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  • Carmen Martín Gaite, el juego de la vida y la literatura by José Jurado Morales
  • Debra J. Ochoa
Jurado Morales, José. Carmen Martín Gaite, el juego de la vida y la literatura. Visor Libros, 2018. 256 pp.

In one of his most recent books, Carmen Martín Gaite, el juego de la vida y la literatura, José Jurado Morales has updated and republished various studies on la salmantina. Thus this volume makes articles, previously published in obscure journals, more accessible. In the first section, “El fundamento autobiográfico,” Jurado Morales unites three studies which, due to the fact that Martín Gaite did not divulge personal information, trace the autobiographical elements of her oeuvre.

The first chapter, “Tentativas autobiográficas,” would best serve undergraduates who are reading Martín Gaite’s work for the first time. The second chapter, “Experiencia vital y escritura poética,” offers a holistic reading about Martín Gaite’s poetry, which few scholars have examined. This chapter is particularly helpful because, in addition to its focus on poetry, it lists a bibliography of studies by many renowned specialists. The final chapter in this section, “Un viaje a El cuarto de atrás,” reflects on Martín Gaite’s most celebrated novel.

The second section of this study focuses on Martín Gaite’s friendship with the mid-twentieth-century writer Ignacio Aldecoa, and Jurado Morales begins with a short review of Martín Gaite’s Esperando el porvenir. Homenaje a Ignacio Aldecoa (1994), which contains a four-part series of lectures that Martín Gaite gave to honor both her friend and the Generación de medio siglo. This chapter would serve advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate students who want to understand not only Martín Gaite’s role as a writer in the 1950s, but also that of her peers, including Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio (Martín Gaite’s ex-husband), Josefina Rodríguez de Aldecoa (Ignacio Aldecoa’s wife), and José María de Quinto. The second chapter extrapolates on Martín Gaite’s friendship with Aldecoa and provides insight into how he influenced Martín Gaite’s writing. The anecdotes that Jurado Morales shares—derived from both Martín Gaite’s Esperando el porvenir and Josefina Aldecoa’s memoir En la distancia—shed light on Martín Gaite’s friendship with both Ignacio and Josefina Aldecoa.

Next, Jurado Morales focuses on Martín Gaite’s short stories, another genre that critics have overlooked. In “‘Un día de libertad’, primer cuento de Martín Gaite,” Jurado Morales observes that Martín Gaite, following the realist style of the 1950s, plays a literary trick: she intertwines chronological time with psychological time by combining the protagonist J.’s memories with details about his mundane routine. This chapter stands out for its critical engagement; the “yo reminiscente” narrates in the first person and thus analyzes and reflects upon himself and his surroundings. In “Algo más que cuentos de mujeres,” Jurado Morales includes [End Page 1058] a quote about women’s experiences—written by Martín Gaite for the 1978 edition of Cuentos completos—where the author observes the disparity between women’s desires and their lived existence. Jurado Morales contextualizes these stories (written between 1950–75) and details how they document female subjects’ Franco-era experiences, and how the author’s voice matures during that period, anticipating the novels she would later publish.

“El arte de pensar,” the fourth section of this study, begins with the reflection “La entrada en el castillo: una poética del lector” (previously unpublished) about the writer-reader relationship. Jurado Morales cites a selection of Martín Gaite’s essays, including “La entrada en el castillo” from El cuento de nunca acabar, which narrates the author’s personal experience with reading Don Quixote. The next chapter “Vivir el tiempo” (also published here for the first time), reflects on Martín Gaite’s interest in temporality, and while various scholars have examined the theme of time in her work, Jurado Morales traces this topic in both her fiction and non-fiction, including in her research on the eighteenth century. Few studies exist on Martín Gaite...

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