I Made You Up Inside My Head by Marta Pérez-Carbonell (transl. Rosalind Harvey): What’s real and what’s not

Over recent years, I’ve enjoyed several novels which explore the idea of who owns the story which is what attracted me to Marta Pérez-Carbonell’s debut, I Made You Up Inside My Head. That, and the strangers on a train trope described in the blurb which sees a writer, his friend and a translator meet on an overnight train from London to Edinburgh.

Although all stories come to an end, not one of them does so completely; they are slowly woven together, just as these fragments were, waiting to form a larger tapestry.

Alicia has moved from Madrid to London after a difficult breakup. Her new job requires her to spend five days a month in Edinburgh to which she travels by train. One Sunday evening, two men share her compartment, one much older than the other, both American. They engage in a conversation that Alicia can’t help eavesdropping. Introductions over, it emerges that Terry is the subject of an excoriating piece accusing him of exploiting a young Swiss man who distinctly resembles the protagonist of his bestselling novel. Terry unfolds the story of how he met Hans, Alicia adding her own experiences of being deserted by her older lover on a remote island she’d travelled to as his research assistant. As the train speeds through the night, intimate details are exchanged and Terry makes a revelation that threatens Bo’s loyalty. Months later, Alicia will undertake another journey to try to find Hans and right a wrong.

All the versions of a story co-exist, like the colours on a Rubik’s cube. Each version, like each colour, can exist on its own, but the rest are still there, beyond our field of vision, and it is hard to get them all to align.

Alicia’s narrative is threaded through with extracts from Terry’s novel as she recounts the confidences exchanged that night. Carbonell’s overarching theme is storytelling; the way we each tell our own story, overlapping it with those we tell it to so that they become part of ours and we theirs. The question is at what point can a writer take liberties with someone else’s story without causing harm or distress. It’s a fascinating subject: we are all storytellers but few of us would be delighted to see intimate details told in confidence appear on the page, particularly if it might put us in danger. Carbonell expresses her ideas eloquently, smartly managing her narrative and bringing her novella to a satisfying close while avoiding the neat resolution that tends to happen in fiction but not in life. Looking forward to reading whatever she comes up with next.

Sceptre Books: London 9781399739078 208 pages Hardback (NetGalley)