The short prose pieces, parodies, monologues (and a couple of poems) in this collection are all drawn from the author's childhood experiences as a doctor's daughter in the small community of Freistadt in Upper Austria, the "Spanish village" of the title. "It's a Spanish village to me" is a proverbial German expression for something puzzling and unintelligible, a variant of the more common "Bohemian village", which wouldn't fit very well here, Freistadt being on the Czech border. And it's also a personal joke, since Schwaiger lived in Spain for some years with her first husband before returning to Austria. However strange Spain may have been, when she looks back, the Austrian village where she grew up is stranger.

The book divides roughly into three equal parts: in the first part, the viewpoint is that of a naive young child, looking at the adult world with a critical and unprejudiced eye, and of course putting her finger on precisely the thing the adults don't want her to notice. She teases her parents for their snobbery and the nuns at school for their blinkered view of the world, conspires with domestic servants and causes trouble with the future bad-girl of the village. In the second part, the narrator is an adolescent confiding to her diary her secret (and sometimes embarrassingly-public) adoration for various boys who don't appear to be interested, whilst avoiding other boys who do. And in the third part the viewpoint switches around between all sorts of narrators: neighbours, dogs, members of the author's family, and occasionally the grown-up author herself, looking back. In one piece she even adopts the voice of her own ex-husband, answering criticism of her previous book.

There's a lot of fun with dialect and rustic comedy, but there's often a hard core of social criticism under the knockabout stuff: the legacies of the Nazi period and the war are still there in the village, of course, the place is full of men who haven't woken up to the sexual revolution, and there are new forms of hypocrisy and intolerance to deal with as well as the old ones. It's not exactly Elfriede Jelinek, but it's not without its bite, all the same. ( )