I’ll Do Anything You Want (2013, tr: Maruxa Relaño & Martha Tennent, 2023) by Iolanda Batallé is the tale of Nora, a painter who, after twenty-five years in a regular marriage, goes astray with a man she meets on a plane. It’s a thrill that brings her marriage into focus (“Neither of them made an effort. The man bored her.”) and her decisions from there take her through the looking-glass into a world far removed from staid family life: that of high-end prostitution.

“Nora lived where everyone with a family lives, on the edge of an abyss”, writes Batalle, and as she falls into it, we see initial uncertainty grow into confidence with each encounter. What may at first have been a sexual awakening becomes a journey of discovery ending in liberation. As a painter, she finds inspiration in her johns and looks to make an exhibition (“McCullers said that writing was her way of earning her soul…[Nora] did the same with her painting.”) stirred by her trysts.

Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a prominent reference, against many other touchstones, paraphrased as “only by loving all things can one survive great heartbreak”, effectively a mantra against the matrilineal norm that saw both her mother and grandmother remain committed, to the end, only to their husbands. “Nora,” we’re told, “had decided to follow desire wherever it led her”, an apt survival method as ”death begins when desire ceases”.

For all its sex and desire, this is not ‘fifty shades’ erotica, but a literary exploration of love, told in an engaging style that drifts freely through its characters’ minds, with recurring thoughts and images gaining clarity with each wave, and full of reflections (“We all arrive at our knowledge of love by having loved a few people.”) on love and what it truly means.

Of all the people in Nora’s life, her deceased parents, and her independent daughters, there are ultimately three key men that come into sharp focus: her pimp, her husband, and the grandfather who raised her. Each have secrets that the narrative eventually unlocks and their combined impact leads a woman who “had never really made any decisions about her life” to take control and find her worth.