The Rooftop by Fernanda Trías (tr. Annie McDermott)

Review by Lucy Kent

In only a hundred-odd pages, Fernanda Trías crafts a suggestive and subtle universe. The unsettling murmur that runs throughout The Rooftop is all at once intoxicating — like a fermenting sweet bouquet. Incestuous relationships, a complicated pregnancy, a sickly canary and dead step mum: The Rooftop twists inside out the institution of the family home.

Clara lives in a decrepit apartment with her invalid father and new born baby Flor. The ailing canary completes the odd-ball family picture. Claustrophobic and close-knit, the book is like a play, staged in one room and rarely leaving that four-walled boundary. Money and time is running out and the result is an urgent narrative — pushing us towards something we know we should be wary of.

In Annie McDermott’s translation, the rooftop itself offers the only respite from Clara’s paranoia, hinting at an act of suicide (that, it should be stated now, doesn’t come.) As we’re stuck in the apartment, the cold air and the cityscape the rooftop offers seem to be the only escape. As a title, the rooftop alludes to an ending, but as a space it provides a relief.

Similarly to, say, Flannery O’ Connor, Trías writes with the flourish of a paranoid and individualistic pen. Clara exists in an us vs them paradox - ‘I stuffed toilet paper in the keyhole, and in the peephole as well. Only then did I feel safe.’ She needs people to survive, stealing their water and relying on their help; she is fixated on shutting them out. Where O’Connor portrays a sickened or dark individual in an almost absurdist society — remember the Gorilla Man in Wise Blood? — The Rooftop lays out its neurosis and in its opening. It then spends the next ninety pages telling us what we should have already surmised. It’s forceful in its truth-telling, and acidic in its relish of the aftershocks that follow

I finished The Rooftop, re-read the beginning and realised that the book had accomplished exactly what it had set out to do… had I only read between the lines. Another win for Charco’s Spanish-language publications and for Annie McDermott’s agile translation. A short and powerful read, it demands to be re-read and scrutinised.

The Rooftop is published by Charco Press, 12th October 2021