Esther Tusquets Research Articles

기억의 정치학과 정동(情動) -에스테르 투스케츠의 『우리는 전쟁에서 승리했었다』

Esther Tusquets’ autobiography, Habíamos ganado la guerra was published in 2007, the year that the Law of Historical Memory was passed by the Spanish Congress. Claiming that the vanquished’ perspective on the Civil War and early Francoist period has attracted great attention in memoirs and fiction, Tusquets calls for more reflective writings from the victors’ perspective. Tusquets was born into the an upper-class bourgeois family that was affiliated with the Francoist band, however she had more in common with the vanquished. This study examines the aspects of trauma representation based on the politics of memory and affect in Tusquets’ Habíamos ganado la guerra. As a way of overcoming the limitations of Post-structuralist trauma criticism, this study analyzes the subjective, eccentric experiences and trauma of everyday life based on affect theory. Through the transition of affect that is transferred in the mother-daughter relationship, it is demonstrated that Franco’s patriarchal system of violence penetrates into women’s daily life at a microscopic level. Fear and shame transferred in the mother-daughter relationship are presented not as the emotional and psychological state but as an affect that crosses the mother’s body and is transmitted to the daughter’s body. Tusquets’ trauma narrative presents the ethic of empathy and consideration based on the potential of the resonance of affect.

어머니 부재의 근원적 멜랑콜리

This article investigates the aspect of the primordial melancholy of the absence of mother in the novel of Varada tras el último naufragio(1980) of Esther Tusquets, a representative female writer in the spanish transition period. The possibility of mourning for the fundamental trauma of mother''s absence will be discussed, focusing on the fact that, unlike the two works of the sea trilogy, a hopeful conclusion is presented. After examining the various symptoms of melancholy expressed by the middle-aged female protagonist due to the loss of an object, investigates the process of mourning of primordial trauma caused by the absence of a mother through a quasi mother-daughter relationship. The melancholy mechanism funtions as a positive mechanism to defend the deintegration of the self. The process of confronting the trauma of the absence of a mother, which has been postponed for a long time in the official history during Franco’s regime, will be analyzed. In this analysis, it is demonstrated that the implication of developmental mourning, which involves experiencing a time of responsible reflection through the grieving caused by the loss of a mother, and consequently a psychological transformation process.

Esther Tusquets: La práctica editorial como praxis feminista.

For Esther Tusquets, feminism was not so much a doctrine as an approach to life. Thus, just as her narrative work and opinion pieces are underpinned by a constant reflection on gender equality and gender identity, her work as an editor reflects a keen awareness of the discrimination experienced as part of the female condition. The fundamental thesis of this article, therefore, is that editorial practice can also be a form of feminist praxis: not only because of all that it entails for a woman to hold a position of responsibility in an economically and culturally maledominated world, but also because of the way in which many of the projects thereby undertaken served to spread and consolidate gender awareness. Particular attention will be paid to the presence in the catalogues published by Lumen and RqueR, the two firms that Esther Tusquets founded and directed at different times in her life, not only of fiction written by women, but also of comics and children’s literature with a markedly vindicatory slant.

Class, Generation, and Gender in Esther Tusquets's Habíamos Ganado La Guerra: Reflections on the Winning of the Spanish Civil War

Class, Generation, and Gender in Esther Tusquets's Habíamos Ganado La Guerra: Reflections on the Winning of the Spanish Civil War

