Blank Canvases

In the words of prominent Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina, “each of Consuelo Martínez Reyes’s stories holds a world, each of those worlds intertwined with the others. Each story, each world, has a distinct voice with the uniqueness and singularity of true voices, not those in writing, but the voices we listen to in everyday life and that reveal a character, a soul. These singular voices are also intertwined, almost always by despair, as well as by the verbal effusion of speech, of what’s said out loud, of what’s never said, of the secret voice of our conscience. Each story, each voice, each world, knit together a map of loss and exile, the map of those who are here yet there, of those who’ve never left the island and would like to leave, of those who left and will not return. The displeasures of those who haven’t left is symmetrical to the uprootedness of those who won’t return. The speech of those who left is infected by another language. All the worlds in the stories are the same lost world: due to separation, death, breakup, chance. With that irony, we also find tenderness. Uprootedness is accompanied by an intimate allegiance. Consuelo Martínez Reyes turns popular speech into style, the dialect of her land into literature.