Clarissa's Blog

Andrea Abreu’s debut novel Panza de burro was promptly translated into English under the title Dogs of Summer and into German as So forsch, so furchtlos.

The mystery is why. Abreu is a no-name beginner writer, and the only original thing about the novel is that it’s written in a very distinctive slang of the Canary Islands. If you listen to it on Audible in a brilliant recording by actress Sol de la Barreda, you can enjoy the language of this interesting region. All of this is lost in translation. So why are publishers lining up to confer the rarest honor of translation onto this book?

The only answer I could find is that the novel suggests that ten-year-old girls are ready and desperate for sex. Working class girls, of course. This point is made clumsily yet insistently throughout the novel. Nothing else happens. There’s no plot. All that happens in the novel is that sex-crazed ten-year-old girls are trying to have sex. The only reason they might be uninterested in having sex is because they want to be having gay sex.

This is the secret to getting big money and access to international audiences. You could write brilliant books and not be able to scratch out a single puny translation, or you could write about children eagerly having sex, and you got it made.

This novel was recommended to me by crowds of people for years. This goes to show how deadened people have become to obvious and gauche manipulations like this one. A young author wanted to strike it big and wrote a thinly veiled child porn book. “It’s about girls growing up,” reviewers gasp excitedly. The novel is not about girls, though. It’s about a pedo’s fantasy of girls.

There is a big future in front of us. Once we have reached the stage of “sexy preteens sexilly sexing,” this recipe for editorial success can be extended to all age groups.