I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness | Granta

  • Published: 19/06/2025
  • ISBN: 9781803511382
  • Granta Books
  • 176 pages

I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness

Irene Solà

Translated by Mara Faye Lethem

Nestled among rugged mountains, in a remote part of Catalonia frequented by wolf hunters, bandits, witches, deserters, ghosts, beasts and demons, sits the old farmhouse called Mas Clavell. Inside, an impossibly old woman lies on her deathbed while family and caretakers drift in and out. All the women who have ever 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 memories unspool, and the house reverberates with the women’s stories. Stories of mysterious visions, of those born without eyelashes and tongues or with deformed hearts. But it begins with the story of the matriarch Blanca who double-crosses the devil, heedless of what the consequences might be.

I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness is a formally daring and entrancing novel in which Irene Solà explores the duality and essential link between light and darkness, life and death, oblivion and memory.

'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 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

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, author of Everything Under

The Author

Irene Solà is a writer and visual artist. She is the author of the novels The Dams, When I Sing, Mountains Dance and I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Towards Darkness, and the poetry collection Beast.

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The Translator

Mara Faye Lethem is a writer, researcher, and literary translator. Winner of the inaugural 2022 Spain-USA Foundation Translation Award for Max Besora’s The Adventures and Misadventures of Joan Orpí, she was also recently awarded the 2022 Joan Baptiste Cendrós International Prize for her contributions to Catalan literatureHer translation of Irene Solà’s When I Sing, Mountains Dance was a finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Barrios Book in Translation Prize and the 2023 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. Her forthcoming translations include Pol Guasch’s Napalm in the Heart (Faber & Faber and FSG), Alana S. Portero’s Bad Habit (HarperVia), Max Besora’s The Fake Muse, and Irene Solà’s I Gave You Eyes And You Looked Toward Darkness.

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From the Same Author

When I Sing, Mountains Dance

Irene Solà, translated by Mara Faye Lethem

When Domenec – mountain-dweller, father, poet, dreamer – dies suddenly, struck by lightning, he leaves behind two small children, Mia and Hilari, to grow up wild among the looming summits of the Pyrenees and the ghosts of the Spanish civil war.

But then Hilari dies too, and his sister is forced to face life’s struggles and joys alone. As the years tumble by, the inhabitants of the mountain – human, animal and other – come together in a chorus of voices to bear witness to the sorrows of one family, and to the savage beauty of the landscape. This remarkable English-language debut is lyrical, mythical, elemental, and ferociously imaginative.

Irene Solà on Granta.com

Fiction | The Online Edition

There Was a Farmer Had a Dog

Irene Solà

‘A twenty-five-kilo dog is too small to survive in the countryside.’

An extract from Irene Solà’s forthcoming novel, translated by Mara Faye Lethem.

In Conversation | The Online Edition

In Conversation

Eva Baltasar & Irene Solà

‘The tide carries my books from my head to a place that is no longer mine.’

The authors discuss friendship, the sea and finishing their novels.

Poetry | The Online Edition

Five Poems

Irene Solà

‘I wore off my tongue / like candy’ Translated from the Catalan by Oscar Holloway.