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I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness

Irene Solà

Start date: September 23, 2025

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What Members Thought

Jun 07, 2025 endrju added it

I need more time—which I don't have—to think about how the novel used its less than 200 pages. It did a lot. The closest I came to understanding it was the collapse of the past and present, rendering the difference between the mythical, the dead, the dying, and the living uncertain, to say the least. At times, the novel was deliciously disorienting. The mythical, deep past plays a key role, so nature teems with aliveness, albeit not the light kind. It's a goose bump-inducing, pleasurable read. I ...more

14 likes · Like · see review

Mar 29, 2025 Ruben rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Irene Solà is one of those writers whose style you recognise from the first page.

Her stories are steeped in Catalan folklore, deep in the forest, existing outside of time. The characters are portrayed as ugly animals, they fart, shit, smell bad and have sex - if there is the opportunity for a disgusting sentence Solà will write it.

'I Gave You Eyes...' is set during one day, from dawn to nightfall, as women gather in a large countryhouse in the expectation of the imminent death of their family ...more

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Jun 18, 2025 Yahaira rated it really liked it

Shelves: owned, arcs, in-translation

Thanks to the publisher for the ARC

The true magic here is not just found in all the witches, wolves, ghosts, and even the devil filling the pages, but in how such a dense and confusing book still has a sense of movement and speed. You have to force yourself to slow down to understand who’s speaking or what’s happening in the scene. A family tree could be helpful.

If my review were just five words it would be: Irene Solà broke my brain.

I’m going to come right out and say that from the first few p Thanks to the publisher for the ARC

The true magic here is not just found in all the witches, wolves, ghosts, and even the devil filling the pages, but in how such a dense and confusing book still has a sense of movement and speed. You have to force yourself to slow down to understand who’s speaking or what’s happening in the scene. A family tree could be helpful.

If my review were just five words it would be: Irene Solà broke my brain.

I’m going to come right out and say that from the first few pages I got hints of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Pedro Paramo, and even a bit of last year’s Woodworm. I Gave You Eyes is totally its own thing though. Solà combines beautiful writing with the grotesque, you could be reading a poetic passage on nature that turns scatological in the blink of an eye. But this book is also funny, darkly so but still! It’s folkhorror through and through, so expect the crude, the vulgar, and the primitive- there are times where the line between animal and humans is blurred in action and in language.

In just over 150 pages we somehow cover hundreds of years of a family while experiencing the last 24 hours of Bernadata’s (impossibly) long life as her ancestors prepare to receive her in the afterlife. Time is collapsed and sometimes just doesn’t add up, the living and the dead coexist in a mountain farmhouse, and generations of women take care of and hate each other. Going six generations back we see where the family curse started and it involves a cat’s butt! Joan asks for a complete husband, but she soon notices he’s missing a toe and uses this fact to break her deal with the devil. Starting with her children, each child is missing something: a part of a heart, a tongue, a liver, or an anus. What’s missing becomes more diluted or harder to see in each subsequent generation. Memories, reasons, time, trauma, they all get muddled. The only constant is the farmhouse they can't escape.

This is a highly atmospheric work that puts women’s voices - the anti-heroines- front and center. Family history isn't linear and isn't always consistent. ...more

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Jul 04, 2025 Carrie added it

Shelves: arc

I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness begins at dawn with a rumbling that emanates from a sleeping bump in the middle of a bed. As an old, portly woman violently snores, another woman at her bedside prays to be forgiven for the things she’s done, the things the other women have done, and for those who aren’t there. This sets the scene for a tale of family, friends, and enemies and the home that is central to it all. God and the devil overshadow everything, and the lines between living a I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness begins at dawn with a rumbling that emanates from a sleeping bump in the middle of a bed. As an old, portly woman violently snores, another woman at her bedside prays to be forgiven for the things she’s done, the things the other women have done, and for those who aren’t there. This sets the scene for a tale of family, friends, and enemies and the home that is central to it all. God and the devil overshadow everything, and the lines between living and dead, past and present are blurred. The women we meet have been forsaken, forgotten and fettered, existing in a world where everything has a price. This feels vague but this novel doesn’t lend itself to a tidy summary.

I was deeply invested in the beginning, the language is beautifully descriptive and the lives (or afterlives) of characters and their relation to each other was intriguing. I struggled to keep track of who was who, but this blurred sense of each woman bolsters the exploration of female experience. Unfortunately my engagement waned in the middle. I loved the premise in the blurb, all the women that lived in the house before waiting for the woman on her deathbed to join them and throw her party. And while this is essentially what happens, I didn’t connect with the way it was executed. This novel has a fantastical quality, characters appear and act like animals, and there is a great deal of good versus evil. I usually love stories that explore the complexity of women’s lives and how they navigate the fates bestowed upon them by the environment they exist in, but the delivery here just didn’t match my interests.

I would recommend this to readers who enjoy fairy tales, beautiful language and blurry/nonlinear narratives along with explorations of complex family histories and faith. I’ve seen many positive reviews of this book and author, and wonder if timing impacted my experience. Andt sometimes a book just doesn’t work for us. I’m interested in reading Solà’s other novel to see if my experience is similar.

Thank you @graywolfpress for the #gifted ARC. ...more

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Aug 01, 2025 Danielle McClellan rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Woah! What an exquisite, singular narrative. Four hundred years of cursed women living together (some in more corporeal forms than others) in a remote Catalan farmhouse. From the moment that Joana finds a way to renege on a pact with the devil, her life and the lives of her descendants are set. This is a surreal, tragic, folkloric story. The story is often tough going--brutal, graphic, and scatological--but the writing is pure poetry.

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