Nubosidad Variable: Postmodern Feminism in Post-Transition Spain

Nubosidad Variable:Postmodern Feminism in Post-Transition Spain Joan L. Brown Carmen Martín Gaite (1925-2000) is one of Spain's most canonical contemporary authors, and her novel Nubosidad variable (1992) holds a special place in her oevre. Nubosidad variable is surpassed only by her masterpiece El cuarto de atrás (1978) in terms of scholarly attention (MLA Bibliography). It has captivated general readers as well as scholars: a bestseller when it appeared, it has remained in print for a quarter of a century. Nubosidad variable has also been translated into eight languages. The novel's appeal is readily apparent. It is a riveting, exquisitely crafted story of two fascinating Spanish women who reinvent themselves as they write to one another, set in the tumultuous years after Spain's transition to democracy. Critics have explored a number of the novel's techniques and themes, especially those associated with writing (Cruz-Cámara, "escritura;" Guardiola; Pérez-Magallón), feminine cultural symbols (Laffey; Pérez, "Structural") and womens' friendship (Almeida, Ferriol-Montano). As I hope to show, Nubosidad variable has even broader cultural significance. The novel inserts women into post-Transition history using tenets of postmodern, twenty-first century feminism. These precepts also illuminate the intellectual biography of this iconoclastic author. Nubosidad variable builds on its novelistic predecessors, illustrating Virginia Woolf's maxim that "we think back through our mothers if we are women" (79). Martín Gaite's novel first evinces and then surpasses the "reclaiming of women's stories" that characterized Spanish feminism in the novel from the postwar era through the end of the twentieth century. This trajectory began with censored novels of the 1940s and 1950s that depicted female subjects in stifling traditional environments, with novels such as Carmen Laforet's Nada (1945) and Martín Gaite's Entre visillos (1957). It accelerated after censorship ended in the late 1970s, with novels that showed women participating in both public and private spheres: examples include El cuarto de atrás, esther Tusquets's El mismo mar de todos los veranos [End Page 301] (1978) and rosa montero's Crónica del desamor (1979). By the end of the twentieth century, the focus on women's life experiences became frank and intimate: almudena Grandes's Las edades de Lulú (1989) and Lucía extebarria's Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes (1998) typify these stories of female protagonists in pursuit of their own desires.1 In the twenty-first century a resurgence of historical engagement, mirroring this preoccupation in the surrounding culture, produced novels such as Dulce Chacón's La voz dormida (2002) and Carme riera's La mitad del alma (2004). Even as Nubosidad variable encompasses the concerns of its precursors and contemporaries, it offers a wider lens on society than other women's novels of the nineties–a perspective that would not become widespread for more than a decade. Written during the immediate post-Transition years, it chronicles the zeitgeist from a female perspective, illuminating a period that is iconic and contested. Nubosidad variable actualizes Martín Gaite's humanistic view of gender, which advocated personal freedom. The novel reflects the same viewpoint as the two nonfiction books that interrupted its creation, a volume of feminist social criticism and a collection of feminist literary criticism.2 a recently recovered interview from the 1970s elucidates Martín Gaite's conception of gender–including a passing reference to performativity long before Judith Butler had introduced the term–and demonstrates that in this area as in others, she was an independent thinker whose beliefs persisted over time. The novel's seemingly disparate structural and thematic elements can now be seen to belong under the rubric of third-wave feminism. These include mutivocality, an emphasis on personal narrative, the rejection of doctrinaire theory, critiques of sociocultural and socioeconomic inequality, and an embrace of diverse modes of gender expression. Through its postmodern form and content, Nubosidad variable enacts present-day feminist tenets, presaging Chimamanda ngozi adichie's invitation (expressed through her celebrated title) to build a more inclusive world through gender equality: We should all be feminists. Inscribing Women into Post-Transition Spanish History...

Winners and Losers in Cinema and Memoirs: Emilio Martínez Lázaro's Las 13 rosas and Esther Tusquets' Habíamos ganado la guerra

This essay closely examines two very different works: Emilio Martínez Lázaro's award-winning feature film Las 13 rosas and Esther Tusquets’ Habíamos ganado la guerra, the first volume of personal memoirs from a major writer, which begins in 1939 when the author was just three. Where Las 13 rosas focuses on the terror, repression, and violence of the early Franco regime, Tusquets’ narrative explores the era from the perspective of a child and adolescent of the Barcelona bourgeoisie to which she belonged. In taking it for granted that artistic representations of the past provide comment on or intervention in the present, the essay proposes, notwithstanding the distinctiveness of their truth claims, the mutuality of history and story, while recognizing the commonality of cognition and emotion, and the intertwining of subjectivity and objectivity in both cinema and memoir. The contribution of these texts to present understandings of that terrible time is closely evaluated.

Subversive Desires and Bodies: Construction of a Female Paradigm in Mercedes Abad’s Sangre

