Learning to Talk to Plants

"Marta Orriols has a talent in drawing characters. This is a novel about someone who loses her partner, but only a few days before he dies he leaves her, telling her he had been having an affair. So it’s about the loss of him as a partner, but also the loss of him from the relationship before he died: it’s like a double loss. She then tries to hide his death from everyone and tries to keep the plants that he was caring for when they were living together. The plants are symbolic of the passing of time and lack of care, they slowly die. That’s what the title is about. But she has a very bold way of describing feelings without being sentimental, which I like very much. She writes beautifully about feelings but in a very cool way. For the reader, at least for me, it makes it even more touching—because you can see that she tries to put distance all the time. This distance makes you, the reader, want to get closer. She plays with the reader in that way: I want you to detach and what you want is me to tell you more and more. Yes. For me, when I read it, I hadn’t lost a significant person but I could relate to it. You don’t have to be in grief or grieving to connect with the book. It’s so human and so strong. I absolutely recommend it. She is also a writer who works very well in translation, perhaps because one can tell she likes Anglo-Saxon literature. I think there is a bit of an affinity and I think English readers would enjoy the novel. I hope her new novel, A Sweet Introduction to Chaos , will be translated soon."