Wildness and Heat: On Andrea Abreu’s “Dogs of Summer”

Andrea Abreu, transl. Julia Sanches | Dogs of Summer: A Novel | Astra House | 2022 | 192 Pages

You might want to avoid reading Andrea Abreu’s gloriously visceral Dogs of Summer around meal times. We open with vomit: “Isora threw up like a cat. Huckahuckahucka and her sick splashed into the toilet boil, then seeped into the sprawling layers of soil beneath the island.” We continue to shit, Isora’s nan telling us that Isora, “spews out her guts and gets the shits and then she eats and shits and spews and pops Fortasec like it’s candy, and she eats and shits and shits and shits and spews and when she gets so blocked up that you can’t even fit a piece of straw up her butthole she sticks in a couple of suppositories so she can take another shit.” Don’t forget the snot, blood, moles, ingrown hairs, scabs, smells. 

This fascination with the body, its excretions, its abject functions, often links closely with our narrator’s burgeoning conceptions of desire. Even her nickname, Shit, manages to be simultaneously unsavory yet tender. Of its origins, she recounts that her best friend, Isora, “called me Shit in an affectionate way and it was a small, shy, quiet affection.” And later, “she called me shit jus [sic] like that in english because poop was a beautiful thing.”

It’s summer on Tenerife, the largest, most populous of the Canary Islands, and ten-year old Shit and Isora would do anything to catch a ride to the beach. Unable to find someone to take them, they roam the roads of their working-class town, tucked high away next to the volcano, trapped under oppressive cloud cover. They play out depraved storylines with their Barbies; masturbate with pens, crayons, clothes pegs; eat fried chicken, stewed taters, red mojo, and gofio amasado. Told exclusively from Shit’s perspective, we find ourselves completely immersed in the obsessions and naiveties of a precocious ten-year-old. 

Shit’s desires for Isora manifest as desire to be her best friend, to kiss her, to touch her, but also to actually be her, to consume her. Often these moments are paired in the text with abject imagery: excretions, violence, death. Isora’s mother is dead (suicide) and one afternoon, the girls try on her panties and grind together on her bed. Shit “didn’t know if dead folks liked it when you got on their beds, much less while wearing a pair of [their] panties.” But she’s undeniably turned on. In a section written in prose poetry and without punctuation, Shit thinks how she’d get “the urge to squeeze her [Isora’s] hand and twist it until all her fingers popped out of their sockets until her hands were just gone sometimes i hated her and wanted to destroy her isora’s lips were flush like she’d been smacked on the kisser i’d kiss her on the red bits behind the cultural center.” In the same section, Isora “was my best friend i wanted to be like her,” and Shit wants to “suck up isora’s head so I’d have her inside my body.”

But Shit and Isora’s closeness is threatened. Isora is growing up faster than Shit. She has boobs and pubes, she messages men for dick pics, she’s interested in the neighborhood boys. “Isora was somewhere else, I realized, somewhere I couldn’t even see the beginning of, and for a second I felt scared.” As summer plods toward fall, Shit worries that Isora will leave her behind. This precarious, heightened emotion eventually leads to a climactic event in the last section of the novel, the repercussions of which challenge the girls’ relationship and Shit’s conceptions of her own independence.

Published in Spain in 2020 as Panza de Burro, Andrea Abreu’s debut is now being translated into 16 languages, with plans for screen adaptation. The question of translation, what’s gained, what’s lost, what’s changed in the process, is particularly interesting as so much of this novel’s power and meaning stems from the nuances of how it’s written. The title serves as an interesting example. “Panza de burro” translates literally to “donkey’s belly” and is an idiomatic expression from the Canary Islands to describe the weather phenomenon of the low hanging, soupy clouds common to the Northern region of Tenerife, where the novel takes place. Translator Julia Sanches has chosen to translate it as “dogs of summer,” a nod to the American expression, “dog days of summer,” those hot summer days often associated with drought, sudden thunderstorms, mad dogs, and bad luck. As follows, we lose the locational specificity of “panza de burro,” the suffocating weight of the weather, but perhaps gain an additional sense of wildness and heat.

Dogs of Summer is a memorable debut, poetic and vibrant. The writing reproduces the fever pitch of early girlhood. Those languorous summer days spent seeking escape from childhood clouds, consumed with yearning. Occasionally these takeaways read too neat, most chapters ending in some kind of emotionally conclusive line. But the result is a satisfying, well-crafted short novel about the intensity, and sometimes disgust or violence, that comes with our very first intimate relationships.