Subversive Desires and Bodies:Construction of a Female Paradigm in Mercedes Abad’s Sangre Heather Jerónimo In the novel Sangre (2000), Catalonian author Mercedes Abad portrays the discordant but nevertheless interdependent and parasitic relationship between Victoria and her daughter Marina.1 With Sangre, Abad joins an ongoing dialogue about mother/daughter relationships to which a plethora of contemporary Spanish authors have contributed, including Elvira Lindo, Lucia Etxebarría, and Esther Tusquets. The lives of Abad’s protagonists unfold in Spain during Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, a period of time in which it was particularly difficult for many women to achieve any type of personal agency.2 Although the masculine-dominated society in which Victoria and Marina live tries to categorize them as objects rather than subjects, focusing on their female bodies as mechanisms for producing children, these women refuse to be defined in the objectifying terms of the body imposed on them. Mother and daughter search out avenues for undermining the patriarchal society in which they live through their subversive desires and a rejection of society’s traditional conception of the female body. For Victoria, her struggle towards female agency consists of a rejection of motherhood that can be interpreted as either liberating or a repetition of the masculine paradigm, depending on the perspective from which it is read. For Marina, her various subversive desires culminate in the drinking of her mother’s blood, which can either be seen as a symbolic violation (rape) of Victoria’s being – perpetuating the male construct – or a rebellious union with another female in an attempt to break free from [End Page 39] the restricted patriarchal construction of the female body. This paper will examine whether or not the main characters’ efforts truly allow them to escape the limitations of their male-dominated political, religious, and social reality, or if they actually uphold the cycle of the masculine paradigm perpetuated under Franco’s rule that sought to confine women’s bodies and minds to a conservative, subservient state. As is well known, the Spanish nation was subjected to Franco’s extremely conservative, Catholic regime from 1939 to 1975. Those in disagreement with the dictator’s ideas were generally silenced, murdered, exiled, or repressed. Franco’s political and religious beliefs overflowed into the Spanish people’s social reality, as well. Very firm gender roles were established for both men and women, moving away from the advances for women established during the Second Republic. Franco harbored a great “dislike of the Republic, instituted in 1931, because of its attempts to better the economic and legal positions of the working classes and women” (Labanyi 92); as dictator, he strove to recreate more traditional family structures. Men were to be the leaders of the households, while women were kept “dentro de los muros del hogar,” acting as followers and the emotional supporters of their husbands (Gallego Méndez 141). During the early years of the Franco regime, Spaniards were intensely indoctrinated in accordance with these familiar Western models of gendered agency [men as active and women as their submissive counterparts]. According to the nationalist tenets of Francoism, a Spanish woman’s place was in the home, and that home should be filled with children. (DiFrancesco 9) The Spanish woman, therefore, simultaneously represented much more and much less than herself as an individual. She became a powerful instrument within Franco’s plan for Spain; through her, future patriots would be born and theoretically raised to abide by the mandates of the country’s dictatorship. At the same time, the Spanish woman lost all pretense of personal agency as society reduced her entire identity into nothing more than that of a body – more specifically, a womb – a machine of production used to populate a male-dominated society. Thus, womanhood in Franco’s Spain implied motherhood; the distinction between the two was nonexistent. Perceived as a body – an object – within a society of masculine dominance, female agency, desire, and personal aspirations were not considered to be matters worthy of discussion. In Sangre, Victoria and Marina attempt to defy Franco and the male-dominated society imposed on them by using any methods available to them. Victoria first learns how to use...

