Isabel Coixet recounts that she vowed to never to do another literary adaptation after her 2017 English-language feature The Bookshop based on Penelope Fitzgerald’s critically acclaimed 1978 novel of the same name.
Then the Spanish director read compatriot writer Sara Mesa’s dark 2021 novel Un Amor at the tail-end of the pandemic. The unsettling work follows troubled translator Nat who quits life in the city for a dilapidated, leaky house in a remote village in Spain’s depopulated rural interior.
It is not exactly clear what prompted the move but she appears to be suffering from some sort of vicarious post-traumatic stress disorder connected to the harrowing refugee accounts she translates for her job.
A figure of curiosity as a lone woman, Nat lives as an outsider and then embarks on an unexpected and inexplicable passionate affair with a local social outcast. “Sara Mesa is one of the most powerful voices in young Spanish literature.
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