Times Past, Joys Present

Abstract

Times Past, Joys Present Geraldine Cleary Nichols (bio) Sólo un pie descalzo, by Ana María Matute. Illustrated by Hugo Figueroa. Barcelona: Editorial Lumen, 1983. Distributed in the United States by the Spanish Book Corporation, 610 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10020. Ana María Matute (b. 1926) is among the three or four best and most widely known writers of fiction in post-Civil War Spain, and she has won all the important literary prizes in her country; her adult works have also been translated into every major Eastern and Western European language. She is known principally for her adult Fiction (eight novels and seven short-story collections to date), unique in postwar Spanish literature by virtue of its lyricism and its persistent yet delicate focus on children. This corpus has been studied extensively in European and American university circles and has won her inclusion in the limited canon prescribed by the Educational Testing Service for its advanced placement test in Spanish. Like several other well-known women novelists in Spain (Concha Alós, Carmen Martín Gaite, Dolores Medio, Ana María Moix), Matute has also written fiction for children. While her children's fiction (three novels and five short stories) has received little attention from academic critics, its popular reception has been enthusiastic, both within Spain and without, as we can gauge from the multiple editions and translations it has enjoyed. Through 1978 (the latest figures available), Paulina, el mundo y las estrellas (1960; Paulina: The World and the Stars) had four printings in Spain and had been translated and published in France, the Ukraine, West Germany, Holland, Iran, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary; "Elsaltamontes verde" (1961; The Green Grasshopper), five printings in Spain, translations in France, West Germany, Portugal, and Japan; El polizón del "Ulises" (1964; The Cabin Boy of the "Ulysses"), five [End Page 174] printings in Spain, translations in West and East Germany, Russia, Poland, Japan, Sweden, Italy, and Czechoslovakia. Astonishingly, her works for children are only now beginning to appear in English. Michael Doyle of the University of New Orleans has translated several stories, one of which, "The Boys," appears in this volume. In 1984, Matute was awarded Spain's Premio Nacional de Literatura Infantil y Juvenil (National Prize for Children's and Young People's Literature) for her latest children's work, Sólo un pie descalzo (Just One Bare Foot). Perhaps the receipt of this prestigious award will at last convince an English-language publisher of her importance. Solo un pie descalzo is a short novel for older children. It relates the adventures of an imaginative young girl named Gabriela, "who often used to lose one shoe. Just one, never both of them" (1; all translations are mine). The first chapter describes her preschool years, the second her first year in school, and the remainder her tenth year, a magical time of flowering and change. In Matute's descriptions of her, as well as in the engaging, slightly naive drawings of Hugo Figueroa that accompany the text, Gabriela bears a marked and surely not accidental likeness to Lewis Carroll's Alice. The adventures of both girls are entirely imaginative and revolve, in great measure, about the domestic or social spheres—fantastically transformed, to be sure, but still recognizable—which little girls of their privileged social class have been in training to occupy since modern (capitalist and patriarchal) times began. Whereas in her adult novels Matute criticizes the classist and sexist upbringing inflicted on her generation, in Sólo she is less concerned with society at large and more focused on the adaptive problems of an "odd (wo)man out." The resulting lack of explicit criticism of Spain's discriminatory social system may disappoint readers who prefer their children's literature to take sides on every current social issue. Like Alice, Gabriela finally returns from her imaginary journeys quite "cured" of her eccentricities and ready to settle into her place in the adult world. Her "excessive" imagination has been brought under control, so she is able to behave more like her siblings, and they stop teasing her. Less absorbed by her own inner voices, she is able to comprehend the heretofore...