Four by Four
Sara Mesa
Reviewed by Kaitlyn Yates
Sara Mesa’s multi-perspective Four by Four investigates the tangled subordination crouching behind Wybrany College, a Spanish boarding school for adolescents on the outskirts of Cardenas. Told in disjointed timelines, select students spar with privilege as it pertains to class, gender, sexuality, and disability, slinking along the structures that form the bedrock of their school. Students referred to as “Specials” attend on scholarship. “Normals” slide by on waves of parental funds. Celia is a Special determined to return to her mother living in the slums of Cardenas. Ignacio, a Normal, makes a life altering choice in his search for company. Teeny, another Normal othered by fellow Normals for her disability, carries with her a terrible secret after Celia’s disappearance. Despite a seeming oasis of normalcy—impregnable four-by-four walls—the colich (college) seeps with violence until those attending become victims and perpetrators of injustice.
Four by Four is a delectable and modern whodunit (or, specifically, how many did it?) for the analytic mind. Translated into English by Katie Whittemore, Sara Mesa’s evasive and suggestive prose results in a mysterious narrative that thickens with each chapter, each sliver of perspective made more climatic by a substitute teacher who undermines the secrecy shielding the colich. Four by Four is not to be read passively. Mesa demands attention, an awareness on the level of language and social dynamism. “[The assistant headmaster] isn’t saying what she seems to say,” Ignacio observes on the day that Celia’s disappearance is revealed. “[She uses] language like a riverbed to transmit subterranean messages.” So too does Mesa in this story of adolescent navigation of and survival of social hegemony.