Beautiful and Dark by Rosa Montero

I'm not sure the title
translated as well as the
rest of the novel, the original 
Spanish Bella y Oscura has
a far better ring.

Rosa Montero is a Spanish journalist and author. She was born in Madrid in 1951, her father was (pleasingly stereotypically) a bullfighter. When she contracted TB as child she was housebound for four years, and it was during this time she developed a passion for literature, both consuming and producing it.

In 1976 she graduated from the School of Journalism and began work at the popular Spanish newspaper El País, where she still works to this day (as of August 2025). Montero has won many awards both for her fiction writing and her journalism, and has been the subject of numerous academic papers. Of her dual vocation she says "on journalism, clarity is a value. The clearer, the more factual it is, the better it is. In a novel, the ambiguity is the value." She also maintains "you can’t make a living out of fiction writing. You can’t and you shouldn’t." For Montero novel writing is, or should be, a wholly artistic endeavour, driven by the subconscious, and should not be shackled by the need to earn enough to live off.

Beautiful and Dark is one one Montero's earlier novels, originally published in Spanish as Bella y Oscura in 1993. In Spanish 'oscura' has, I believe, connotations of the murky and gloomy, which do not entirely translate to the English 'dark'.

Montero has won the prestigious Qué Leer
prize twice.

The novel follows Baba, a young orphaned girl, who goes to live with relatives in the neighbourhood of El Barrio, literally The Neighbourhood, in an unnamed city. Here she meets Airelei, a dwarf, or as she describes herself a Lilliputian. 

There is a strong mythic strand that runs through Beautiful and Dark, with Airelei professing to be hundreds of years old, and capable of performing magic. Yet I am not sure I would describe the novel as Magical Realism. There is magic, and there is realism, but the two do not really intertwine. Baba's internal world is subtle and realistic, she mainly observes the world around her, her nature is to react and it involves considerable soul searching on her part to actively influence the world around her.

In turn, the world is a dark and mysterious place, vague in that childish way, where facts are learned in isolation and connections are not yet fully formed as why things are the way they are, and how they connect to each other. So the spells of Airelei (which may or may not work, we never really know) are as mysterious to Baba (which I have just realised translates as slime, or spital) as the prostitutes who stand illuminated in the violet windows.

The Spanish flag is one of only two to
contain pink

A huge part of the novel is the atmosphere, which stands somewhere between Dickins and noir pulp, so much so that modern elements, like aeroplanes and jeans, seemed a little out of place. Adrienne Mitchell, who translated the work into English, says of Montero's prose in Beautiful and Dark, "her words jump off the page—they are alive, visceral, juicy, sparkling." This is very much true, the setting is enthralling: dark, grimy and somehow filled with both the social realism of an inner city slum, and the brooding malevolence of a Grimm's fairy tale. But to so great and extent, that I found it swamped the more subtle elements of the novel. 

Montero has said she is not a fatalist in the Eastern sense, that while we can not stop things from happening to us, we can control how we react to them. But she has also said "our lives mean us being undone over time." And I think this latter quote reflects Beautiful and Dark more accurately. Baba is young, and should be filled for hope of what her future may contain, yet it is constrained by her past. Ultimately she has little control over her life. Even the enigmatic Airelei who has lived well beyond the normal time allotted, accepts that sooner or later, she will meet her fate. There is a lot of introspection into the human condition in the novel, but it is so finely drawn, that I lost sight of it within the broad sweeps of the cruel world. I think a second reading would probably draw a lot more out of the novel, but I am not fond of retreading old ground when there are so many new books I haven't read once yet.

★★★★☆