Memory of Safo

42 worldliteraturetoday.org cover feature Memory of Safo Esther Tusquets I did not know how painful it would be to watch the growing decrepitude of someone with whom I had shared so much. With Safo’s life cycle also closed the most fulfilling period of my life, the happiest and the best years. S afo was fair-haired and soft. She had a silky coat, long, drooping ears, sparkling dark-brown eyes, a pointed muzzle, and the hair of her tail so long that the ends dragged on the ground because Safo—a dachshund, a sausage dog, a trolley car dog—had extremely short legs. But she was not a dachshund with smooth hair, or wiry hair, but rather a longhaired dachshund, and that’s why the hair was so soft, and blonde with reddish highlights, very similar to that of Irish setters. Safo had such lively eyes and wagged her tail so jauntily that not even her drooping ears, also so long that they got into the food bowl, managed to give her a sad look. Safo was one of the merriest, liveliest, most stubborn and mischievous dogs I have had. That was the way of my dog Safo. She was born in my parents’ home, the only female in a litter of five puppies. The mother, Chufa (the tiger nut name was given by my brother, amused by the ridiculous appearance of those low, elongated dogs, which we had never had up until then), who had been mine, I had later abandoned, upon getting married and leaving home. Life as a couple seemed to me—even before I first tried it—too risky and uncertain an adventure to involve anyone else in it. I thought that my future life would be unpredictable and on the move, and the dog was used to a methodical , safe, and orderly existence. But I do not know if Chufa ever accepted the fact that it had been for her own good, nor do I know if she ever forgave me. Because she did bark happily when I arrived, and wagged her tail and licked my ear, but it was not the same as before, and from that time on she had a certain severe and reticent air. “Wherever you went, you should have taken me with you,” I read in her eyes. And yet she never got around to telling me so, because she was a very dignified dog—“a real lady,” said Ana María Moix—and she kept to herself the jealousy and pain of abandonment. Safo’s father, whom I only saw once, was a classy male dog, with a very long pedigree full of “vons” and surnames with two s’s. A goldenhaired dog with a distant look, who did his duty efficiently but without enthusiasm, and left the house with the same indifferent air with which he had come, following a couple of blonde foreign humans, who also looked at us, or so it seemed to me (Chufa was an unregistered dog of unknown parentage), with their noses in the air. I would have thrown the three of them down the stairs with a good kick in the rear. And I had to explain to Chufa that they were snobs and idiots, that the quality of a dog (or of a human, of course) is never measured by his pedigree, and that she was a darling dog, the prettiest in the world, and that she should not feel slighted, because it happens that males sometimes behave that way. Two years later Chufa would discover that, although I had been moved by the best of intentions, I had lied through my teeth, because two years later Chufa would find true love, the love of a dog who licked her and sniffed her and pushed her tenderly with his snout and barked to her softly when the intercourse was over and it was not yet time to begin again, a male who wooed her and flattered her tirelessly between one mount and the next, and who, when Chufa was sleeping limp and exhausted inside her basket , lay stretched out to his full length before it July–August 2013 • 43...

Memory of Safo

42 worldliteraturetoday.org cover feature Memory of Safo Esther Tusquets I did not know how painful it would be to watch the growing decrepitude of someone with whom I had shared so much. With Safo’s life cycle also closed the most fulfilling period of my life, the happiest and the best years. S afo was fair-haired and soft. She had a silky coat, long, drooping ears, sparkling dark-brown eyes, a pointed muzzle, and the hair of her tail so long that the ends dragged on the ground because Safo—a dachshund, a sausage dog, a trolley car dog—had extremely short legs. But she was not a dachshund with smooth hair, or wiry hair, but rather a longhaired dachshund, and that’s why the hair was so soft, and blonde with reddish highlights, very similar to that of Irish setters. Safo had such lively eyes and wagged her tail so jauntily that not even her drooping ears, also so long that they got into the food bowl, managed to give her a sad look. Safo was one of the merriest, liveliest, most stubborn and mischievous dogs I have had. That was the way of my dog Safo. She was born in my parents’ home, the only female in a litter of five puppies. The mother, Chufa (the tiger nut name was given by my brother, amused by the ridiculous appearance of those low, elongated dogs, which we had never had up until then), who had been mine, I had later abandoned, upon getting married and leaving home. Life as a couple seemed to me—even before I first tried it—too risky and uncertain an adventure to involve anyone else in it. I thought that my future life would be unpredictable and on the move, and the dog was used to a methodical , safe, and orderly existence. But I do not know if Chufa ever accepted the fact that it had been for her own good, nor do I know if she ever forgave me. Because she did bark happily when I arrived, and wagged her tail and licked my ear, but it was not the same as before, and from that time on she had a certain severe and reticent air. “Wherever you went, you should have taken me with you,” I read in her eyes. And yet she never got around to telling me so, because she was a very dignified dog—“a real lady,” said Ana María Moix—and she kept to herself the jealousy and pain of abandonment. Safo’s father, whom I only saw once, was a classy male dog, with a very long pedigree full of “vons” and surnames with two s’s. A goldenhaired dog with a distant look, who did his duty efficiently but without enthusiasm, and left the house with the same indifferent air with which he had come, following a couple of blonde foreign humans, who also looked at us, or so it seemed to me (Chufa was an unregistered dog of unknown parentage), with their noses in the air. I would have thrown the three of them down the stairs with a good kick in the rear. And I had to explain to Chufa that they were snobs and idiots, that the quality of a dog (or of a human, of course) is never measured by his pedigree, and that she was a darling dog, the prettiest in the world, and that she should not feel slighted, because it happens that males sometimes behave that way. Two years later Chufa would discover that, although I had been moved by the best of intentions, I had lied through my teeth, because two years later Chufa would find true love, the love of a dog who licked her and sniffed her and pushed her tenderly with his snout and barked to her softly when the intercourse was over and it was not yet time to begin again, a male who wooed her and flattered her tirelessly between one mount and the next, and who, when Chufa was sleeping limp and exhausted inside her basket , lay stretched out to his full length before it July–August 2013 • 43...

