(#gifted @transitbooks) I had high hopes for this little novella, which promised to be ‘an exploration of the range and expression of female silence’. Our protagonist Mara moves to a small provincial town in Argentina and challenges herself to speak as little as possible for a full year.

.

I wanted a thoughtful, introspective musing on why Mara decided to stop talking, expecting a sort of pared-down Vox (a very heavy handed novel). Instead I got taxidermy and horses. Lots of it. There was also a tiny bit of insight into Mara’s previous life as an interpreter, which I liked! And which explained some of her decision to stop talking.

Cristoff includes tonnes of extracts from (legitimate) historical documents which are on display at the museum where Mara now works as a guard. Some of it was fascinating in itself, but the threads never really came together into a cohesive narrative. For example, I discovered a bizarre medical art experiment called Que Le Cheval Vive en Moi, where a French artist injected herself with horse immunoglobulins before undergoing a blood transfusion with horse blood, successfully due to the build up of her immune system. She said she felt like a super-human, hyper-aware and hyper-sensitive. All well and good, but what exactly does it have to do with the story? I have to say it left me scratching my head a little.

.

I imagine that for some readers this will be a brilliant read. For me, it was only okay. The translation by Katherine Silver was tightly controlled. Cristoff occasionally employs long, run-on sentences filled with verb after verb which could have seemed clumsy but Silver handles them well. These were among the flashes of good that I found among the opacity. Unfortunately not enough to pull this one above a 3 for me.