The bill has come due for every pleasant reading moment I’ve ever experienced. It arrived in the form of an autobiographical narrative Land of Women by the Spanish author Maria Sanchez. Feelings of chthonic horror overcome me whenever I am visited by the memory of reading the book.
The reason why I hate Land of Women is not that its author is a standard sloganeering lefty. Cristina Fallarás is a leftist in the exact same mold as Sánchez, yet I loved her book A la puta calle. The number one consideration for me is always whether a book is well-written. Ideology doesn’t enter into my calculations at all if the writing is good.
Land of Women is atrociously written and extremely poorly read on Audible. In this, too, this book differs from that of Christina Fallarás. Both women recorded the audio version of their books themselves, and in this exercise Fallarás proved to be as talented as she was in the writing of the text. Sánchez, on the other hand, might be a good veterinarian, which is her original profession, but she most certainly shouldn’t write. The fact that Sánchez gets aggressively promoted and was even translated into English, while the book by Fallarás has been memory-holed, is a great literary injustice.
One of my biggest complaints about Sánchez’s writing is that she clearly hates the Spanish language and is incapable of editing her own text. Throughout the book, she uses the expression “el medio rural” in every other sentence. I have not encountered this turn of phrase anywhere outside of bureaucratic documents and find it jarring in a text that attempts to give a lyrical description of the countryside. But that’s not even the point. Sánchez says it so many times throughout the book that one begins to get dizzy. It seems that the idea of searching for a synonym is completely alien to the author.
Another problem is Sánchez’s love of rhetorical questions. She ends every short section with 6 or 7 of them, without any awareness of how boring and repetitive this narrative trick gets. I listened to the book on Audible, and there is an additional layer of horror in the author’s completely fake intonation when reading the questions aloud.
I might be more understanding of Sánchez’s terrible writing if it were compensated on the level of the content. But that is ridiculously bad, too. Sánchez’s main idea is that, because of sexism, nobody recognizes that women work in the countryside alongside men. I have no idea what that even means but Sánchez goes on and on for 200 pages, denouncing in a pouty voice the lack of recognition for her work in the countryside as a woman. This form of grievance is outdated and vapid. Spanish rural areas are tragically depopulated. Whole villages stand empty and look bombed out. This devastation cannot be cured by primitive, childish feminist slogans. Sanchez’s attitude is that of a person who stands next to a site of a terrible fire that devastated a whole neighborhood and whines that nobody paid her enough compliments.
It’s nothing short of appalling that many brilliant books are never translated from Spanish into English, while this badly written, superficial, and prattly excretion of an impoverished mind does.
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