Born Again Skeptic and Other Valedictions by Robert Murray Davis

he “understood that the only revenge, the only memento, and also the only possibility to forget and to forgive consisted in telling what happened, and nothing more.” It was some twenty years before Abad was able to write this memoir. The key to the memoir’s triumph is Abad’s deft handling of memory. The paramilitary’s violence succeeds and soccer continues to serve as “the opiate of the people,” the work suggests, because memory or the act of remembering does not occupy a higher plane than it currently does. That is why the right wing held society hostage in the 1960s (when the author was a child) and repeated its exercise in the 1980s without massive resistance. The work’s title, Oblivion, is best captured by Mejía Vallejo’s speech at the father’s funeral: “We live in a county that forgets its best faces, its best impulses, and so life will go on. . . .” Adele Newson-Horst Morgan State University Robert Murray Davis. Born Again Skeptic and Other Valedictions. Norman,Oklahoma.MongrelEmpire. 2011. isbn 9780983305248 Robert Murray Davis’s collection of personal essays, Born Again Skeptic and Other Valedictions, opens with a piece titled “Is This an Autobiography ?” The short answer to that question is yes—the essays are for the most part autobiographical. However, the threads woven through the book tell far more than just one man’s experiences; they offer insight into the American condition: the arc of our recent, collective history as well as the trajectory of an individual life. Davis, who taught English at the University of Oklahoma for thirtyplus years, covers an array of topics ranging from memories of his parents to his ambivalent relationship with Catholic theology to literature, books, and academia. Sociopolitical issues and broken relationships are also frequent—and sometimes parallel —subjects. These are not personal essays bursting forth from (mis)adventures, as in the vein of David Foster Wallace ’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” but they do provide a glimpse into man-and-moment in a similar fashion. In “Borders,” Davis employs a dark humor to discuss the demographics of Sun Lakes, a community for “mature adults” where he has retired in the rogue state of Arizona . Bordering the Gila River Indian Community, Sun Lakes is divided into sections that seem based on class—in various senses of the word. One resident tells him, “You might be able to find a woman in Phase I who lives the way you do. My new cleaning woman lives in Phase I. She’s sleeping with my yard man.” The Phoenix -area borders Davis addresses are both geopolitical and psychological, and he sees a sad state of affairs in Arizona and beyond: “As long as we are mobile, we are less bound by geography and environment, believing more or less unconsciously like Hemingway in Green Hills of Africa that when a country is used up, we can move to another one.” While many of the essays in Born Again Skeptic balance humor and charm with memory and critical analysis, some are much more serious in tone. For example, “Dry & High” is the literally sobering tale of Davis’s abrupt, cold-turkey end to his Esther Tusquets Seven Views of the Same Landscape Barbara F. Ichiishi, tr. Host Seven Views consists of a series of delicately rendered vignettes set in postwar Barcelona, each told from the perspective of a young girl whose family belongs to the Catalan upper-middle class. All the joys, sorrows, and discoveries of coming-of-age are brought to life in the author’s lyrical prose. Jean-Philippe Toussaint Reticence John Lambert, tr. Dalkey Archive What starts as a simple vacation to visit a friend soon leads to a mystery involving a missing person and the strange appearance of a dead black cat. The narrator describes his search for truth while curbing his growing sense of paranoia. Belgian author Toussaint is the author of nine other novels. july – august 2012 75 Nota Bene 76 World Literature Today reviews drinking—an act that appears at first to be entirely for the good but which turns out to be the trigger for an avalanche of hard times...

A Question of Values: Narrative Consciousness in El mismo mar de todos los veranos

Esther Tusquets has been accused of promoting conformist and masculinist values in her writing by some feminist critics. The first two novels of her trilogy conclude with troubling rape scenes in which the protagonist and victim is partly complicit, and in which she takes masochistic pleasure. It has been said, with respect to her first novel, El mismo mar de todos los veranos, that this amounts to a betrayal by the author of both her character and her reader. Feminist texts are meant to be subversive; Tusquets' novels are anything but subversive when they allow for such a violent reimposition of the status quo. The values they subscribe to are therefore highly dubious. But is this a fair judgement? How does the reader determine the values of a text? Using narrative theory, I will argue that through a closer exploration of narrative consciousness in this novel we can make a more nuanced assessment of the text's 'value structure' (Chatman 1990). I will further argue that an analysis of narrative consciousn...

