My Clavicle:: And Other Massive Misalignments

‘I’m going to tell you what happened to me and what didn’t happen to me. The possibility that nothing happened to me is what's giving me the shakes.’ Marta believes she is dying. With the onset of menopause, the changes to her body are stirring up new anxieties. Every time she feels a pain in her chest, a numbness in her arm, or a tension in her clavicle, she assumes she has cancer, or some other diagnosis she has yet to learn of. During a flight, she starts to experience a pain underneath her rib. Unsure whether the pain signals the ominous approach of death or a simple bout of flatulence, Marta descends into an examination of pain’s impact upon her life. Is her body failing her or is she failing her body? From one of Spain’s most widely read and acclaimed authors, My Clavicle And Other Massive Misalignments is a provocative and vulnerable semi-autobiographical novel rendering a memorable portrait of pain, health anxiety and menopause.

About the Author :
Marta Sanz is an award-winning novelist, poet and essayist. Sanz has written fifteen novels and four collections of poetry, as well as contributing to anthologies and media publications like El País and El Mundo. Many of her novels have won prestigious prizes and four were included in El País's 100 Best Books of the Century.  Katie King is a highly experienced translator of Spanish literature. She has translated numerous works including Luis García Montero’s Someone Speaks Your Name and One Year and Three Months. As a translator, journalist and scholar, King has been published in esteemed publications including Words Without Borders, World Literature Today and Columbia Journal, as well as in print anthologies by Graywolf Press and Ecco Press.

Review :
'Sanz's autofictional English-language debut is a poetic mediation on illness, mortality, and writing.'  'This work of autofiction . . . abounds with lived-in details on everything from anxieties over mortality to going through the menopause. Sanz also works on some interesting formal choices into this book, along with nods to writers as disparate as Lillian Hellman, Elvira Navarro, and James M. Cain.' 'One of the most harsh, beautiful, brutal and impious books that I have read in a long time.' 'She has found the best way to be a political writer: her language is like a body. She talks to you like nobody else can.' 'A literary exercise in "auto-fiction" that also studies the mood of a family and a wider social environment.' 'Marta Sanz demonstrates a poetics of fragility . . . Her writing oozes pain and truth. However, . . . it also oozes life, possibility, catharsis and games, luminosity and humour.' 'Her (auto)fictive character is a funny and alive, kind of unsentimental, menopausal, overworked writer, who by the end of the first page, already describes an “attack of the farts.” By the end of the second, calls another writer a bitch. This excellent voice-work is also due to Katie King, who translated Sanz’s writing from Spanish.' 'If art imitates life, then My Clavicle does a good job, because it’s all over the place – but not all over the place in a way that feels disorienting. Although, if it is disorienting, it’s because, Sanz is saying life is disorienting, and fractured like the main character’s pain, in a way we don’t ask for.' 'Alongside refreshingly honest insights into the physical and mental difficulties of menopause, Sanz proffers equally honest reflections on the perils of being a writer.'  'For a novel about an obsession with mortality, this witty tale brims with vitality.'