ELECTRODOMÉSTICOS

A debut collection of short fiction explores the long shadow of the Spanish Civil War in the Basque Country.

One of the most enduring works of art about war is Picasso’s giant painting Guernica, with its dynamic hysteria. In McCavana's town of Guernica, “baskets of red and pink summer flowers erupted from the gray buildings like happy little wounds.” It is not that McCavana's striking debut ignores the horrors of war, but that these stories are attuned to the quotidian and, even more, to setting—the way it reflects, and is separate from, the human dramas taking place there. Many of the stories in the collection are short vignettes—called “Recuerdos,” or memories—that are image-rich descriptions of, say, a town so tilted that meats slide forward against the butchers' display cases, or a tree filled with black felt berets. Longer stories linger dreamily on mundane but symbolic details. In the opener, “No Spanish,” a young girl’s father demands that his family stop speaking Spanish in favor of Basque—a language they don’t know at all, and which has been outlawed—and buys a radio to help them learn it. In “Cecilio,” a former soldier’s memories come flooding back, triggered by a neighbor’s cello playing. As the book unfolds, the stories move from war to its aftermath. In the title story, whose name is Spanish for “household appliances,” a worker installs an oven in the home of an older couple whose past reveals itself after the worker inserts himself into their lives. McCavana—an American writer who has family history in Bilbao—takes a risk in eschewing any spectacle here; these stories can sometimes seem sedate or removed, as if they’re taking place behind a thick pane of glass. But war has many faces, and McCavana reminds us that small gestures bear great weight.

Quiet but impeccable.