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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Maren Wiederhold
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NO ERA A ESTO A LO QUE VENÍAMOS

María Bastarós

Timeless, universal and delirious stories about the chaos and absurdity of our days.

No era esto a lo que veníamos is a book about the horror of normality. Its characters struggle to integrate themselves in a cosmos that legitimates their existence: one of romantic love, maternity, developments with swimming pools, a job with a salary, a traditional family. A longed-for normality that slowly becomes hostile territory, stifling, where life is often difficult to sustain. After her stunning debut, Historia de España para niñas, María Bastarós surprises us again with these tales of asphyxiating environments: the desert of Los Monegros, the erosion of the Bardenas, abandoned roads, industrial bays... Places that mark a path toward the margins or toward delirium, where people always seem to find the opposite of what they were looking for. María Bastarós is an art historian, exhibition curator, cultural manager and writer. She has worked for centers such as the Thyssen Bornemisza in Madrid, the CAAM in Las Palmas or the Instituto Cervantes in Tangier. In 2015 she created the cultural platform Quién Coño Es and the art critic magazine linked to it. For this, she won the second MAV Prize for Best Initiative for a female author under 35.

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Book Published 2021-11-01 by Editorial Candaya SL

Comments

Her ability to create a sense of sustained menace or to capture a darkly surreal suburbia shows her in full command of the form. Bastarós's writing has sharpness of tone and vision.

An accurate shot to the marrow of normality. A perverse, disturbing and lucid look capable of making you see the heroine that hides in a beautiful field of poppies. Absolute devotion for María Bastarós.

A novel of characters and stories intertwined to explain a historical moment in the purest Bolaño style, but with the concision and pruning that Bolaño often lacked. Addictive, risky and structurally impeccable.

We find ourselves with one of the year's most piercing works in terms of narrative, especially if we arch our gaze and approach the uncomfortable, unpleasant and sometimes terrifying world - because it is anodyne, dry - that Bastarós proposes from the twist of our own contemporaneity.

These stories of girlhood and sexuality are wonderfully powerful: sensual in their craftsmanship, devastating in their effect. I keep on going back to them to marvel at Bastarós' ambition and her risks. I loved, loved, loved this book.

A bomb to normality.

A perverse way of thinking that verges on brilliance.

From the Monegros desert to abandoned roads, industrial estates or brand new housing developments, María Bastarós unfolds in No era a esto a lo que veníamos an enveloping and disturbing universe that connects with our most primal fears, the reverse side of desire and the terror of the everyday.

We might sit back from these stories with a sense that their darkness is too deep to reflect real life. But while Bastarós's meticulous prose has an endless capacity to shock, the themes she explores are starkly familiar. If we dared to peek beneath the impassive surface of our own lives, we might find that the brutality of Hungry for What is not confined to the page.

The more time I spent in Bastarós's world and it is a world, geographically demarcated and with characters migrating from one story to another the more I was reminded of the Argentinian writer Silvina Ocampo, who composed an impressive library of macabre work between the 1930s and 1980s. The malignity Bastarós's stories exude, as well as their use of child protagonists, perversion of domestic settings, the sensation of sliding between reality and weirder, less explicable spaces, and, relatedly, the unpredictability of where the next sentence will lead, are all traits these writers share.

There is ugliness here, given and received, but it's the freshness of the details and relentlessness of Bastarós's vision that make this such an enthralling read.

María Bastarós talks about gender, feminisms and fictions from a point of view where knowledge quenches the thirst for curiosity. With conviction, firmness and without mincing her words.

UK: Daunt Books

María Bastarós does not want the reader "inside" the story, she does not want an immersive, compassionate experience: she wants an experience of lucidity, of play and reflection. Of complicity too. In that complicity we will be questioned, because it will set in motion the springs of our ideology.

These short stories seem macabre but are full of tenderness and fragility. A masterful magic, charm and strength. Maria is an amazing author.

María Bastarós moves so comfortably in the limits of the fantastic, in the possibility of everything ending in the most unexpected way, that reading her generates excitement and spreads a perplexed and fearful look towards normality. Perhaps that is the most lucid look possible.

A funny, ferocious, confronting collection of short stories foregrounding the voices and experiences of women and children.

A splendid book in which the author brings together everything that a short story should have.