“I call everything a story, I don’t distinguish between genres,” writes Pedro Almodóvar in his introduction to – ostensibly the veteran Spanish film-maker’s , though, sure enough, that description doesn’t quite cover it. Assembled from a presumably dense and disparate archive of prose written between the late 1960s and the present day, the book’s dozen selections mingle elaborately fantastical fictions with candid personal essays and the odd self-reflexive curio piece that sits somewhere in between. A tight, tidy foray into literature was never to be expected from the 74-year-old, whose utterly singular cinema thrives on chaotic melodrama and billowing, sensual abandon.
If unruliness comes as no surprise – it’s a mixed bag both in its form and its rewards – its occasional crystalline terseness very much does. Almodóvar invites readers to view the book as a stand-in for the fuller memoirs he steadfastly refuses to write. That notion seems fanciful as you begin reading.
The first story, The Visit, describes a transgender woman’s bloody revenge mission; others early on cover queer Catholic vampirism and a peculiar nesting-doll rewrite of Sleeping Beauty. takes more complete if still amorphous shape later with pieces of plain autobiography. The through line here is the restless churn of Almodóvar’s imagination and storytelling sensibility, with sexual, spiritual and cinematic fixations that we sense intrude as much on his everyday life as they do on .