Dolores

Lauren Aimee Curtis

Dolores
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Orion Publishing Co
Country
United Kingdom
Published
18 February 2021
Pages
144
ISBN
9781474612517

Dolores

Lauren Aimee Curtis

Finalist for the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction 2020

On a hot day in late June, a young girl kneels outside a convent, then falls on her face. When the nuns take her in, they name her Dolores.

Dolores adjusts to the rhythm of her new life - to the nuns with wild hairs curling from their chins, the soup chewed as if it were meat, the bells that ring throughout the day. But in the dark, private theatre of her mind are memories - of love motels lit by neon red hearts, discos in abandoned hospitals and a boy called Angelo. And inside her, a baby is growing.  

Review

This very short novel from Lauren Aimee Curtis follows the titular character, Dolores, as she arrives at a remote convent of nuns. She’s sixteen years old, dehydrated, pregnant, and has a lace tablecloth, taken from a restaurant, pinned to her head. The book moves between scenes from her life in the convent and the events that led her there, and Curtis skilfully balances both its revelations and ambiguity to aid momentum.

Dolores isn’t the girl’s real name, and it’s never disclosed. Her mother has a Spanish background and fills their apartment with Spanish novels which she never reads. We know the convent is in the hills somewhere in Europe, but never know where, exactly. All this, rather than being frustrating, gives the story an otherworldly sheen, and the book is so well written that it makes the need for solid details feel frivolous. What Dolores doesn’t hold back on is the grotesqueness of everyday life for the women at the convent. The nuns have green-yellow gunk in their eyes and bad breath. One has a large tooth that hangs out of her mouth. They smell of sweat. Another has ‘a large, round, and translucent face, like the moon’. Even the pretty one bites her nails.

Focussing on these details has the possibility of slipping into cruelty, but Curtis resists doing so. By keeping the narrative tight, she’s able to put care into each sentence and this pays off with a kind of warmness that encompasses the characters in its glow. Curtis is certainly a new Australian voice to pay attention to and she is already receiving attention from overseas readers; a part of Dolores has already appeared in Granta. If you are looking for an Australian novel that embraces its uniqueness, then Dolores can’t be recommended enough.


Chris Somerville is part of the online Readings team.

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