Review by Emily Corbett

Federico Ivanier’s Never Tell Anyone Your Name (2020), translated by Claire Storey (2023), is unlike anything I have read before for two reasons. First, it is the first YA novel to be translated from Uruguayan to English. Second, Ivanier’s plot is both utterly bizarre and enthralling.

The novel takes place in Irun, a border town between France and Spain. The anonymous protagonist, a sixteen-year-old boy from Uruguay, has mistakenly booked the wrong train from Bordeaux in France to Madrid in Spain and finds himself needing to wait for eight hours for the next available departure at midnight. To pass the time, he wanders around the streets of Irun reflecting on the loss of his first love, Lucrecia. Before long, he is befriended by a local Spanish girl who he finds to be irresistibly attractive. Meeting her, he tells us, makes “you understand how the sailors felt when they heard the sirens’ songs” (21). When she suggests they go to a remote part of Irun, our nameless protagonist is happy to follow. From there, the story takes one unexpected turn after another and the two find themselves with an ending neither of them had planned, one which I absolutely refuse to spoil for you, dear readers.

Ivanier’s novel joins a growing number of YA horrors being published in recent years. At the same time, it pushes the boundaries of the genre as we know it in the English-speaking world with its jarring approach to storytelling. Narrated in second-person present tense, Ivanier and Storey have created prose that is immersive, immediate, and unsettling. As a reader, you feel deeply implicated in the events that unfold. One of the stand-out aspects of this novel-in-translation is the way that suspense is built as the reader is drip-fed clues about what is to follow. Coming in at less than a hundred pages, it’s easy to devour the story in one sitting.

Never Tell Anyone Your Name is a testament to the power of translation to bring excellent stories to new audiences. It is one of three YA novels in translation that has been acquired by UK publisher HopeRoad from Claire Storey’s “YA Literature from Latin America” Arts Council England Project, along with The Wild Ones by Antonio Ramos Revillas (Mexico) and The Darkness of Colours by Martín Blasco (Argentina). The project has sought to identify and translate award-winning Latin American YA texts that have not yet been translated into English. Read more about Claire Storey’s project here. If this novel is anything to go by, then I can’t wait to read the others Storey has selected.

Never Tell Anyone Your Name
Written by Federico Ivanier, translated by Claire Storey
2023, HopeRoad Publishing
ISBN: 9781913109226
Reviews: Outside in World
Interview with the translator

This review was written by Emily Corbett, who is also the curator GLLI’s 2024 International YA Literature Month. She is a lecturer in children’s and young adult literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she leads the MA Children’s Literature: Theoretical Approaches to Children’s and Young Adult Literature programme. Her research focuses on the growth and development of YA from literary, publishing, and cultural perspectives. She is also General Editor of The International Journal of Young Adult Literature and was founding Vice President of the YA Studies Association. Her monograph, In Transition: Young Adult Literature and Transgender Representation (2024), is forthcoming with the University Press of Mississippi in June. You can find her contact details on her institutional website and connect with her on Twitter and Instagram via @DrEmilyCorbett.

Opinions expressed in posts on this site are the individual author’s and are not indicative of the views of Global Literature in Libraries Initiative.