Recently, within the framework of the Book Fair in San Bartolomé, I had the fortune to attend the presentation of Los nombres de Feliza, a novel by the Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez, the result of almost three decades of research around the figure of the sculptor Feliza Bursztyn. Born in Bogotá in 1973, Vásquez has consolidated his literary voice with works such as El ruido de las cosas al caer, awarded the Alfaguara Prize.
During the days leading up to the Fair, I went to the El Puente bookstore and was able to get other works by the author. Among the books that Norberto recommended to me and whose reading I have enjoyed, I would highlight Viajes con un mapa en blanco, where Vásquez reflects on the novel as a mirror of society and a privileged means to understand human nature. There he maintains a suggestive thesis: "we have not invented the novel; the novel has invented us."
In Viajes con un mapa en blanco, Vásquez also establishes a deep connection between the novel and History, arguing that both share the purpose of understanding the human experience, although they do so from different perspectives. For him, the novel, beyond its fiction, becomes a valuable tool to explore subjective truths, emotional nuances, and moral dilemmas that escape the reach of History as a discipline and the documentary sources from which it draws.
Thus, the author argues that the novel can illuminate the voids of History, giving voice to those who were ignored or silenced. It is not about replacing History, but about complementing it, offering a more intimate and complex dimension of events. In this way, the novelist often acts as a historian of the invisible, and fiction becomes a legitimate and necessary way to understand both the past and the present.
From this same desire to intertwine history and fiction to give voice to the untold arises Eliza, Myriam Ybot's first novel. As a debut novel, it is a mature work noteworthy for its documentary rigor, its ability to maintain the narrative pulse, its sensitivity, and its deep look at the issues it addresses. I already had the opportunity to recommend Eliza last year in an article titled "Summer Readings" before embarking on reading it again recently with the colleagues of the Island Library Reading Club. Then I described it along with other editorial novelties as "a very entertaining novel, where you can perceive the extensive documentation that the author had to collect to create her fiction. The influence of the classics of the English novel is also denoted. The use of narrative twists will lead to the fact that, once the reading has begun, it cannot be abandoned until it is finished."
Now I would like to delve into some of the aspects that I outlined then. Firstly, the question of historical rigor. Although the protagonist of the novel, Eliza Drake, is a fictional character, she is undoubtedly inspired by real women: European travelers such as Olivia Stone, who visited the Canary Islands and documented their experiences through letters, diaries, and books during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The writer Olivia Stone traveled with her husband, the photographer John Harris Stone, through the Canary Islands between 1883 and 1884. From that trip was born her work Tenerife and its six satellites, where she offers a unique look at the geography, society, customs, and nature of the archipelago. It is a delightful work that was once published by the ULPGC in two volumes but has been out of print for years (although it can be accessed through the electronic book modality in the Digital Memory of the Canary Islands). Fortunately, part of this legacy has recently been recovered in the book En camello por Lanzarote, published by Itineraria Editorial, as well as the novel Eliza itself, with an enlightening prologue by the writer Pepe Betancort.
It should be remembered that the English travelers of the 19th century approached the Canary Islands with a look that combined naturalist astonishment and ethnographic interest. Along with Stone, another good example is found in Marianne North, a Victorian painter whose works, in addition to recording plant species with scientific rigor, capture the atmosphere and emotion of the environment. It is no coincidence, therefore, that one of her paintings was chosen as the cover of Ybot's novel. Compared to male travelers, women focused on aspects such as human relationships, domestic life, and the details of the landscape. And that same look is what Eliza maintains throughout the work: her interest in the details, in the everyday, which even leads her to a healthy interest in Canarian gastronomy.
And here we find perhaps two of the great successes of the novel: the female vision of the protagonist and the thematic axis, addressing a little-explored aspect of Canarian history in literature: the presence and influence of the British community in the islands, with some relevant exception such as Alonso Quesada who in Las inquietudes del Hall, offered a complex look at the English, recognizing with irony and intelligence both their modernizing role in the islands and their arrogant and distant attitudes towards the local population.
Eliza thus takes up and updates the question of the British presence in the Canary Islands as a theme and the legacy of the English travelers, in particular, integrating history, landscape, and emotion, paying tribute to those women who, with respect and curiosity, expanded our cultural imagination and inviting us to reflect on identity, freedom, and the encounter with the other.
But Eliza also stands out, in addition to that thematic issue and the historical rigor with which she addresses it, for her careful prose, for her broad vocabulary, and for the sensitivity with which Ybot describes both the landscapes and the emotional nuances experienced by the protagonist. Alternating between diary fragments and an omniscient narration, the novel stands out for its sensory and historical richness, transporting the reader to the atmosphere of the Canary Islands at the beginning of the 20th century.
Now I would like to dwell on the concept of travel in this novel. The journey in Eliza is a structuring axis and symbol of transformation: not only geographical, from Victorian England to Lanzarote, but also identity. This displacement can be read as an inversion of the classic colonial journey: it is not the European man who explores exotic territories, but a woman who seeks in the periphery a form of personal emancipation. However, the journey is not unequivocally liberating; it also raises tensions and contradictions. While it allows the protagonist to connect with her desire, it reveals implicit hierarchies in her relationship with the environment. In any case, Eliza subverts the traditional archetype of the male hero on the journey, such as Odysseus or Robinson Crusoe, and transforms it into a female interior journey, introspective and affirming of subjectivity, which gives it a critical and innovative dimension.
Regarding its link with the classics of the English novel, from my point of view Eliza is reminiscent of heroines such as Jane Eyre or Catherine Earnshaw, who also defy social norms in search of autonomy and fulfillment. Ybot's style, careful and evocative, refers to the elegant prose of authors such as Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë, although her language is more contemporary. In addition, like Austen, Ybot acutely portrays the limitations imposed on women by social conventions, using irony and psychological analysis to delve into the character of her protagonist. Finally, the landscape, rural in Charlotte Brontë, insular and exotic in Ybot, takes on a symbolic value in the emotional evolution of the protagonist.
Eliza is, in short, a novel about discovery and female emancipation. Eliza Drake's journey to Tenerife and Lanzarote in the first decade of the 20th century becomes an intimate transformation in which the nature and light of Lanzarote, where the author has resided for more than thirty years, play an essential role. The description of the landscape, culture, and traditions is carried out with endearing respect and affection, and I find some stylistic, thematic, environmental, and temporal similarities with the work of another exceptional narrator, Ana García-Ramos del Castillo, author of notable novels such as Tanto para nada or La vida en silencio.
Eliza is a literary work that combines evocative and authentic prose, documentary solidity, and deep sensitivity (linking History and fiction) and also has a relevant capacity to connect the local with the universal. It invites us to look at the Canary Islands, and especially Lanzarote, with different eyes, to value the richness of our history, and to recognize the essential role of female voices in the construction of collective memory. Eliza is, therefore, a novel that deserves to be read today... and, surely, also in a hundred years.
