Reading Favorita in Jen Calleja’s translation, I was never quite sure what was real and what was a dream, or rather a nightmare – the novel’s fantastical imagery reflects the absurdities of our world. Fans of Emerald Fennell’s 2020 film Promising Young Woman will appreciate the way Steinbeck delves into what it means to be a victim of male violence.

Favorita opens with the narrator, Fila, finding out that her estranged mother Magdalena (aka Favorita) has died, or rather, been murdered; a doctor tells Fila over the phone, “but don’t believe them when they say that it was her liver. [...] She didn’t want to die.” The prose is spare, unemotional. Right away, the tone is set for the rest of the novel – what is true? How does our experience of the world affect whose side of the story we believe?

Despite their distance, Magdalena’s death (murder?) snips Fila’s final tether to the world. Having also recently lost her grandmother Lavinia, who raised her, Fila has lost her anchors. Her narrative voice is uncertain without her mother and grandmother – she has always been caught between the two of them and what they want for her. Magdalena and Lavinia’s voices continue to struggle for Fila’s attention inside her head, with their competing outlooks on life: pious, reserved Lavinia and bold, brash Magdalena. 

With nothing keeping her in Switzerland, Fila sets out to Italy to discover what really happened to her mother. Anyone expecting a cut-and-dried feminist whodunnit will be disappointed. Instead, Fila’s journey cuts much deeper, questioning the difference between vengeance and justice, echoing the way Promising Young Woman examines the rationale behind Cassie’s obsessive vendetta. In Italy, Fila meets two women who worked for Magdalena, and they take her to their home, an abandoned – but intoxicatingly utopian – salami factory, where women and children live, ready for the revolution. Initially, Fila doesn’t understand the need for violence or revolt, but meeting these women awakens her desire for revenge: she wants to kill the man who killed Magdalena. Her new-found companions, though, believe the revolution is more important. Steinbeck critically compares these approaches to vengeance (or justice?), interrogating to what extent individual retaliation alone can combat misogyny. What does revenge look like in a world where men continue to oppress us?

Fila becomes haunted – literally – by the ghosts of victims of male violence and increasingly obsessed with the ways in which these women are depicted. As she does so, Steinbeck confronts the reader with the fact that regardless of who did in fact commit the murder, we all take part of the blame. Turning a blind eye, blaming the victim – we all contribute to the normalisation of the most extreme crime of misogyny: femicide. 

But Favorita also encourages us to imagine more, to want more than just an eye for an eye. The abandoned salami factory (based on the real-life Metropoliz in Rome) symbolises a more collective response to misogyny, one where we can start from scratch and build a world in which we are safe. Steinbeck suggests that revenge on an individual level is only part of the answer – the deep roots of misogyny need to be tackled at a societal level. Favorita shatters the illusion that anyone is blameless in misogyny, and in Calleja’s deft translation, the bluntness of this lesson is keenly felt.

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 30 seconds