Aixa de la Cruz (Bilbao, 1988) is a veteran of writing despite her age. She debuted in 2007 with When We Were the Best. In 2019 she hatched with Cambio de idea (Euskadi Prize for Literature 2020 and Librotea), a brief and intense autobiographical chronicle, written with firmness and resolution. With Las heiresses she enlarges her literature without abandoning the themes that accompany her as a woman, now a mother, and a worker.
Grandma Carmen took her own life a few months ago and her four granddaughters – sisters Olivia and Nora, on the one hand, and Erica and Lis, on the other – return to the house they have inherited to determine the future of the house and rethink your future. The novel draws a female constellation in a familiar universe where men are satellites.
We are facing a title of classic tints. The return to the family home and the opening of the trunk of memories is also a literary constant. There are many recent stories that suggest the healing that involves moving away from the asphalt to reincarnate in life in a natural environment (even if it is with the Amazon delivery man at the door, as this text sarcastically suggests). All these common places are present, but they do not define the novel, they only frame it.
The creation of an atmosphere that goes beyond the merely descriptive prevails here: a complex environment, with tectonic plates that move. A dense air permeates these pages and stirs. The reader feels how the focus changes, how the characters enter and leave the house and themselves; we are capturing different angles, until completing a figure, a prism. It is a polyhedral and harmonious story where the cousins and the referent of the suicidal grandmother travel with their thoughts and complex elucubrations.
The oneiric has weight in the story. It is unsettling and disturbing, as dreams sometimes are. Sanity and madness alternate to face existence and its challenges (motherhood, abortion, parenting, job insecurity, mental illness...).
At times it is Olivia who guides us. Cardiologist doctor, she controls and cares. She takes on the task of keeping an eye on her sister Nora, who has a drug problem (and she aspires to a year of torpor like that of Ottesa Moshfegh's character). At times it is Lis, who has suffered a psychotic episode and is the mother of a small child, who takes command of the story. Or her sister Erica, staunch defender of the powers of nature and alternative rites. Olivia and Lis; Nora and Erica form a tandem. Not always. The four women turn out to be one thing and the opposite. Being a part and the whole.
The shadow of grandmother's suicide is long. Is there a genetic predisposition to addiction and mental disorder? The consumption of narcotics and anxiolytics is not a new invention – from Optalidon then to Valium today. Nor the complexity of family relationships, the place that as one gets older is defined as "the symbolic space in which the guilty are sought". There are digressions without artifice of deep subjects like the psychic illnesses.
The text oozes formal and substantive maturity. Aixa de la Cruz's literature seems to emerge from an engine in constant operation, which exhales pages full of life, questions, tentative attempts, far from conventionalisms and very close to reality.