Conciencia y (post)modernidad en El mismo mar de todos los veranos de Esther Tusquets

El mismo mar de todos los veranos es uno de los textos señeros de la producción novelística postmoderna española. A lo largo de la novela, Esther Tusquets propone una representación de la conciencia novedosa y compleja, que resulta en un texto de muy difícil lectura. En este artículo me interrogo sobre las características de la representación de la conciencia en esta novela. El análisis de la obra es doble: a partir, primero, de un acercamiento pragmático al texto y, segundo, de un acercamiento semántico. Este análisis servirá a su vez para sondear las fronteras entre la modernidad y la postmodernidad narrativas en lo que podemos denominar novela de la transición española a la democracia que se produjo a finales de los 70 y principios de los 80, e interpretará la representación de la conciencia propuesta por Tusquets a la luz del concepto de conciencia esquizofrénica, formulado por Deleuze y Guattari en su libro Capitalismo et schizophénie. L’Anti-Œdipe.

Post/Imperial Encounters: Anglo-Hispanic Cultural Relations (review)

Reviewed by: Post/Imperial Encounters: Anglo-Hispanic Cultural Relations Fernanda Peñaloza (bio) Juan E. Tazón Salces and Isabel Carrera Suárez (eds.), Post/Imperial Encounters: Anglo-Hispanic Cultural Relations (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2005). ISBN 90-420-1992-1. The intricate web of cultural encounters between the Anglophone and Hispanophone 'worlds' is frequently analysed from either the context of the different articulations of the British and Spanish colonial systems in the Americas or the so-called Hispanic experience in the U.S. This volume, comprised of twelve markedly different essays, is a welcome addition to cross-cultural studies precisely because it departs from the most obvious topics in the field. According to the editors, the origins of this book 'started from a completely open topic, "Anglo-Hispanic relations"' (p. 9). As a result, this collection of articles follows a chronological order that spans five centuries and explores transcultural links not only between England and Spain, but also with the U.S., Latin America, the Caribbean, and less predictably, Ireland. In a disappointingly short introduction, the editors justify the range of topics and perspectives included in their selection by situating the articles within three temporal categories: 'the historical interventions of Britain and Spain in the Americas; the period around the Spanish Civil War; the present with its global culture tinged with neocolonialism' (p. 9). Although this selective periodization is relatively evenly represented, one can only guess why both editors and contributors seem to agree that these historical moments were more significant than others. There is a lack of clarity as to how the editors validate their chronological selection. For example, it is puzzling that the nineteenth century, a period in which Spanish and British relations in the Americas underwent profound shifts, is heavily underrepresented in these cross-cultural readings. Notwithstanding these omissions, this volume has its merits. One of the most significant contributions of this book is that it recuperates material often neglected or ignored by non-specialists. This certainly applies to Jacqueline A. Hurtley's analysis of the travel narratives of Irish-born scholar Walter Starkie, which she situates in the context of his work as a British Council representative in post-Civil War Spain. There are [End Page 459] inspiring and to some extent innovative comparative readings as well, such as D. Gareth Walters's article on thematic parallelisms in the poetry of Federico García Lorca and Dylan Thomas; María Elena Soliño's comparative study of two Catalan writers, Ana María Matute and Esther Tusquets, which highlights the intertextual dialogues between the authors' best-known novels and the Peter Pan story; and Guillermo Iglesias Díaz's reflection on border-crossing of genre in the works of iconic directors Woody Allen and Pedro Almodóvar. Additionally, albeit perhaps pushing the boundaries of the 'Anglo-Hispanic' too far, Isabel Carrera Suárez offers a very accomplished analysis of articulations of gender and colonial discourse in an enlightening article that compares Maryse Condé's and Lucía Guerra's work while engaging with current debates on postcolonial theory and the Americas. The very important subject of literary translation is superbly tackled here by Carmen Bobes Naves who explores the crossing of cultural boundaries in Leandro Fernández de Moratín's translation of Shakespeare's Hamlet. As the above examples show, essays on history, literature and even film interweave in this volume linking a wide range of texts, approaches and geographical locations. However, due to the lack of a solid introduction, the reader is left with the impression that many assumptions need to be made without knowing exactly where the editors stand in relation to key concepts such as language, culture, colonialism, imperialism and globalization that reverberate throughout the essays, and which, in turn, are strongly connected to the 'Anglo-Hispanic' realm. This lack of thematic coherence and conceptual framework in part explains the conflicting perspectives that emerge in this book which seems to have gone unnoticed by the editors. So for example, on the one hand the reader will find Francisco J. Borge's tropological study of Richard Hakluyt's narratives reproducing colonial discourse by failing to see the connections between the rhetoric of...

