Paula Vázquez

La librería y la diosa - 2023

A moving memoir about motherhood, feminism and books.

Paula attends classes in a ceramics workshop with four other women, who chat and have tea together and mould the clay before firing their creations in the kiln. Not all of them come out well: thirty per cent of the pieces miscarry. At the age of thirty-six, Paula is also trying to get pregnant, but as sometimes happens with her ceramic pieces, she suffers successive miscarriages. Her desire to be a mother surged unexpectedly, after spending her entire youth rebelling against the idea of repeating her mother’s mistakes, who gave up studying to look after her children. But perhaps now that her mother has passed away, Paula can begin to view motherhood from another perspective. Until then, her main concern was to be an independent, traveling woman, self-sufficient and able to cope with anything. And thanks to her love of reading and following an impulse, she has fulfilled her dream of being a bookseller. Far-removed from her life in Argentina, she has opened one of the most genuine and charming bookstores in Barcelona (and another one later in Madrid), whose shelves are only stocked with Latin American books.

Now Paula has just one desire: to be a mother, and one preoccupation: to make room for her child in her feminist life. Perhaps a ceramic goddess, whom she can shape with her own hands, will bless her with the gift of fertility.

‘Her writing is delicate and with a cadence reminiscent of waves that arrive gently but constantly at a shore which, at last, after grief and transformation, becomes the refuge Paula desired to inhabit.’ Victoria Gabaldón, Mamagazine

‘A literary journey through the realms of motherhood, independent bookstores, and feminism, in which she guides us through her own process of transformation and reflection, challenging expectations and celebrating women's free choice.’ Carmen Gómez Moreno, El Generational Post

Las estrellas - 2019

“A genre-breaking book that incorporates narrative, poems, essays and an intense tale of farewell. Do we let go of people we love so they can leave? Do we write them? Writing can be a way of saying sorry, a way of finding reconciliation. A mother and daughter who are all mothers and all daughters that ever were: the mother of invention

There are works in which writing acts to encrypt closeness or absence: letters like a grave that traces the silhouettes of loved ones. Paula Vázquez realizes an exercise in remoteness and proximity, while lifting the veil from disappearance and agony. Those bodies we once had by our side now return, in this summons that is also a farewell. The Stars, her first novel, is written with meticulous rhythm and a great desire to find light. This book is like a catalyst of painful and sensitive particles, where love and literature meet up once more.” Francisco Garamond

“Mourning tends to outlive its telling: Letter to My Mother by Georges Simenon, A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir and A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke are novellas, as if narratives of maternal death demanded an ascetic synthesis in style, a kind of laconic sorrow. The Stars deserves to be a part of that melancholy group.” María Moreno

“This story belongs to the hallowed ‘literature of the self’ but is much more than that: it is fine poetry, it is intelligent, and spare, the discovery of how far the ability to love is tied to the ability to write. It is sober in tone, is so bereft of stridency – reminding me of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking – and has the opposite effect: it annihilates.’’ Josefina Licitra

“The Argentinian writer opens up a new path, that is imaginative but severe, tender and chiaroscuro, in the genre of filial mourning. The Stars achieves something much closer to a casual photo, taken without warning, than a solemn monument. The book’s aspiration is slight, in its own way, and hence its final success, is so remarkable.” Juan Marqués, El Mundo

“This is no self-help book, not a ‘new age’ philosophy, no lyrical explosion but soothing pages that dive into one’s consciousness and meaning of life through reflection. And every now and then, a sentence like a bullet…” Olga Merino, El Periódico

“The Stars is most of all a work about the power of words and a travel guide through intimate spaces across half the world, maybe because, as the author points out there is only one letter difference between ‘flight’ and ‘plight'.” Elena Costa, El cultural

“A beautiful story about pain, maternity, anguish and time. Through the illness and death of her mother, she speaks of filling voids, occupying emptiness, healing wounds and tearing down stereotypes. Hard to believe this is her first novel.” Loreto Sánchez Seoane

La suerte de las mujeres - 2017

“Since I was a girl, my life had followed the line of stitches on the back of a nervous animal, without danger or the hint of pain mattering. But now they do matter. The discovery of that shadow, of that danger, is at the core of this book”

“Working on the mechanisms of everyday life, Paula Vázquez goes beyond the hazards in life. Marriages, childhood, family, and work are the scenarios in which the characters in Women’s Luck experience transformation: The sense that ‘something is changing place in your chest, like the colours in stained-glass changing with the seasons.’ The secret, of course, is in the detail: the sugar in soup, a son’s late arrival, an employer’s imperceptible gesture, the oracular phrase uttered by a manicurist. Playing with two spaces that overlap, the feminine and southern Argentina, Paula Vázquez explores the power of fate, fortune and instinct in exceptional rhythmic and sober prose. Her sharp eye captures with precision the moment of a jump, the nuanced boundary where life collapses. No character leaves a tale by Vázquez unscathed. No reader either.” Ana María Shua.

“Paula Vázquez's book of short stories can take us to a constellation that includes Elena Ferrante, Clarice Lispector, and Silvina Ocampo. A tradition of women, estrangement, and uncertainty.” Mariel Martínez