s private fantasy which has nothing to do with us. New elements and even new creatures there are, but they are germane to the plot. Similarly, neologisms are kept to a manageable and comprehensible quota.
 
Like many a novel about technohumans coexisting with regular humans, the book has a somewhat existentialist ambience and an underlying theme about racism, and so Rosa Montero naturally lends gravitas to the story but without being tendentious.
 
I confess to some doubts about a few details, particularly in the denouement and ending, but the story and characterization are more than strong enough to bring it off. I come away with a long and interesting list of unknown vocabulary to look up (wonderful words such as engruñar, repantigado, oquedad, beodo, rezongar, quincallería!) and a desire to read Bruna’s next challenge in El Peso del Corazón.