Sara Mesa’s Four by Four, originally published in Spanish in 2012, is a gloomy novel about power. Its setting is Wybrany College, an elite boarding school where the students are ‘always submissive’, like ‘a herd of livestock’, yet are also ‘hungry’ for their teachers’ humiliation. The nearest city is a hotbed of violence, a site of civil collapse from which the school is a refuge. Most of the students are the wealthy children of government ministers, but Wybrany also admits scholarship kids known as ‘specials’ as part of its programme of ‘integration’.

In the first part of the novel, Mesa offers various examples of corrupting power imbalances. We see these from the perspectives of students Celia and Ignacio, as well as the school’s assistant headteacher, a woman known as ‘the Arse’. Celia is a headstrong ‘special’ who early on compares her sickly friend Teeny to a pet. But she in turn is subjected to the manipulations of the sleazy school adviser. Ignacio, queer, disabled and bullied, seeks acceptance by putting himself at the disposal of an older student. The Arse relishes her power over the students, but pursues a clandestine affair with the headmaster, who verbally degrades her.

In this first section,