Oldladyvoice by the review of Elisa Victoria – a wise and distorted gem of a novel | fiction

Seville, 1992, and nine-year-old Marina is afraid her mother will die. While her mother is in the hospital, Marina is sent to see her grandmother – who is “seventy-two, petite, pot-bellied and has no regrets” (and is also called Marina). More than her mother’s life is at stake: unless medical treatment is effective, Marina, who is separated from her father, must be sent to a convent school. During a long and scorching summer, between the sunny courtyards of apartment buildings and a worker complex in Marbella, she reckons with the complexities of life, death and her own burgeoning lust in this sour start. -soft.

With his candid description of preteen sexuality and the undercurrents of family tragedy, Oldladyvoice remind me of The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, winner of the International Booker. But Elisa Victoria has a lighter hard, and her story remains meaningful. Child narrators in adult fiction often have irritatingly angry eyes or are excessively precocious. Marina is neither. His gentleness, his anxiety and his mercurial gaze on the world around him – from frozen croquetas, hot plastic deckchairs, and stolen porn from her mom’s boyfriend’s bedside table – make her an enchanting companion. She knows that her introspective character and kitsch sensibility sets her apart from other children, who poke fun at her twee outfits and her social awkwardness (“Oldladyvoice” is the mocking nickname given to her by a boy in her class).

“Everything would be easier if I wasn’t so precious,” she said. “I try to hide it, but it’s written all over me. Perfume advertisements, TV dances, dollhouses, Xuxa. I love anything out of date. But regardless, Marina doesn’t have much to say about her peers either: “People of my generation are either boring fools or evil pigs… I guess my place is in quiet rooms, and there must be many more like me, holding their breath alone, without anyone knowing.

Oldladyvoice is firmly anchored in time and space. The first Gulf War and the election of Felipe González play out against the backdrop of blurry TV sets, while Marina’s catalog of references – Sailor Moon and Smurfette, Whitney Houston and Chabel dolls – will evoke a more nostalgic nostalgia in child of the 1990s. But there is something deeper than nostalgia at work here. Although the book is set in the recent past, Victoria cleverly weaves into Marina’s monologue the unease of the present, a poignant sense of impending global catastrophe that threatens to engulf the narrow world of its protagonist. It is, in many ways, and given the rarity of such a categorization, a “millennial novel”.

Adults, Marina insists, “talk down to us, saying that children have it easy these days,” but she sees through this condescending optimism: “The centuries are important, the one you get has a major effect. Most of my life will be in the 21st century, strange as that sounds. This is only a middle chapter, the last for the elderly now, and a grim prequel for the newly born children. As the summer heat rises, Marina’s grandmother’s neighbors retreat to their stifling little apartments, where they will see the end of the millennium, “in a burnt orange tone, warm and dark”. For Marina, the 90s “are all that separates us from the rest”.

If all this makes Oldladyvoice seems heavy, it is not. More than anything, it’s extremely fun. Victoria’s prose is effervescent, her jokes never miss their mark, and her young narrator’s observations are as tender as they are genuine. I loved this little gem of a wise and distorted novel.

• Elisa Victoria’s Oldladyvoice, translated by Charlotte Whittle, is published by And Other Stories (£ 11.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

AK Blakemore’s The Manningtree Witches is published by Granta.