One of those nights that would put anyone's romantic history to shame.

This very short and perfect novel is the fourth published by Edicions de 1984. Tessa Hadley, an English author who masterfully portrays family relationships and paints scenes set in the placidity of a Sunday afternoon that are inevitably clouded. The party It is a kind of tragedy in three acts, in the classical style, that narrates the coming-of-age of sisters, Evelyn and Moira, who are middle class and daughters of a dysfunctional marriage: the husband no longer hides that he has a mistress and the wife endures it as best she can. Sunday roastThe main English family meal: as she might say with curlers in her hair, on the verge of tears. But Tessa Hadley is the queen of alternating moments of maximum light and maximum darkness, detecting the sadness hidden in the happiest moments and the light born from the deepest tragedy. The scene immediately following the family meal, where the two daughters comb and dress their mother at a dressing table, is of exemplary beauty and elevation, made solely with combs, hairpins, and dialogues laden with subtext.

But the book is titled The partyAnd everything revolves around a party. First, there's a pub scene, which is essentially a preview of what will happen in the third episode: the sisters meet some older men who seem to be flirting with them, and it all ends with the sisters fleeing upstairs to an apartment full of rats and filthy toilets, which will be nothing more than a foreshadowing of what they'll discover later. In the second episode, the one with the barbecue, they receive a call with an irresistible invitation to a mansion in one of the city's most exclusive neighborhoods. Like two chaietas about to be slaughtered, the sisters go (one would have preferred to stay home translating French literature, but the older one forces her to go). And that's where everything will happen.

The party It's a kind of murky, highly lustful encounter with characters of more than ambiguous intentions, which ends more or less badly. The book's greatest merit, beyond describing it and playing with the expectations of the two sisters, is its ability to write the pages that portray the morning after one of those nights that would put anyone's romantic history to shame. These aren't pages of total regret, nor of euphoria, but rather they skillfully oscillate between these two feelings with all the sense and sensitivity such a moment requires: "They doubted themselves, they felt impure and dirty, but, in reality, they presented the appearance they had most longed for; an enigmatic, opaque, and desirable appearance." Leaving them at precisely this point, sitting in a café adding sugar to their coffee to keep it from being bitter, is knowing exactly when to put a period to the end of a story. Reading Tessa Hadley is, now without a doubt, a categorical imperative.