My Clavicle
Description
“Marta Sanz’s language is like a body. She talks to you like nobody else can.” —ABC
On an international flight to a conference, the author Marta Sanz notices a tiny bump beneath her skin, just below her clavicle, near her breast bone. So begins an inquiry that is at turns satirical detective story, philosophical inquiry, memoir, and pure poetry.
In Spanish, the title is Clavícula, which refers to the collarbone, but also makes a direct pun on the word clavé or key. In the aftermath of Marta’s discovery we realize that something fundamental has changed for her, and that whatever has happened, however elusive, it is something very real. At the same time, the mystery reflects in everything the author encounters, but especially the bodies of women, and especially women of a certain age.
My Clavicle is a masterpiece of auto fiction from one of Spain’s most celebrated contemporary voices–the narration of the episodes fracturing like the author’s body into a deeply moving series of vignettes that never lose their tension: imperfect, obsessive, and often hilarious.
The difficulty of giving a name to Marta’s pain, of even locating a precise place for it, provokes a number of reflections: about the edge that separates the body from scientific definitions and imagination; about the function of poetry; about our intolerance for psychological gray areas; about anxiety as a pathology of late stage capitalism; and, in the face of constantly dispiriting headlines, the perversion of a public health system. Ultimately, Marta’s attempts to define something impossible are channeled through her strange and roving pain, manifesting in curiosity, humor, and love.
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Persons
Marta Sanz is an award-winning novelist, poet, essayist, and scholar, and one of Spain’s most celebrated contemporary writers. With a literary career spanning more than two decades, she has published fifteen novels and essay collections, including Los mejores tiempos (Debate, 2001), winner of the Ojo Crítico Prize for Fiction; Animales domésticos (Destino, 2003); and Susana y los viejos (Destino, 2006), which was a finalist for the 2006 Nadal Prize. Her recent works include Farándula (2015); Círculo de lectores (2016), winner of the Herralde Prize for the Novel; Clavícula (2017); and Pequeñas mujeres rojas (2020), a crime novel that appeals to collective memory, all published by Anagrama. Sanz holds a PhD in philology and is a critic for the El País literary supplement and for the magazine Mercurio. She was editor-in-chief of the cultural magazine Ni hablar and wrote for periodical publications like ABC and Viento Sur. Incredibly, while she has been published broadly in the Spanish-language world, My Clavicle marks her debut in English language translation. My Clavicle will be published simultaneously in the United Kingdom by Akoya Press.