Review: Euphoria Days, by Pilar Fraile

Review: Euphoria Days, by Pilar Fraile

a review by Rich Horton

Pilar Fraile Amador, who writes as Pilar Fraile, is a Spanish poet and a writer of short stories and novels. Euphoria Days was published as Días de euforia in Spain in 2020, and the English edition, translated by Lizzie Davis, appeared in 2024 from Great Place Books. It is her first novel to be published in English, though there have been several short stories and at least one book of poems.

Euphoria Days is science fiction, taking a satirical look at corporate culture, and at sexual relationships, and at the entanglement of those two things, in a near future setting. There are five central characters: María, Angélica, Blasco, Diana, and Carlos, and the novel weaves its way through their interconnected lives. They are all youngish -- from their twenties to perhaps 40 as the novel begins, and working in the sort of typical jobs you might expect in the near future. María's job is the most overtly SFnal: her company is working on algorithmic ways to optimize "happiness", and one thing they do is assign sexual "matches" among their employees. As the book opens, María's match with Roger is disintegrating, and her projects to improve happiness seem to be foundering, as she is haunted by nightmares about worms. Angélica works in a fertility clinic, and she discovers a notebook from a previous worker that seems to show a continuing decrease in fertility. Blasco and Diana are married, and Diana is a high-powered boss. Blasco is obsessed with online videos of pretty women, and he and Diana's marriage is foundering. Carlos is rather a player, and sort of an outlier in the general group.

Over time these people interact, sometimes without quite knowing it. Relationships form and dissipate. Jobs change. Two of the women have children via IVF (with a fairly open secret about how this in a way tangles their relationships even further.) Over a decade passes, and we get a sense of the world changing -- perhaps disintegrating -- just a tiny step out of notice of the characters, even as their lives oddly mutate. The conclusion is purposely inconclusive -- these are somewhat self-deluded characters, living in a self-deluded milieu.

The novel is effectively satirical, and at the same time an effective portrayal of its characters. Though it's SF, it's not really too interested in its extrapolations. The future is a decaying future, and in the background we hear of severe economic trouble, radical political reorganization, fertility decline, corporate dysfunction, but in the foreground the characters are living lives not too different from today. I might have been interested in further discussion of the happiness optimization algorithm mentioned at the start, but that's not really the intention here. The story suggests that algorithms certainly won't lead us to happiness -- but that our own trendy approaches to life hacks (if you will) are likewise doomed. Euphoria Days is a fine novel, well-written (and well-translated), well-characterized -- recommended.