Sara Mesa received a true taste of Scotland. A torrential downpour tried really hard to put the dampners on this event by soaking everyone making their way to the Scottish poetry library. It failed. Hosted by the Cervantes Institute, Sara Mesa’s event was the first of more to come. (Can’t wait.) And the hot steaminess that ensued, as all those brollies and coats and trouser legs (I was literally soaked up to the knees) dried out, matched the steaminess of the novel under discussion.

L to R: Katie Whittemore (translator), Sara Mesa (author), Stella Sabin (publisher) (29.05.2024)

Sara Mesa’s Un Amor is the first of her novels to be brought to British shores. Other novels were published in America and Peirene Press may bring them across the pond at a later date. (Please do.) But for now we have a novel with an untranslated title … Un Amor – should be simple, shouldn’t it? We’ll come back to that.

For details of the plot let me direct you to Grant and Tony, who have both written reviews with all the detail you need. I’m going to concentrate on the literary tropes that Mesa masterfully inverts.

In the first instance, a stranger comes into town. Usually this stranger is a man, a hero, who, about to bring positive change. Here we have a female, an anti-heroine, Nat, escaping from her past in the city, moving to a hot, dusty, sparsely populated village. After the first interaction with her obnoxious bullying landlord, it becomes obvious that she’s no mover and shaker; she hasn’t the faintest idea of how to assert herself. No, in this case, the stranger’s not going to change anything. Will this rather unfriendly village change her?

Two other men come into her life. Pîter, the friendly neighbour, is always there to explain things, lend a helping hand. Katie Whittemore described him as a mansplainer. I didn’t see it that way, but his attentions are at times a little claustrophobic. Then there is Andreas who, when Nat is struggling with a leaky roof, because the landlord refuses to fix it, is willing to repair it for a price.

He makes an indecent proposal.

Nat initially refuses but the wet weather continues ….

Anyway what starts as a business transaction becomes “un amor”, the central erotic relationship that is confined to Andreas’s bed. Nat sneaking home before dawn, preserving the appearance of decorum, thinking nobody knows. But in this village everybody knows and they do not approve.

Nat finds this “amor” highly satisfying, like nothing she has experienced before. It awakens a need, a desire, an obsession in her; she simply has to be with Andreas. Yet, when she confesses to the reasons for her fleeing to this place, he sends her packing … triggering the downward spiral that has threatened from the very beginning. This is exacerbated by the behaviour of her dog, Sieso, definitely not a woman’s best friend, which brings the two-faced nature of the villagers and their hidden hostility into the open. Finally, finally, finally Nat makes a decision that I can support!

Mesa asked two thought-provoking questions about her frustrating leading lady. A) Would we judge so harshly if she were male? B) How many times in our own lives do we not make a quick escape, but attempt to ride out a bad situation?

(My answers: A) This character would be a self-indulgent wimp, and I’d probably like him even less. B) More times than I care to remember!)

As for that untranslated title: Katie Whittemore felt that opting for either “a love” or “one love” was too much interpreting. The problem surely lies with “amor”. For what has love got to do with it? Desire, yes. Eros, yes. But there’s not a whiff of mutually loving relationship. Perhaps Mesa is being sardonic and A Love? would convey the intent. But with no ? in the original, I keep thinking of Stan Barstow’s novel about a love that isn’t. “A Kind of Loving” feels true to the substance, and yet that really is adding interpretation. No, Whittemore is right – Mesa is being deliberately ambiguous – best leave the title as it is.