Emma Olsen’s Last Book (124 pages) was published by one of the main Galician publishing houses, Editorial Galaxia, who then brought out a Spanish translation of the same book in their Mar Maior series for distribution in Spain and Latin America.

The Galician text is presented, in a note by the American editor Frank Miller, as a translation of a text originally written in English by Emma Olsen, who has died the previous summer before the age of forty, having retired to her childhood home in Faith, South Dakota, in the company of her daughter Linda to write some ‘urgent memoirs’, to ‘settle accounts with her personal and literary biography’. So, while the book is presented as a novel, we are to understand that the content is biographical.

Emma Olsen has driven back to her childhood home in Faith, South Dakota, having left twenty years earlier. In all that time, she has only returned three times: twice to visit a good friend who has since died, and once to bury her father. Although she is a well-known author, having won the Pulitzer Prize for her book Dream Grass, she feels the need, now that she has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, to relate the story of Clarissa, the girl who grew up in the next-door house in Faith, an identical house to the one in which Emma grew up, only in reverse, a girl who always wanted to be different and managed to achieve this with everybody except Emma herself, which is why she hated and loved her at the same time. Emma and Clarissa would lie on the artificial lawn in front of Clarissa’s house, swim in the swimming pool and touch each other’s skin. Before writing this book, the only person Emma has told the story of Clarissa to was Susan, with whom she lived for several years until Susan was killed in an accident outside New York. For a brief period, Emma felt liberated, having told Susan about Clarissa, but now the weight of the memory has started to grow again and this is why Emma has decided to write this book before she dies.

While lying on the grass, Clarissa and Emma liked to invent a catalogue of all the possible ways of killing oneself, from inhaling noxious paint to imbibing poison. When Clarissa was still a child, her father eloped with a woman from Rapid City; in a similar way, Emma’s mother disappeared when she was only six. In the village lived a Mrs Brown who used to make the most wonderful apple pies. She had been born in Newport, Wales, and married a Mr Brown, with whom she had travelled to the States, expecting to return, only to live there for forty years. After retiring from the tyre factory where he worked, Mr Brown died of a heart attack, and Mrs Brown, realizing she was never going to return to Newport, finally decided to buy some new furniture and started baking cakes, even though the doctor advised her to lower her sugar consumption (another way of killing yourself).

Faith exists at the end of an abandoned railroad, in the middle of a plain, where it is impossible to hide. People who leave Faith to go somewhere else end up either returning or going mad. When Emma turned eight, Clarissa wanted to make a blood pact with her and pricked her finger on a park bench, but Emma didn’t dare, so they kissed instead (a pact made with saliva). On that day, they suddenly heard a scream: Mrs Collins’s husband had fallen into his well while trying to catch his hat, which had blown off in the wind. The two daughters attended the funeral with Emma’s father and Mrs Logan, Clarissa’s mother, who wept the whole time, perhaps because she was jealous of the way Mr Collins had died a proper death and been laid to rest, while her own husband had simply eloped, leaving her no option but to continue with the pretence of her own life. When the girls were sixteen, however, Mr Logan came back. Emma also remembers how once, the Logans’ washing machine broke down, Mrs Logan was doing the ironing in a pool of water but, despite the risk of electrocution (another way of killing yourself), she just smoked a cigarette and watched the scene unfold.

Emma’s father used to have a photograph of Emma’s mother and Mrs Logan standing by the fence that separated their houses, both heavily pregnant. When Clarissa was born, she was considered the perfect child, with blond hair and white teeth. Even when her younger sister, Anna, was born, Clarissa continued to be the object of everyone’s attention. The only time she experienced failure was when her grandmother, Mrs White, tried to teach her to sing. Clarissa couldn’t do this. Mrs White used to visit the local pub and return home drunk most evenings. She loved to sing karaoke and professed great admiration for Connie Francis. Sometimes, Mrs White would invite the girls to tea and, while she was in the house, the girls would take the road out of Faith in the direction of an Indian reservation they knew almost nothing about. Once they came across an animal that had been run over (another form of getting killed). Emma was repulsed, but Clarissa was fascinated and proceeded to examine the corpse. This reminds Emma of the discovery of the best-preserved skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex, known as Sue, which was found on Mr Collins’s land and briefly brought fame to Faith.

When Mrs White died, Mr Logan rented her house to a teacher of literature who had just arrived in Faith, Mr Montana. Clarissa used to hate all her teachers, especially those who idealized her. On one occasion, the science teacher, Miss Line, accused Emma and Clarissa of cheating in a test because all their mistakes had been identical. The one Miss Line kept viewing with disgust was Emma, but Clarissa defended Emma in front of the school director, said it wasn’t her fault and asked to be punished instead (the opposite of what the science teacher wanted). One time they were together, Mrs Brown came to inform them that Emma’s older brother, Luke, had been injured. It turned out a basketball hoop had fallen on top of him in the park and broken some bones, but he was all right. On the way to the park, Bill Collins came past in his father’s old truck and offered them a lift. Clarissa didn’t want to go, but Emma did. Bill had changed a lot since his father’s funeral, he was no longer this little kid, but a fully grown man, and the two of them sat in silence in the park, Bill laying his hand on her shoulder, before Emma returned to stay with Clarissa for the night.

