In Dams, by Irene Solà, translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem, a young girl named Ada comes home from London to Catalonia, and spends her summer delving into the past, writing stories, certain that she wants to go back to London when the season is over and yet simultaneously pulled back into the landscape, history, and tall tales of the town she once left behind. Hanging out with friends, chatting with her brother Quim and her sister Nadià, and hooking up with her first love, Vicenç Jr., she at once tries to hold herself above her hometown and finds herself slipping into it.
Solà’s novel is intensely metafictional: Ada’s stories, each marked with a title in all caps, switch off with scenes from reality proper. The reader traces, then, not only the world around Ada and how her perspective is slowly shifting with the long, hot summer, but the world within her as she, an aspiring author, explores her voice. On a pure narrative level, Solà paints a tale of summer romance, of poignant, often-warring emotions and the difficult and yet familiar feelings of nostalgia and returning home. Ada is twenty-seven, an age at once solidly adult and also still quite young. She feels grown up, too old to be listening to her mother’s admonishments, and yet she also is adrift, unsure of herself. She wants to ask local adults if it’s all right to write about their lives, but her sister’s anger at being a subject takes her entirely by surprise, putting her on the defense.
On a metafictional level, Solà explores what it means to be a writer drawing from real life, from the characters who raised you, while also trying to cast out to be something new. Despite all the things she believes that she wants, Ada finds herself the most inspired by her own hometown, by the world she thinks she will ultimately leave. But her voice is uncertain. Ada promises her fellow characters that the names won’t stay the same in the final stories, and yet in our reading, they are. And the stories all appear true, except that they begin to take on new tones and genres, and get more outlandish, throwing doubt on the older stories that Ada wrote to us. What of this is real? What can really be expressed through the pages of a story?
The narration outside of Ada’s tales points at an intrinsic fault in the written work to portray reality. Solà presents her side of the novel (as opposed to Ada’s) by beginning every part with “This is.” This, she says, is the farm, this is Ada driving, this is what happened across town. “This is what happened,” the narrator seems to assert, insisting on it to the reader: this is what is real. As if Solà is gesturing in front of us—this is Ada in her car, look and see. But we can’t. The page sits between us. Just as the mother’s pain is a river that is ultimately relieved by a dam, holding back some of its course, eddying, something of reality is always held back in the end from reaching the page.
Solà hints at this with the photographs that end the novel. “This is blue,” one says. “This is red.” And yet both are simply grey, solid blocks on the page. The reader cannot see the colors. They must take the narrator on faith, pointing to the intrinsic failure of language to accurately portray what we can see and experience ourselves. Just as, in one moment, Ada tells her lover that he smells like corn, and the narrator shows us that the two of them are thinking of completely different scents. No matter what Ada puts to the page, her thefts of sorts, her recastings, will never quite be able to put reality onto the page. Solà’s novel is at once a rich novel of nostalgia and the richness of life, and an exploration of fiction and its possibilities and ultimately, its failure to approximate the sumptuous, complex lives we live.
FICTION
Dams
By Irene Solà, Translated by Mara Faye Lethem
Graywolf Press
Published November 3, 2026
