Clarissa's Blog

The novel Mothers Don’t by the Basque writer Katixa Agirre starts really well. The beginning is so good that I hoped the novel would be at the level and in the vein of Thursday Night Widows by Claudia Piñeiro.

But then, six pages into the novel, the writer switches gears and begins a completely different project. Instead of the portrayal of a wealthy gated community in the Basque Country, she plunges into a self-justifying narrative of an over-inflamed and pouty neoliberal ego. There have only been five trillion such narratives, and it must have felt urgently necessary to add one more to the ever-expanding list.

What is really frustrating is that in the first six pages, the writer demonstrates that she can do something that is enormously better. She has the talent, but she chooses not to exercise it.

A neoliberal self grows like an inflamed pustule. Any contact rubs against it painfully. A writer who can find a little bit of a critical distance from the endless streams of self-pity produced by this way of being can write excellent literature. Agirre, on the other hand, chooses to indulge it. And guess what? This merited her novel not one, but two translations into English. The main idea that her book advances is that the ego of a modern woman cannot tolerate being a wife or a mother. It’s too much of an imposition because it distracts a woman from the pleasing contemplation of her self-importance.

A neoliberal self achieves its pinnacle of joy through being completely passive and alone. The entire goal of feminism in the current moment is to sell this lonely passivity as a great new beacon of female liberation. Agirre’s novel contributes to that, so it gets translations and prizes.