An Ambivalent Attraction?: Post-Punk Kinship and the Politics of Bonding in Historias del Kronen and Less Than Zero

Matthew J. Marr is an Assis tant Professor in Hispanic Studies at The University of Illinois, Chicago. His most recent publications consider such topics as space and identity in Esther Tusquets's El mismo mar de todos los veranos and postmodern humor in the poetry of Ro ger Wolfe. He is the author of a forthcoming book en titled Postmodern Meta poetry and the Replenish ment of the Spanish Lyrical Genre: 1980-2000. Jose Angel Manas's Historias del Kronen (1994) is a novel that ostentatiously flaunts its literary kinship with other texts?with rock lyrics (The The, Nirvana), films {A Clockwork Orange, Henry: Portrait of a SerialKiller), and even a novel: namely, Bret Easton Elliss American Psycho (1991). So pronounced, in fact, is Manas's name-dropping that it has led one critic, German Gullon, to signal what he dubs pararreferencialidad as one of the book's most salient fea tures (xxiii). In short, Historias del Kronen assails its reader with a barrage of pop culture allusions in a kind of narrative offensive: one designed, it seems, to prove the author's incom parability (at least in the recent Spanish context) as a con noisseur of primarily nihilistic, violent, edgy?and almost always Anglo-American?music, film, and literature from the end of the twentieth century. This said, and especially in light of Manas's explicit attraction to the work of Bret Easton Ellis, it is curious that the former makes no direct allusion to

Home and Away: Con la miel en los labios by Esther Tusquets in the Light of 'En la ciudad sin mar'

This article offers a reading of Con la miel en los labios by Esther Tusquets in the light of her earlier piece of short fiction 'En la ciudad sin mar', part of Siete miradas en un mismo paisaje. After surveying the similarities in both plot and characterization between the two texts, the article goes on to study the divergences along with their consequences and effects. These can be grouped into three areas: firstly, the earlier piece had a single protagonist, whereas the novel uses a dual-protagonist structure that gives centre-stage to a relationship rather than one individual within it. Secondly, the main narrative has moved from Madrid in 'Ciudad', where the Barcelonan main character felt like a foreigner, to the home town — again Barcelona — of the two protagonists of Miel. Lastly, the point of view has been transferred from the younger, richer, and more spoilt of the two women in the short story, to the more mature and less privileged lover of the novel. The multiple and enmeshed effects of these three key changes are studied by the article, which concludes that, in spite of the similarities between the two stories, the ideas put forward in the novel are significantly altered relative to the earlier piece.

The Language of Two Shores

Nuria Amat's view of literature between borders places her in the arduous trajectory of Spanish women writers, who have written their works from the periphery of Spanish fiction. Historically, few women have been among the canonical writers of Spain, and those who wrote were known for their ambivalent representations of their role as authors. Marginal writers of both sexes were forced to engage in literary disguises and subterfuges, “common and necessary practices for those who deviated from orthodoxy and convention” (Levine and Marson xxi). With the death of Franco in 1975, women writers of Spain such as Ana María Moix (b. 1947, Catalonia), Esther Tusquets (b. 1946, Catalonia), Marina Mayoral (b. 1942, Galicia), Lourdes Ortiz (b. 1943), Montserrat Roig (b. 1946, Catalonia), Cristina Fernández Cubas (b. 1945, Barcelona), and Rosa Montero (b. 1951, Madrid) began to explore their personal and national histories as the censorship ended. There soon followed a boom of female writers, who, “encouraged by the feminist movement and by all the changing atmosphere of the seventies, were able to find marketing success that soon made them visible” (Nichols 11).

