Biography
Iolanda Zúñiga is a music teacher who has worked in a vegetarian restaurant in Vigo, as a bookshop and record shop assistant and as a puppeteer. Her first book, Post-it Lives, is a collection of forty-six microstories relating to universal daily situations that was published in 2007 to critical acclaim. She has since published a poetry collection, Amor amen, and three novels: Periphery (winner of the Xerais Prize for novels), about the precariousness of life and lack of opportunities in the favelas, Nights in the Safari: A Manual for Confused Lovers (published under the heteronym Marleen MaLone) and Natura (Book Gala Prize for best work of fiction). Post-it Lives has been translated into Basque, Catalan and Spanish.
Synopsis
Post-it Lives (136 pages) was first published in 2007, to critical acclaim. It contains forty-six microstories written about the lives and situations faced by ordinary people on a grey day. The prose is tight, tense and fast-moving. The stories are given musical terms as titles.
Sample
I’m going to name the daughter I never have Manuela. She’ll grow up with the eyes of a stray dog, unaware of the reason behind the hordes of cars, the pedestrian stampedes during sale season, or the shouts of the dogcatchers. I’m going to abandon the daughter I never have in the early hours of the morning, on a mountain, by the broom bushes the, or on the doorstep of some rich man with a palace and a pre-purchased burial plot, a man who’ll take care of her and keep her barren past under wraps. That, or the dogcatchers will come and take her to some social center, to the big house where people wear white coats. Or maybe she’ll be a foul-smelling nomad. I might name the daughter I never have Olivia instead of Manuela. I’ll conceive her during the few moments of lucidity my addiction allows me. I might abandon her after her baptism, so that I can miss her so, so much…so that I can die of sorrow and give my life meaning by re-upping on grief. Olivia won’t cry or point fingers. Olivia won’t look for me. She’ll hate her mother and grow up swathed in failure. She’ll be the fruit of neglect, she’ll be a whim. The light of day will show me my mistake, and I’ll batter my stomach with closed fists in the fifth month to abort her. I’ll stick a needle deeper than my uterus and inject myself with fistfuls of heroin. The only thing I’ll have to leave her is my unmistakable DNA. And with anxiety kicking at my heart, I’ll dream about her living in a little palace with jasmine on the balcony, with a garden where mockingbirds sing…I’ll dream about her having hair like Juliet. Her father would probably rather call her Juliet than Olivia or Manuela. I’ll have the name embroidered into the blankets of the crib we abandon her in. Even if we throw her into a garbage bin, she’ll have those initials embroidered in gold by her grandmother for the day of the baptism. J.G.D. Juliet Goddamned Daughter. She’ll go through life with eyes full of fear and desperation, the eyes of a stray dog without an owner or a home. My darling, my little girl, my sweetheart…She’ll be as wiry and tough as the rugged feelings of sailors in Terranova. As hardened against solitude as she is against tides. Far from the present-tense pastel of shop windows in spring.
Portico of Galician Literature 