The Voices of Adriana

A Spanish writer and philosophy scholar grieves her mother and takes care of her ailing father in this uneven offering from Navarro (The City in Winter). Adriana is preoccupied by everything but her unfinished thesis. She frets about her widower father’s ill health following a stroke and fixates on his daily habit of searching for hookups on dating apps. Adriana looks half-heartedly for love herself, drifting from one short-term relationship to the next and remaining hung up on an unnamed colleague known as the “bearded man” who abandoned his wife and children for Adriana before leaving her three years later. Much of the novel meanders, just as Adriana meanders through her life, but it greatly improves in the final section, which comprises three narratives ostensibly written by Adriana as part of her thesis, including that of her mother’s stifling childhood and later career as a pediatrician, her grandmother’s loveless marriage to a local medical assistant and farm owner during the Spanish Civil War, and Adriana’s infatuation with the bearded man. Navarro’s metafictional exercise intrigues, even if it doesn’t always hang together. (Feb.)