The Language of Two Shores

Nuria Amat's view of literature between borders places her in the arduous trajectory of Spanish women writers, who have written their works from the periphery of Spanish fiction. Historically, few women have been among the canonical writers of Spain, and those who wrote were known for their ambivalent representations of their role as authors. Marginal writers of both sexes were forced to engage in literary disguises and subterfuges, “common and necessary practices for those who deviated from orthodoxy and convention” (Levine and Marson xxi). With the death of Franco in 1975, women writers of Spain such as Ana María Moix (b. 1947, Catalonia), Esther Tusquets (b. 1946, Catalonia), Marina Mayoral (b. 1942, Galicia), Lourdes Ortiz (b. 1943), Montserrat Roig (b. 1946, Catalonia), Cristina Fernández Cubas (b. 1945, Barcelona), and Rosa Montero (b. 1951, Madrid) began to explore their personal and national histories as the censorship ended. There soon followed a boom of female writers, who, “encouraged by the feminist movement and by all the changing atmosphere of the seventies, were able to find marketing success that soon made them visible” (Nichols 11).

Esther Tusquets, El mismo mar de todos los veranos

Esther Tusquets, El mismo mar de todos los veranos, Ed. Santos Sanz Villanueva. Madrid: Castalia, 1997. 275 pages. After the death of Franco in 1975, Spain witnessed a substantial increase in the number of novels published by women. One of the first and most original voices to emerge in the early years of democratic Spain was that of Esther Tusquets. Editor of the Barcelona publishing house Lumen, Tusquets did not publish her first novel until after the age of forty. Her first novel, El mismo mar de todos los veranos (1978), was followed in 1979 by El amor es un juego solitario, in 1980 by Varada tras el ultimo naufragio, and in 1985 by Para no volver. After a silence of twelve years, Con la miel en los labios appeared in 1997. Her short stories include the collection Siete miradas en un mismo paisaje (1981), considered a novel by some, several other narrations, and children's stories. From the beginning, her fiction met with noticeable critical acclaim both in Spain and among American Hispanists. Not only have numerous scholarly articles explored her works, entire books have already been devoted to her publications. The literary value and critical acceptance of her work is now confirmed by the Castalia edition of El mismo mar de todos los veranos. Santos Sanz Villanueva, professor at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid, prepared the edition, wrote the introduction, and provided a series of footnotes for this version of El mismo mar. He also includes a simple bibliography of Tusquets's work and a brief list of secondary sources. He touches on the major points associated with her fiction: the theme of love; the configuration of her discourse; and the peculiarities of her language. Throughout his discussion, he stresses what he considers the traditional structures underlying her fiction. Despite the complexities of her language, he does not see her as part of the formalist or experimental trends of the seventies. For example, he sees in the relationship between an older woman and a young girl not so much a challenge to accepted sexual arrangements as echoes of the May-December love in Moratin. He also refuses to label the novel feminist because, as he states, it lacks a propagandistic dimension. And he does not perceive evidence of oppression or marginalization in the novel. His position is particularly perplexing since the book is published as part of Castalia's Biblioteca de Escritoras. In his sixty-four footnotes, Sanz Villanueva explains the novel's mythological, literary, and diverse cultural references. …

Consuming Aesthetics: Seix Barral and Jose Donoso in the Field of Latin American Literary Production

In spite of the disagreements on how to interpret and contextualize the publishing accomplishments of the "Boom" writers, almost everyone would acknowledge the need to ask how the institutions of literature--editors, literary agents, scholars, readers, publishing houses, authors, etc.--interacted in the production of contemporary Latin American narrative. 1 This essay evaluates the field of cultural production of the "Boom" through the interaction of Latin American writers (Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, José Donoso, Mauricio Wácquez, Jorge Edwards, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, among others) with the Barcelona intelligentsia of the 1960s and 1970s (writers like [End Page 323] Juan and Luis Goytisolo, Juan Marsé, Esther Tusquets, Juan Benet; and editors such as Carlos Barral and José María Castellet), and looks at how this interaction benefited the prominent Catalan publishing industry as well as the diffusion of Latin American narrative internationally. In particular, this essay focuses on Seix Barral's editorial policies favoring the distribution of the literary works of many Latin American writers in the 1960s and 1970s. In this sense, the case of José Donoso (1924-1996) is particularly relevant to evaluate the interaction among "Boom" writers and the Barcelona intelligentsia since he was a member of this group whose production was mainly published by Seix Barral. 2 Despite his role as agent/reporter/writer of the "Boom" Donoso has disregarded the Latin American publishing success as "anecdotal," and has insisted that "the Spanish American novel began to speak an international language" in a clear departure from "the regional taste and aesthetic values" (9-10) that dominated the novel before 1960.

The Apple of Earthly Love: Female Development in Esther Tusquets' Fiction

The Apple of Earthly Love: Female Development in Esther Tusquets' Fiction