'Chrysalis': A terrifying fable set in Andalusia about stolen childhoods

In insects like butterflies, the chrysalis is said to maintain a quiescent state : the dormancy prior to becoming an adult. The chrysalis is thus part of a natural process, with several stages and drastic changes, with layers that mutate, giving rise to the adult version of the specimen. With this image, as disturbing as it is poetic, the Spanish film screenwriter , cultural icon, and for some time now also a fiction writer, titles his first novel , which will be the focus of some of the conflicts that his child protagonist will go through.

The cover illustration of Impedimenta's carefully crafted edition , the face of a young woman illuminated against a black background, seems to provide some clues to the story. Crisálida arrives three years after Malaventura , a collection of short stories by Navarro also set in Andalusian Spain , within the realm of what has been called "southern Gothic."

And if it is true that such dark and supernatural atmospheres are palpable in the novel, it is no less true that elements of other genres can also be assigned to this story: the borders that define every western , the terror that emerges in the sinister , the fantastic and imaginary worlds linked to mythological or ancestral stories.

Between literature and cinema , a multitude of references emerge: from Stephen King to Shirley Jackson, from Sergio Leone to Corman McCarthy, from Quentin Tarantino to William Golding, from Walt Whitman to García Lorca.

Also important is the fact, which almost becomes an authorial signature, that geography—in this novel, the Sierra Nevada—functions, in itself, as a character . While there are many possible resonances and affiliations, from there on, everything that happens in Crisálida is new, and this is largely due to the construction of the protagonist's voice: she is the one who will lead us by the hand to learn about the story of her family, which, from the beginning, is perceived to be broken.

At the beginning of the novel, the adolescent girl Nada, or simply Ná, wakes up in a sanatorium with no memory of who she is or how she got there. Although she's told the place isn't a mental institution, the nameless girl knows that the other inmates "are crazy like her."

He doesn't care. He doesn't listen to the doctors, the nurses , or the "men in ties," representatives of that society he stopped frequenting long ago—the same one his parents detested—and now they want to understand the mystery of that reappeared girl.

Only one nurse, Brígida, wonders (and asks her) why no one looks for her, how it is possible that no one visits or claims her. She is the only one Nada manages to like, although that doesn't prevent her from frequently scandalizing herself, nor from frequently self-flagellating her tortured body.

Between nightmares and medicinal fumes , the girl begins to retrace her story for Brígida : how one night, without warning, she fled into the woods under the command of her father, "the Captain," and her mother, "Honeysuckle," a hippie couple who, in 1980s Granada, decided to abandon the society they despised in pursuit of ideals of freedom, dragging their five small children, their "Robinsons," with them. "We're going to live here because nature is the place to live."

It must be said right away that Chrysalis may not be a book for every reader , as this story contains intolerably cruel episodes in which the Captain attempts to "re-educate" his children, as well as violence and abuse of the children and among themselves.

But whoever dares to move forward – and endure – will suddenly find themselves trapped by a story that also overflows with ideas and reflections , which come through the thoughts of Nada, torn between the tenderness that comes from being a witness to the events into which she was dragged with her brothers, and the sordidness in which she has no choice but to participate.

Lucid, sensitive, and early adult, behind that voice—not always reliable—lie questions about the fragility of children, the many forms of vulnerability, and a very early loss of innocence. Far from "Captain Fantastic"—another fictional family that escapes capitalist society and seeks an alternative life in the woods—that film starring Viggo Mortensen in which survival is fostered through physical training and critical thinking, the experience of Nada and her siblings will be brutally determined by the lysergic and mystical madness with which the Captain , an idealist who seeks to transform each member of his family , starting with his wife, accomplice and victim.

Renamed in the forest by their father as Quartz, Nothing, Lightning, Columbine, Cub—who is barely a baby when they leave the city— the children will gradually forget their few memories from before the delirious crusade . The father-Captain will not calculate the cost of his enterprise until he finally loses his way.

Isolated under the Captain's tyranny in the deep woods, confused by the hallucinatory visions of their father and certain supernatural presences that terrify them , the children will lose, first, their innocence, and over the months, their humanity. "I've begun to see Lightning running on all fours through the woods, just like an animal."

They will grow accustomed to hunger, to the cold, to competing for food, to living like animals, to fighting to survive, even among themselves . They will see death; they will also see killing. In the figure of this all-powerful father, it is also possible to associate the mythological scene of the totemic feast. Nada, for his part, in the midst of puberty, will take care of his siblings and his mother as best he can.

But she can't help but admire her father: "I have his voice in my head. I have his blood, and no matter how many times I cut my wrists, I'll still be his daughter." She then seeks to halt the development of her body, to remain a chrysalis, a child, innocent . "Who was who I am, what am I? If I'm neither a toad nor a bat nor a girl."

This sort of moment or rite of passage – Nothing has her first period in the woods – recalls that scene at the beginning of the film Carrie , in which we see the teenager under the shower, terrified by the blood that flows from her body, without knowing what is happening to her, a terror that precedes the laughter of her classmates and the subsequent disaster.

Asked if he imagines a film version of Chrysalis, which he himself could adapt, the Granada-born writer stated that, in principle, he would prefer the reader to continue imagining the protagonist , with the sound of Andalusian slang, and a territory that remains an indecipherable zone between the real landscape and the imagined world.

Chrysalis , by the Spanish Fernando Navarro (Impedimenta).