Calila: The Later Novels of Carmen Martín Gaite by Joan L. Brown (review)

In a writing style that echoes Martín Gaite’s limpid prose, Joan L. Brown delivers in Calila: The Later Novels of Carmen Martín Gaite a tour de force that makes a case for reading and studying the novels that the author published throughout the decade of the 1990s. For Brown, Martín Gaite was not only a favorite writer and a subject of research but a close friend, and in Calila the readers are treated to a critical perspective that is informed, yet not overshadowed, by the profound personal attachment between the two women. ‘Calila’ was the writer’s nickname used by those to whom Martín Gaite awarded “the gift of intimacy” (147), and as a member of the author’s inner circle, Brown offers insights into her writing that are rooted in personal correspondence and shared experience. Still, the biographical never overshadows the critical in Calila, and Brown’s discussion of each of the six novels constitutes a valuable addition to the existing body of scholarship on these texts.

Brown begins the book by pointing out that it took her a while to gain enough critical distance from Martín Gaite’s later novels to be able to write about them as a scholar and not as a friend (3). The introductory chapter offers the readers a brief yet crucial overview of the writer’s life and career until the publication of Caperucita en Manhattan (1990), Martín Gaite’s first novel of the 1990s that ended a twelve-year break in the author’s novelistic output which had begun after the publication of El cuarto de atrás (1978). Brown dedicates a chapter to each of the novels that Martín Gaite wrote in the 1990s, Caperucita en Manhattan, Nubosidad variable (1992), La Reina de las Nieves (1994), Lo raro es vivir (1996), Irse de casa (1998), and Los parentescos, an unfinished novel that was published posthumously in 2001. The chapters are brief, yet densely packed, suggesting a wealth of possible venues of research. Brown deftly teases out the thread that unites these different and complex works of fiction, stating that “though techniques vary, these novels are unified by an enduring theme: the search for identity and meaning through examination of the past, in order to attain a brighter future” (4).The critical perspective that Brown offers in Calila allows the readers to appreciate each of the six novels in their uniqueness while, at the same time, seeing them as part of a singular creative journey of a brilliant writer.

At times, Brown relies excessively on terms such as young adult literature and third-wave feminism, that have greater validity in the United States than elsewhere. She is justified in her insistence that Martín Gaite’s Caperucita en Manhattan deserves more critical attention than it has received, yet the idea that this will be achieved by categorizing the novel as belonging to the young adult genre rather than children’s literature remains somewhat unconvincing.

The critic’s efforts to make the book relevant to non-specialists are successful, and she strikes a delicate balance between offering the critical insights that scholars of literature who are well-familiar with Martín Gaite’s work will find of use and, at the same time, integrating historical and political background information that can guide novice readers of the writer’s novels. Understandably, some imprecisions and redundancies are bound to creep into an ambitious project like Calila. To give an example, Brown refers to Franco’s tomb in the Valley of the Fallen as “an anomaly in Europe” (83), forgetting that Lenin’s Mausoleum in Moscow has been open to the public for almost a century and still constitutes an important tourist attraction in Russia. The information that the father of Martín Gaite’s only child Marta was the writer Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio is repeated several times in the text, and so is...