My Clavicle: And Other Massive Misalignments

Sanz makes her English-language debut with an appealing work of autofiction about a middle-aged Spanish writer dealing with chronic pain. The novel begins with the narrator growing concerned on a transatlantic flight about a bump on her chest, which quickly becomes a source of morbid fixation. Upon returning home to Madrid, she whimpers to her husband, “I’m going to die.” Her subsequent doctors’ appointments are both somber and comical: “I can’t tell if what I’m seeing is my body or a scene from a horror movie,” she notes during a cardiac stress test performed by a grumpy nurse. Alongside refreshingly honest insights into the physical and mental difficulties of menopause, Sanz proffers equally honest reflections on the perils of being a writer. “We’re literary Stakhanovites, trapped in a Soviet worker culture that reveres hard labor as its own reward,” the narrator says in reference to her unpredictable monthly earnings. Such pithy asides are juxtaposed with lengthy and intense descriptions of the narrator’s pain as she attempts to come to terms with it. For a novel about an obsession with mortality, this witty tale brims with vitality. (July)