Confessions of Senora Francesca Navarro and Other Stories

"Memory, of course, is sometimes like a bucking horse, sometimes a runaway one, and one must control the reins until finally it stops, snorting with exhausted relief," writes Natalie L. M. Petesch in her haunting new collection, The Confessions of Senora Francesa Navarro and Other Stories. Petesch immerses readers in the lives of people caught up in the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War, which left 500,000 dead. She captures the hand-to-mouth existence on the streets of Madrid of two war orphans, whose friendship redeems their shattered world; an old soldier's memories of a fallen militiawoman; the dilemma of Franco's laundress as she seeks to duplicate a stolen religious icon she finds in his home; and a man struggling to find his bride among 14,000 Nationalist refugees waiting, after the fall of Madrid, for ships to evacuate them before Franco's Fascists arrive to kill them. In the title novella, told by an elderly woman to her granddaughter, families of officers endure hunger, filth, and danger in an underground fortress. Petesch conveys the humiliating details of war through the sensibility of a cultured woman who recalls only too vividly latrines of laundry tubs, the smell of unwashed humans, and the stench of death. Brilliant in its imaginative power, and heartbreaking in its access to the bottomless well of human tears, The Confessions of Senora Francesa Navarro and Other Stories is the work of a mature artist able to convey a particular world so vividly that we know these people as our own.