YOU’RE VERY QUIET TODAY
ANA NAVAJAS
A deeply atmospheric and beautifully observed debut novel.
“When I got home, I went out on the balcony to smoke a cigarette. I like that you can no longer smoke inside. I like smoking to suspend time while daily life carries on.”
In the wake of her mother’s death we follow the narrator’s life in Buenos Aires, and her occasional trips to the provinces to visit her father, who now lives alone in the house where she grew up. We see her in different roles: as a mother of three, a wife, a daughter, a sister, but now also as a motherless child. But who is she when she’s by herself, without having to take care of anyone else? Who is she when she has no role to fulfil, when she stops serving the needs of the people around her? She is very quiet today, but her silence is filled with words. Beneath the stillness there is this grief: alone, she struggles to find her own voice. She seems to be telling us: let me be quiet, I am living. She is demanding to be allowed to feel things in her own way and at her own pace. And in doing this, she reveals humour, an endless curiosity towards the enigma that is her children, and her memories of a childhood spent in the sticky heat of rural Argentina.
You’re Very Quiet Today is a stunning work of autofiction that shows the complexity of the female voice and the telling weight of silence.
Published in Argentina: Rosa Iceberg, 2022 / Spain: Seix Barral, 2022
Ana Navajas is an Argentinian novelist. She grew up in the province of Corrientes and returned to the capital to study Communication at the University of Buenos Aires. She currently teaches Creative Writing in Buenos Aires where she lives with her family. Her literary debut novel Estás Muy Callada Hoy was published to much acclaim by Rosa Iceberg in 2019.