I must confess that the image chosen by the Impedimenta publishing house for the cover of This Is Your Home, by Jon Bilbao (Ribadesella, 1972), has held my attention longer than I expected. It is an oil — or perhaps an acrylic — by Aaron Harker, titled Scent and Sensibility, which I would translate as The Scent and Sensitivity. I say it has held my attention because, at every pause in my reading, before opening or after closing the book, I would linger a few seconds observing it and checking how tightly the threads that bind it were woven to the nine stories that comprise the volume, in a manner nearly inextricable. The choice of that image, from editorial and literary viewpoints, is a resounding success.
The painting by Harker condenses much of what beats within the book and what the cover of This Is Your Home illustrates, and functions as a reading key, for in it is reflected, story by story, what Bilbao is distilling. There is the fear and death of What Happened in the Cave; the threatened childhood of Exploitation; the thrill that drives us to survive in Variation on a Car Trip Through Big Sur. There is also the insecurity of the dark, that fear that paralyzes and raises the hairs in Many People Live Inside There, and the abuse of the strong over the weak recounted in Reminder. Later appears the survival instinct of someone fleeing what they cannot master, in Non-Physical Experience, and the opportunity cost depicted in A Long Weekend. The painting’s color richness is likewise matched by the lexical richness of the eighth tale, Conversation in a Henhouse. And finally the existential uncertainty — life and death that always lurk — in the closing piece, First Night or Marke’s Return (A Kind of Epilogue). It’s not that every story has an exact mirror on the cover; it’s that the image radiates a restlessness that runs through all the pages of This Is Your Home.
This singular collection, in addition to offering a literary connection to the feelings, emotions and imaginations provoked by such a disturbing image, unveils Jon Bilbao’s evident narrative power. There are stories, such as Many People Live Inside There, that have managed to give me goosebumps on my arm. And which, at this point in my reading experience, a text can make my skin crawl, provoke a shiver, a kind of horripilation…, speaks volumes about the literary craft with which these captivating, mysterious and unsettling stories are written.
That same craft, however, coexists with a formal reservation I don’t want to hide: some stories leave a taste of endings that feel unfinished. The author builds a patient, oppressive atmosphere and, at the moment of the denouement, sometimes prefers ellipsis to resolution. In tales like Non-Physical Experience or A Long Weekend, this renunciation of closure works as a deliberate stroke, a threat that remains suspended. In others, however, the ending arrives before the tension accumulated has had its release, and one closes the page with the sense that a final blast was missing. I don’t know if this is a feature of intention —to leave the wound open— or a limit; in any case, it does not blemish the whole, but it is worth noting.
Because in This Is Your Home the everyday is not a safe refuge, but a cracked painting through which leaks, just as the scent of a fawn detected by the fox on the cover, the bewilderment of many of the characters. Bilbao handles the tension with the precision we demand from a surgeon or, given that he is a mining engineer, from someone who must place blasting charges to extract ore from a mine gallery. He does not require flashy artifices or loud shocks to destabilize the reader: it is enough to heighten a silence, slow a character’s gesture, or weave an atmosphere — what atmospheres!, and remember What Happened in the Cave — to propose an environment where the threat never fully reveals itself, though it lurks at every corner of the tale.
When I close the book and, for the umpteenth time, turn my gaze to the cover’s painting, I understand the game the author invited me to play. That “house” was not a cozy home, but a territory — perhaps personal, autobiographical and autofictional — moral and psychic, as fragile as it is dazzling. With This Is Your Home, Jon Bilbao has produced a mature and disturbing work that, in line with the best of his career, confirms him as one of the most consistent Spanish narrators of the moment and of our literature, without a doubt. I have not only enjoyed reading it, but I now reveal that, after placing the book with its cover captured among the others in my library, some of its most forceful and disturbing images continue to resonate within me.
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Author: Jon Bilbao. Title: This Is Your Home. Publisher: Impedimenta. Available: All of his books.