There are ruptures that not only end a relationship: they also force you to ask who you are when the life you had built around another person disappears. That is what happens to Clara, the protagonist of The Dry Years, the debut of Raquel Zas (Viveiro, 1989), which arrives in bookstores on September 2. After separating from Diego, she is left without a partner, without a home, and, in short, without the life she had built, and she returns to her parents’ town. There, in the middle of that life pause, she begins to ask herself a question that sustains the whole novel: what happens when you stop desiring?
From there, Raquel Zas builds a novel that uses Clara’s intimacy to speak of something much broader. Of what we expect from women when we talk about desire, of the ideas we have learned about how our sexual life should work, and of the pressure that can exist even around something that, in principle, should belong only to us. The Dry Years begins with a breakup, but soon shows that its real interest lies in everything that appears when a woman starts to ask herself what she wants, what she desires, and how much of all that she has learned to want because it was what was expected of her.
A realistic grieving process
One of the things I enjoyed most about The Dry Years is the way Raquel Zas tells a breakup. There isn’t here a sugary version of mourning nor that idea that, after crying for a while, another person will appear to take the place of the former one. Clara has to learn to live with an absence that cannot be replaced and with the sense of having lost, together with Diego, a large part of the life she had imagined for herself. There is a line in the novel that sums up this idea especially well: “People who leave you are not replaceable. The notion that you will fall in love again is a fallacy. Love is not substitutable.” And perhaps that is precisely what makes her process so recognizable: understanding that getting over someone does not mean stopping missing them or quickly finding another person, but accepting that what has ended will not be the same again.
Clara is, moreover, one of those protagonists with whom it is very easy to identify: because her doubts, her insecurities, and her way of facing what is happening to her feel very close. Zas does not try to turn her into an exemplary woman or a heroine who emerges strengthened from a breakup; she lets her be lost, angry, and sad. And while Clara tries to rebuild her life, the novel also shows how we relate to others when we are afraid of being alone, how much we can end up confusing habit with love, and the need to feel loved with desire.
Female desire, much more than a question of sex
But it is in Clara’s relationship with desire where The Dry Years finds its true center. The novel talks about sex, yes, but above all it talks about everything we have learned to think about it. About how a woman who enjoys sex should be, how much she should desire, what it means not to want or not to feel as she’s supposed to feel. And about the question that appears when we don’t feel as we have been told: is the problem me?
What is interesting is that Raquel Zas does not try to answer it in a simple way. Instead of telling Clara what she should feel, she accompanies her as she tries to figure out what is happening to her. The Dry Years ventures precisely into that uncomfortable terrain to ask how much of what we think we want truly comes from us and how much has to do with everything we have learned about how a woman must desire.
The return to her parents’ town works very well within that process. Clara goes back to the place she left just as she feels that the life she had built has collapsed, and that return also serves to look again at who she was before becoming the person she thought she had to be. In that space appear family, friends, and other relationships that act as contrasts to her own, and the novel thus widens its gaze toward the different ways in which we seek affection, companionship, and refuge.
Friendship also carries significant weight in the story. Clara’s friends are, in many moments, the best thing she has around: they are there, listen, offer opinions, accompany, and also ground her when necessary. They are not a mere support for the protagonist nor do they appear only to talk about their own problems; they have their own lives, their contradictions, and their histories. With this story, Zas shows you that when a romantic relationship ends, you discover that there are other bonds that have been carrying you for a long time. That friends, in the end, are also a form of love and, many times, one of the most important ones.
Why you should read The Dry Years
Raquel Zas writes with an emotional clarity that makes the novel progress with great ease and that reflections on love, sex, loneliness, or mental health do not seem placed there so that the reader arrives at a definite conclusion. Everything happens through Clara and what happens to her, and that makes the questions arrive in a much more natural way.
The Dry Years is, in short, a novel about a breakup that ends up talking about many more things. About female desire, but also about the pressure that exists around it; about the need to feel loved and about the difficulty of distinguishing it from love; about friendship as a refuge and about how difficult it can be to find ourselves again when the person around whom we had built our life disappears.
And, above all, it is a novel that poses a question that may be much more uncomfortable than it seems: what remains of our desire when we stop trying to fulfill what we are supposed to desire? Raquel Zas does not offer a closed answer, but achieves something better: turning that question into a magnetic, intimate, and very easy-to-recognize story. A debut that talks about sex only to end up talking, in reality, about something much deeper: about learning to listen to ourselves when we no longer have such a clear idea of who we should be.
