I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness by Irene Solà in California

Irene Solà explores how language gives form to memory and identity through a novel that spans centuries, voices, and landscapes.

Irene Solà returns with I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness, a novel described by critics as both audacious and entrancing — an intricate tapestry of time, memory, and myth. Known for her distinctive integration of art, folklore, and narrative experimentation, the author continues to explore these elements in a story where the living and the dead coexist, and the landscape itself carries the imprint of history and memory. Through themes of desire, legacy, and the passage of time, the novel blurs the boundaries between myth and history, offering a world that is at once ancient and vividly present.

Irene Solà in conversation with Shruti Swamy

• On Friday, June 20, at 7 pm.
• Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco, CA 94122.
• Free RSVP.

Shruti Swamy will be in conversation with Solà, and together they will explore the novel’s layered structure, its interplay between reality and mythology, and its engagement with oral tradition. The discussion will also address the complexities of translating a work so deeply rooted in language and place, and how translation shapes the portrayal of identity, memory, and cultural heritage.

Reading club: Irene Solà in conversation with Molly Parent

• On Saturday, June 21, at 3 pm.
• Women’s Club, 46 Park Rd, Fairfax, CA 94930.
• Free.

The acclaimed Catalan author presents her newly translated novel, I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness, in a special reading and conversation at the Fairfax Women’s Club. She will be joined by Molly Parent, co-owner of Wayfinder Bookshop and Point Reyes Books, where Solà’s previous work, When I Sing, Mountains Dance, has been a bestseller since its release in 2022. Together, they will delve into the novel’s evocative themes, including mythology, language, memory, and the natural world.

I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness

Dawn is breaking over the Guilleries, a rugged mountain range in Catalonia frequented by wolf hunters, brigands, deserters, race-car drivers, ghosts, and demons. In a remote farmhouse called Mas Clavell, an impossibly old woman lies on her deathbed. Family and caretakers drift in and out. Meanwhile, all the women who have lived and died in that house are waiting for her to join them. They are preparing to throw her a party. As day turns to night, four hundred years’ worth of stories unspool, and the house reverberates with raucous laughter, pungent feasts, and piercing cries of pleasure and pain.

It all begins with Joana, Mas Clavell’s matriarch, who once longed for a husband — “a full man,” perhaps even “an heir with a patch of land and a roof over his head.” She summoned the devil to fulfill her wish and struck a deal: a man in exchange for her soul. But when, on her wedding day, Joana discovered that her husband was missing a toe (eaten by wolves), she exploited a loophole in her agreement, heedless of what consequences might follow.

I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness blurs the lines between the dead and the living, past and present, story and history. In it, Irene Solà draws on oral tradition as well as art, literature, and fairy tales to tell a new kind of story.

Irene Solà is unlike any other writer — she storms her own path, setting fire to all our preconceived notions of what a novel can do while she goes. I adored this book.

—Daisy Johnson

In the spirit of Ágota Kristóf and Juan Rulfo, I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness is forged from the deepest and truest stories about the perversity of the body, the sheer drama of the natural world, and the vengeful side of the divine. A fecund and daring book.

—Catherine Lacey

Irene Solà

Irene Solà is a renowned Catalan writer known for her innovative blend of literature, art, and film. Her debut poetry collection Bèstia won the Amadeu Oller Prize, and her first novel Els dics received the Documenta Prize, marking her as a boundary-pushing literary voice.

Her second novel, Canto jo i la muntanya balla (When I Sing, Mountains Dance), brought her international acclaim, earning the European Union Prize for Literature in 2020 and being translated into 24 languages. Solà’s visual art has also been exhibited in prominent venues, including Barcelona and London’s Whitechapel Gallery.

Shruti Swamy

Shruti Swamy is the author of the story collection A House Is a Body, and a novel, The Archer. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Elizabeth George Foundation, the San Francisco Arts Council, and Vassar College, and is a 2024 Rome Prize Fellow in Literature.

Shruti’s work has appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeny’s, AFAR Magazine, and The Believer,and twice won the O. Henry Prize. Her introduction to Ursula K Le Guin’s masterpiece Always Coming Home appears in the novel’s 2023 reissue. She teaches writing with the collective The Dream Side.

Molly Parent

Molly Parent’s tenure in bookselling began at Green Apple Books (2009 to 2012). Her experience in the role led to a recognition of the significant role of human interaction within the bookstore environment. Beyond her retail experience, Ms. Parent has served as an educator and communications director for non-profit organizations, including 826 Valencia and Mount Tamalpais College. In 2015, she co-organized a 24-hour marathon reading of Moby-Dick. Her contributions also include serving as a juror for the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and leading workshops focused on empowering youth and fostering community through creative writing. Ms. Parent holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Literature/Writing from the University of California, San Diego.