“People talk about the sea being monotonous, as they do about anything they don’t observe closely enough,” says the narrator of Medardo Fraile’s story “The Sea.” Reading the stories collected in Fraile’s Things Look Different in the Light, the Spanish author’s first book translated into English, one would have a hard time accusing Fraile of careless observation. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa, these twenty-nine stories prove Fraile to be an obsessive and precise writer who, like Anton Chekhov or Jane Bowles, is fascinated by the silent despair underlying everyday life. He confronts this subject by exploring the nature of storytelling. What purpose, he asks, do the stories we tell ourselves serve? Do they offer hope?
