Hungry for What
Check Your Appetite: A Review of María Bastarós’ Hungry for What
by Chance Freihaut
These stories are not normal. They will fool you as they have me. Suburbia, office buildings, untouched thickets, the roiling heat of the desert. Settings you have read but have never been forced into without escape, not like this. Translated from the Spanish, Hungry for What, is María Bastarós’ first book to be published in English. In it, the mundane is suffused with the violence of suppressed dreams, the power and escapism within sex, and the myriad voices of women beating against lives they have but cannot accept. All while children play in ways that will make your stomach turn. Bastarós writes as if the whole narrative were walking on razor wire. With each character, scene, and sentence slowly sinking deeper, drawing blood, until something finally slices clean through.
Bastarós deftly navigates between the sublime and the prosaic, often infusing the latter with the former to climactic extremes, leaving single actions or lines with the power to change the entire narrative. Decisions and events as straightforward as roller skating on a sunbaked desert, making a birthday wish, or moving into a new, sparsely populated suburb are rife with the pent-up longings and fears which Bastarós’ characters exhume throughout each tale.
In “That Time With the Shotgun,” a wife navigates the liquor-fuelled frenzy of her husband and father’s unemployed antics. They steal gasoline and soil, create a garden in the backyard on a whim, only to abandon it when the yield is stunted. Rats overrun the unkempt beds, so the men return home with a truckful of cats. The story culminates in a simple contest in the garage, with the wife as the ultimate judge in a decision that has the power to destroy or exalt any one of them.
The prose here is exquisite. Balancing on a knife edge, Bastarós often fills her sentences with unadorned specificity laden with varying undercurrents of violence, transgressive desire, and the decay of normalcy. When the husband in “It Doesn’t Come Cheap,”—who was once a gregarious pilar in his wife’s life—turns taciturn, the wife worries how much he must know about her secret acts. Both husband and wife become strangers to each other. One has enacted a betrayal that pervades their lives and strips them down to the bone. Bastarós captures this downward turn in both when she writes:
“Countless times I’ve wished he’d talk less, leave space for the unspoken. But this isn’t a calm silence; it’s a strident, screaming silence. A silence that wants to be heard.”
Later, the wife catches the husband observing her as she prepares dinner or hangs up clothes to dry and sees in him a “face full of shadows.” And it is ultimately shadows that structure this story through the bookends of a solar eclipse. Highlighting slow consequences, inevitable ones that orbit towards an inescapable darkness at the expense of another’s light.
A key specificity throughout many of these stories is the absence of named characters. The horror or elation unfolds to the wife, the children, or most often the nameless figure ascribed only she/her pronouns. The threat in “The Birthday Girl” is simply the man. This deliberate choice heightens both the protagonist’s and the antagonist’s synonymous ability to be anyone, to be us. And more importantly, it paints a clear picture as to who these women are in the context of their lives. Their identities and duties being reduced to a title, a designation, a gender. Perhaps an argument to be made is that to break through these reductive identities, these women and young girls, like planes breaking the sound barrier, need to punch through their own invisible yet tangible walls—by whatever means necessary. Bastarós does not provide an overarching diagnosis nor a remedy. Her role here is external, purely generative. She’s simply turning up the gas and bringing everyone on the page to a boil.
Bastarós plays with this and uses it to propel the climax and central conflict of each story into something boundary crossing yet visually striking. The last page of “Girls Don’t” masterfully blends grief and sex in a scene that is sacrificial and haunting; showing that grief can not only be a surrender to emotion, but also an act of willful destruction.
However strong these stories are, an argument can be made against the whole collection. Bastarós’ tales, while each unique in their choice of perspective and location—be it subversive wives, toxically curious children, the acrid and unforgiven desert or the isolation of Spanish mountains—all leave different prints in the mind but do so with the same ink. These explosive endings, while still surprising in how they land, come almost expectantly after the tone and voice is established in the first two stories. Halfway through this collection I asked myself if the inevitable shift to darkness and depravity was all I was going to remember from it. But this question reminded me of the light, of the tenderness sprinkled throughout. There is a sympathetic understanding to be found in the birthday girl’s wish. There is a sense of justice come too late in the short piece “Love.” It is only the desire to preserve life that changes the sister’s fate in “How to Save a Cricket.” And in the titular story, “Hungry for What,” an office worker trapped in a world of grey repetition achieves escape or transcendence or total annihilation through the vessel of her sandwich in the breakroom fridge.
A kind of claustrophobia envelopes the best of these stories. Ideas or events that once set in motion seem inescapable, with conclusions you watch unfold yet hope that they are just sick dreams, hallucinations, or hauntings—not the acts of wilful beings. In both “A Few Tins of Roe” and the final story, “Those Who Keep the Fire,” Bastarós renders the world down into a pestilential wound brimming with actions we don’t want to see, thoughts we don’t want to hear. And here is what Bastarós does best: just when you want to stop and look away, to close the book, she doubles down and removes the safeties, letting the story barrel full speed ahead into a wall you can’t see but know is coming. Treat yourself to an exhilarating voice and a masterclass in tension, read Hungry for What.
Chance Freihaut is a fiction writer whose work has been published in This Side of West and The Imagist. His writing focuses on identity, memory, time, and death. He’s been a finalist for the Writer’s Union of Canada Short Prose Competition and Exile Quarterly’s “Best Canadian Short Story.” In 2024 he won PRISM International’s Grouse Grind Lit Prize for V. Short Forms and was the recipient of the W.P. Kinsella Scholarship in Fiction. He is currently pursuing a double major in Writing and Philosophy at the University of Victoria. He serves as Fiction Editor for This Side of West.