At some point between 1820 and 1823, Francisco de Goya painted fourteen intensely dark images directly onto the walls of his country house on the banks of the River Manzanares. Now displayed at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, these so-called ‘Black Paintings’ depict violent confrontations and sinister distortions. One shows the god Saturn eating his own son; another, a dog drowning in dark brown sand.

Goya’s dog is central to Chilean-born poet and novelist Pedro Carmona-Alvarez’s elegantly earnest Chiquitita, first published in Norway in 2023 and now translated into English by Seán Kinsella. The novel is structured as fifty-nine short chapters, and narrated by Marisol, a woman who recounts memories of her flight from a military dictatorship in a ‘long, narrow country’ in what seems to be South America, as well as her time spent with her parents in a refugee hotel and the family’s eventual settlement as ‘political refugees’ in a ‘fresh and cold’ country in northern Europe. (The parallels with the ten-year-old Carmona-Alvarez’s own flight from Chile to Argentina to Norway are extensive.) Marisol’s flood of remembrances is triggered after she and the boy she’s dating see Goya’s dog. ‘What is it with that little dog?’ Marisol asks herself. ‘Am I the dog? I don’t understand.’

The earliest memories begin when Marisol is about five years old. Although she is ashamed of wetting the bed so often (‘No one wet the bed until I came along’), her extended family dote on her, calling her ‘pearl, sweet pearl, daughter, sometimes jewel, sun, my sun, and heart’. By