Lead Review (I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness)

• Book: I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness
• Location: Catalonia
• Author: Irene Solà, Mara Faye Lethem (Translator)

Review Author: tripfiction

I Gave You Eyes and You looked Toward Darkness by Irene Solà, novel set in the mountains of Catalonia

TR: Mara Faye Lethem

Shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards 2026 – Fiction With A Sense of Place.

This a short and intense read. At the heart of the novel is Mas Clavell, a house nestled in the mountains which has been home to many women across generations. As it opens, Bernadeta is dying, watched over by Margarida. From page 1 the writing is imbued with a visceral sense of decay, as the story moves around between women past and present, ghosts and the devils, exploring the nature that surrounds the house, as night inevitably becomes day, on repeat. There is a roiling sense of darkness that permeates the narrative.

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The story is divided into chapters that denote stages of an unfolding day and as the lens of storytelling moves around the set, it feels like each chapter is created in a single take – the words are joined together in a breathless and dense account of supernatural darkness, almost a stream of consciousness as the author alights upon a variety of situations, people and animals, all colourfully described in raw terms.

There are copious similes that proved interesting but sometimes left me feeling disconnected: to wit “The kitchen window was narrow and deep, like an ear canal“. I had no real sense of what that meant. The author then goes on to imbue the house with facets of the human body adding another level to the fantastical tales and legends gleaned from traditional sources.

There is a huge amount of descriptive detail from prepping every part of a goat for consumption to choosing herbs suitable for causing a torrent of farts. Moreover there are bulls and wolves, and blood and gore, devils in espadrilles and gibbets for hanging. I came away from reading this book feeling that it was the literary equivalent of a Hieronymus Bosch painting but without his weird copulation scenes.

Setting is richly detailed though unspecific.

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