On the afternoon of Luke’s accident, Emma and Clarissa had been to the local swamp, where they had swum in the water and Clarissa had said how easy it would be to drown somebody who didn’t know how to swim by rowing them to the centre of the lake and pushing them into the water. A snake had wriggled past, Emma had immediately put her arms around Clarissa and hidden behind her back while Clarissa took a large stone and sliced the snake in half. It was then that Emma realized she was perhaps a bit afraid of Clarissa. When they got back to Clarissa’s house, her sister, Anna, an obese girl who watched a lot of television, was preparing two large slices of bread and mayonnaise and demanded back her T-shirt, which Clarissa had borrowed and which was now soaking wet. Clarissa threw the T-shirt at her and it landed on the bread. A few days later, Clarissa came round to Emma’s house for dinner and gave her a talisman in a small box: a plastic bracelet she had inherited from her grandmother. Luke used to help Mr Montana with his books and do odd jobs around the house, but couldn’t move now because of his broken bones, so Emma went to let him know that Luke would not be coming. Immediately the literature teacher and Emma struck up a friendship, Emma told him about her disappeared mother’s books and how she read them in secret and later, when Emma visited Mr Montana in Faith – he was old by now and mistook her for another student – he asked if she knew a writer by the name of Emma Olsen. Mr Montana was the reason that Emma’s relationship with Clarissa changed.

The people in Faith celebrated the autumn equinox with a parade. The parade was organized by Mr Wilson, who lost his daughter, Sarah, a primary school teacher, on board the space shuttle Challenger when it broke apart 73 seconds into its tenth mission in 1986. There was a monument to the victims of this disaster in the local park. At the end of the parade one year, shortly after Emma had come into contact with Mr Montana, who introduced him to poetry, in particular the poetry of Anne Sexton, and said when you start loving poetry at the age of seventeen, it stays with you for ever, Mrs Logan set out a picnic lunch for everyone taking part in the parade, and it was there that Emma felt betrayed by Clarissa for the first time because she swam in the swimming pool with another girl, Monica Evans. As a result, Emma decided to leave the party with Bill Collins. Ever since she had met Mr Montana and he had introduced her to literature, made her a writer, she had begun to feel different. While everybody thought Mr Montana was an outsider, he had in fact been born in Faith, but his mother, Marion, had left the town when he was only five, fed up of being a single mother.

Emma appreciated Bill, the way they could be in silence together. Bill would come to visit Emma’s brother, Luke, but it soon became clear that the person he was really interested in was Emma. He would park his truck further and further away from their house, so that Emma would accompany him to the truck and he could drive her back again. They kissed for the first time on Veterans Day, and Bill, aware that Emma would one day leave Faith, asked to go with her. When Emma went to live in New York, she rented a room from a man called John and got pregnant with Linda. Before Linda was born, however, John moved to Europe and only visited from time to time. What Emma understands by love is the willingness to be with someone wherever they may be, wherever they may go, which is something Bill gave her.

Bill was impressed by the fact that Emma had started to write, especially when she won a local prize for her first short story, ‘Being Orphaned’. Emma went to the presentation ceremony in Rapid City in the company of Mr Montana, Clarissa and Monica. The three girls shared a room in the hotel and, when Monica fell asleep, Emma and Clarissa explored each other’s bodies between the sheets, the following morning signing a piece of paper that said they belonged to each other for ever (which Clarissa kept in her bra). Back in Faith, Bill and Emma carried on going out together and, for her eighteenth birthday, he gave her a necklace with their names intertwined.

Mr Montana handed Emma a leaflet about a creative writing course at Black Hills State University, and Emma decided that she would go. When she told her father, he stared at her with a mixture of fear and incomprehension, as if Emma had turned out like her mother. Emma went to tell Bill about her decision to enrol at university in his room, where he kept three photographs of her on the wall, two from before they had started going out together. Bill then got down on his knee and asked Emma to marry him, they would go to Rapid City together, he would work and she could study at university. Emma accepted, this was her ticket out of Faith. That same night, having been accused by Mrs Logan of stealing Clarissa’s grandmother’s bracelet, Emma went to tell Clarissa of her decision to leave Faith without her.

On the morning of her wedding to Bill, first Mr Logan came across to Emma’s house to say that Clarissa had disappeared. Then there was a phone call from Mrs Collins, Bill’s mother, asking where Bill had been all night. Clarissa had visited Bill’s house the previous evening and asked him to go to the lake with her, where she said Emma was waiting with a surprise. At this point, Emma realized what had happened, she remembered what Clarissa had said about killing somebody who couldn’t swim by rowing them out into the lake and pushing them out of the boat. She went round to Bill’s house and found the piece of paper she and Clarissa had signed in Rapid City, promising to remain faithful to each other. When the bodies of Clarissa and Bill were pulled out of the swamp, everybody assumed it had been an accident. Only Emma knew the truth, which she has now confessed in this, her final piece of writing.

This is a very interesting and well-constructed narrative, with the novelty that the book reads as if it was a translation of an original written in English. The author has even included 28 translator’s footnotes giving background information to further the pretence that this is a translation of an English original. This book won the Repsol Short Fiction Prize in 2013 and was chosen as that year’s best work of fiction by the Galician Publishers’ Association, who named Berta Dávila as their author of the year.

Synopsis © Jonathan Dunne