Author: Elvira Navarro
- Fiction
- Literatura Random House
- ISBN: 9788439728061
- Release Date: 01-01-2013
-Reviewed by: Jorge Romero
La Trabajadora, by Elvira Navarro, has been one of those books that is a bit hard to read. The beginning of the book is somewhat rough and it may lead to certain readers to not want to read the book.
La Trabajadora starts by Elisa, the main character of this novel, posting ads in the newspaper asking for men to perform oral sex while she is menstruating. The long narrative of this first part is just that, Elisa meeting with different men at bars to see if she can find the ideal candidate to satisfy her sexual fantasies and desires. She finds a short Mexican man with which she ends up having some sort of relationship for a few months. Then one day, he just walks out of her apartment to never to come back. Because of her difficult economic situation, she has to move to a cheaper apartment.
At her new apartment, she rents a room to her friend German’s old coworker Susana. Susana is a beautiful blonde lady who has worked in many European countries, but is back in Madrid working as a telemarketer. She is also a collage artist who puts her own maps, or works of art, together. She has a long distance relationship with her Dutch boyfriend. Elisa tries to find out about Susana’s life, family and place of work but is unsuccessful. They have an ok relationship but is very hard to really know how they really feel about each other, since Susana is very secretive about certain parts of her life.
The main idea behind the book is the relationship between harsh economic situations and mental health issues. It seems that since Elisa’s economic situation became worse, so did her health issues. She starts having many bad episodes of health problems, some of which have landed her at the psychiatrist. It seems that Susana has also some sort of health issues.
After reading a few online reviews and interviews with the book’s author Elvira Navarro, it seems that she is trying to narrate a story in which she wants to talk about how economic problems negatively affect the mental health of a person. I think she did a good job at capturing this however, the development of the story around this subject could have been much better.
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