Memory and Identity in the Narratives of Soledad Puértolas: Constructing the Past and the Self by Tamara L. Townsend (review)

The contemporary Spanish writer, Soledad Puértolas, is widely recognized for her exquisitely crafted and evocative prose; her achievements are reflected in her membership in the Real Academia Española in 2010. The last book on Puértolas’s narratives published in the United States was in 1994. Tamara L. Townsend’s book, Memory and Identity in the Narratives of Soledad Puértolas: Constructing the Past and the Self, is therefore a welcome book-length study of Puértolas’s work. Written in English, this timely study is a fresh and comprehensive appraisal of the author’s work, which has grown steadily in the past twenty years. Soledad Puértolas is one of the transition-era writers of la nueva novela. Despite the tendency towards realistic forms in the narratives of this group, Townsend emphasizes Puértolas’s greater attention to the interior world of her finely nuanced characters. The plots of her stories are often tenuous and uncertain. Townsend traces the mysterious and elusive complexities of memory through Puértolas’s novels, short stories, memoirs and essays to illustrate her thesis that “Memory and the use one makes of it can both reveal character and shape identity” (2).

Memory is examined in this study through four different perspectives: baggage, escapist, relational and amnesic. Townsend employs memory studies, psychological and psychiatric studies to support her thesis. She effectively connects contemporary theory in these fields to Puértolas’s narratives. Townsend exhibits a deep understanding of her source materials and a remarkable command of the prolific writings of Puértolas as they relate to the theme of memory.

In her introduction, Townsend explains the current interest in Spain regarding the role of historical memory, pre-Franco, post-Franco, and beyond. She references the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica, established in 2000, and she discusses the positive and negative implications of coming to grips with the ghosts of Spain’s past. Townsend admits that Puértolas’s work is not ostensibly political, but since the author spent her early life living under Franco’s dictatorship, she carries the burden of that period of violence and repression which fostered among many in her generation a pact of silence about the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath. Puértolas’s writing post-Franco focuses on the inner lives of her characters who, with only a few exceptions, express disillusionment with the political scene. Contrary to her fictional characters, Puértolas comments on her feelings of frustration and repression during the years of the Franco dictatorship in her recent book of essays, Nostalgia de los demás: “Ese peso del presente que no deja nada atrás y no permite intuir el futuro. Esa desesperanzada detención, una eternidad claustrofóbica. Lo he padecido” (63). However, Puértolas’s narratives eschew the political for the personal, with the result that she is a more universal writer.

Townsend’s discussion of historical and collective memory is followed by her careful and detailed examination of memory in Puértolas’s work in the four modes described above. Among the many psychological sources upon which she bases her research, she cites T. P. Wong and Lisa M. Watt’s work on reminiscence (as baggage), Svetlana Boym’s studies about nostalgia (as escapist), and Robert N. Butler’s study of the life review (as relational). She also presents Thomas Wägenbauer’s contrasting models of memory as “storage”and “story.” In her chapter on amnesia, Townsend refers to David Lowenthal’s book on The Art of Forgetting. Indeed, she has consulted and handled skillfully a wide variety of psychological sources as well as extensive literary scholarship. In each of the four chapters, Townsend studies multiple characters from diverse narratives. Most of the protagonists fail in their ability to overcome the labyrinths of memory. Nevertheless, for each mode of memory discussed...