The mechanisms of the tale and the mechanisms of the heart

There are no infallible formulas, but it could be said that a good short story is one that, by showing us only a piece of the lives of its characters, is capable of telling us about their entire lives and personalities. This is true, at least, for short stories of realistic conception, tone, and perspective, let's say of the Flaubertian and Chekhovian tradition, a tradition that 20th-century American short story writers (Hemingway, O’Connor, Cheever, Updike, Carver, Munro, and an endless etcetera) developed and explored in a way as brilliant as it was influential. Eider Rodríguez (Errenteria, 1977) fits within this tradition.The six medium-length stories that make up his new book, Everything was the same hole, translated with the usual skill by Pau Joan Hernàndez, all share the same narrative mechanisms and address very similar human materials. With a clear prose, of contained intensity and with a devastating expressive precision – more sober and wise than showy and exuberant –, always within the coordinates of the everyday, with narrators in the first or third person, Rodríguez focuses his attention on brief sections – an evening, a few days, a few weeks, a little over a year – of his protagonists' biographies. They are biographical sections in which everything is about to change or go off the rails, moments in which the uncertain possibility or the exciting hope of another life is glimpsed.Rodríguez shows us her protagonists by touching upon the touchstone of a husband, a lover, a friend, a lifelong (lesbian) partner, neighbors, a group of strangers, or her own family, and is capable of explaining these relationships in a rich, suggestive, subtle, complex way. They are relationships crossed by changing moods, agitated by long-sedimented contradictory feelings, overwhelmed by incompatible emotions that nevertheless must be reconciled.Unbalance the reader's expectations

Perhaps the story that best defines Rodríguez's literary proposal is Canícula, which opens the book. The protagonist, Ixabel, is a woman in her fifties, existentially tired and bored, married to a husband with whom they talk more about his dental problems than about anything more or less pleasant, adventurous or loving. One day Ixabel goes to a nudist beach, meets a slightly younger man there, gets excited, and falls in love with him. From here, Rodríguez could build a melodramatic, passionate story, full of debasing secrets, the typical revival of adolescence in adulthood, but he does the opposite and builds a mature marital love story, in which adultery is nothing more than a fleeting and ultimately unimportant circumstance.The ability to break or at least significantly unbalance or relocate the reader's expectations is the house's trademark. Rodríguez is very good at concluding her stories with small, disconcerting but meaningful details: the girl who has said goodbye to her best friend and gets into her father's bed and hugs him with a beautiful and purest love (in "Mars and ruins"), the nocturnal caress that betrays a very deep crack in a supposed marital paradise (in "Duck Heart"), the small terminal push that casts a shadow of doubt over a lifelong love affair (in "The Crater"). Another of Eider Rodríguez's virtues is her skill in creating secondary characters with little narrative presence but great substance. Rodríguez knows the mechanisms of the short story genre as well as the mechanisms of the human heart.