Pilar Adón’s Of Beasts and Fowls opens with an epigraph from Emily Dickinson: “We are the birds that stay.” In this highly structured stream-of-consciousness novel exploring themes of salvation, isolation, and death, the reader is sometimes brought deep into the mind of the protagonist—and sometimes not. It doesn’t take long to realize that the protagonist, Caro, is one of a gaggle of unreliable characters. In their haunting and haunted utopia lurks a mystery, a series of secrets.

There is even a lagoon of sorts, but I’ll say no more about that.

The book begins in medias res, as Coro, a successful artist with a good case of hypervigilance who is grappling with an existential despair, describes her locale: Bethany. The name strikes a New Testament bell, evoking Lazarus and his sisters. Bethany is also defined—although not in the novel proper—as “A house of affliction.” 

In a frenzied moment, awakened from sleep, she had placed paintings—portraits, in fact, that she’d made of her deceased sister—in the trunk of her car and drove from her apartment out into the night. She’d gotten lost. She’d left her telephone at home. Although she is lost, she keeps driving, making turns and attempting to turn around, only to find herself at a kind of dead end, a gated community of sorts: Bethany. 

This landscape, with all of its forests and elevation and its lake, its goats and dogs and lizards and birds, offers no beauty or freedom but only suffocation. Throughout the book are moments where the protagonist is running out of air; she faints, she grows tired, fatigue overcomes her, and there are numerous allusions to drowning.

Arriving in Bethany, Coro discovers a collective of women run by Catina and Tresa. The two share a vision. Coro is waiting for “a new sign” as she walks in this richly forested territory containing all manner “of Beasts and Fowls.” Another of the book’s epigraphs, from Epicurus, exhorts its reader to “[l]ive hidden,” and this advice would seem to govern all of them. In fact, once she is in Bethany, Coro is hard pressed to find her way out. 

This entrapment becomes the crisis that reflects her inner conflict, her own compulsions, among which is the conundrum of her desire expressed so inexplicably and terribly early on: “What she needed was to be submerged, learning how to convert water into nutrients and produce oxygen.” Such feelings of suffocation, of asphyxiation, only grow. Later it is revealed that Coro is a survivor of an accident in which her sister drowned.  

As the book unfolds, issues of communication and perception come to the fore. There is play even among the names of the characters. As a child, Coro “was also called Mag. And Mae.” Her parents gave her several names “to address, by different means, one of the girls who had arrived in their universe to decorate it a bit.” A range of points of view comes into play— a real liberal use of free indirect discourse—leading the reader into this universe both from a place deep inside Coro as well as from a perspective looming high above. The reader is cast in the role of detective, of puzzler, and the book becomes a puzzle, a cross between literary novel and thriller, a kind of rural noir. 

It took me a long time to understand the protagonist’s dilemma. It wasn’t until I turned back and started the book anew that I realized the opening had given me all the clues I needed. I needed to go back to see how far ahead it was set, before the narrative turned back to what seemed to be a more traditional, chronological beginning. Which is also to say that Adón makes liberal use of gaps and delays. Here is an example, in dialogue, of the author’s persistent use of indirection:

‘Why don’t you tell me what this is about once and for all?’ Coro asked. ‘Why don’t you speak plainly?’

‘This has nothing to do with you.’

‘Are you drugging me?’

Catina looked at her as if what she asked made no sense.

‘You said you’ve already got hold of a knife, right?’

‘You need to wash,’ Tresa said as she drew near a window. ‘And start painting […]’

Dissonance, discordance, and ambiguity color the communications between Coro and the women. Tresa initially suspects that Coro’s sudden appearance might signal a desire to buy a house. Later, this concern is redirected toward a man who, as it turns out, likely owns the property. It seems that the women are squatters with a peculiar, if not creepy, way of life. As the newcomer, Coro, tries to piece it all together—through their codes, their methodical practices, their history, their purpose in her own destiny. Trapped, she repeatedly attempts to reason with them, but they will not engage with her in any way that discourages her acceptance of their offering. Her grip on her identity loosens. She reminds herself that she has had a presence in galleries, has in all measurable terms, made herself a success in her field. 

Throughout the novel, what delights is the visceral experience on offer—the sensual and punctilious positioning of language: the “oven smell” that persists; a pervasive smell of smoke without any discernible fire. There is also the prizing and passing on of knowledge regarding the plants and animals, and this gathering of autonomous women who work the land is not without its library. There is also ample discussion of literature and philosophy. 

Almost to the point of the reader’s exasperation, Adón shows us what we take to be the intentional misfiring of communication. By way of the writer’s—and protagonist’s—attention to smells and sounds and textures, we are so close to where the action is, almost too close—but can you really ever be too close? 

+++

Pilar Adón was born in Madrid in 1971 and is the author of four novels, including The Mayflies (forthcoming from Open Letter), several short story collection, and four volumes of poetry. She received the Ojo Critico Prize for Viajes inocentes, and won the Premio Francisco Umbral al Libro del Año, Premio Cálamo, and the Premio de la Critica for Of Beasts and Fowls.

+

Katie Whittemore translates from the Spanish. Full-length translations include works by Sara Mesa, Javier Serena, Aroa Moreno Durán, Lara Moreno, Nuria Labari, and Katixa Agirre. Forthcoming translations include novels by Jon Bilbao, Juan Gómez Bárcena, Almudena Sánchez, Aliocha Coll, and Pilar Adón. She received an NEA Translation Fellowship in 2022 to translate Moreno’s In Case We Lose Power, and was a finalist for the Spain-USA Prize for her translation of Katixa Agirre’s Mothers Don’t.

+

Twice a Pushcart nominee, Geri Lipschultz has published in Terrain, The Rumpus, Ms., New York Times, The Toast, Black Warrior Review, and College English, among others. Her work appears in Pearson’s Literature: Introduction to Reading and Writing and in Spuyten Duyvil’s The Wreckage of Reason II. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. from Ohio University and currently teaches writing at Borough of Manhattan Community College. She was awarded a CAPS grant from New York State for her fiction, and her one-woman show  Once Upon the Present Time was produced in NYC by Woodie King, Jr. Her novel, Grace before the Fall, will be published by Dark Winter Press in September 2025.