Text: English (translation) 
Original Language: Spanish

Love Customs in Eighteenth-Century Spain

History

Gaite, Carmen Martin

Europe

University of California Press

This conversation text implements a dynamic, learner-centered approach that encourages students to use Spanish to resolve meaningful and emotionally charged conflicts. A carefully crafted pedagogical apparatus featuring Conversaciones creadoras mini-dramas, written by renowned Spanish novelist Carmen Martin Gaite, challenges students to become active participants in the learning process.

Conversaciones creadoras: Mastering Spanish Conversation (English and Spanish Edition)

Education & Teaching

Brown, Joan L.

Schools & Teaching

Houghton/Mifflin

Carmen Martin Gaite has a sizeable corpus of creative literature which, for the most part, combines personal or fictional experience with a realistic view of life in contemporary Spain. Her prize-wining essay Usos amorosos de la postguerra espanola [Courtship Customs in Postwar Spain] (1987) is a companion piece to her fictional work and offers a key that explains the attitudes of the protagonists as well as those of her generation. Its dedication clearly shows that this is not a piece of dry research: "For all Spanish women between 50 and 60, who don't understand their children. And for their children, who don't understand them." She obviously hit the right chord: the book was so popular that it sold seven editions in less than six months and was named "Libro de Oro" [Gold Book] by the Spanish Booksellers Guild.

Courtship Customs in Postwar Spain/Usos Amorosos De LA Postguerra Espanola (English and Spanish Edition)

Martin-Gaite, Carmen

Americas

UNKNO

The Back Room

Winner of Spain's National Prize for Literature
 In the middle of the night, a woman awakens to find a stranger in her bedroom. Though she cannot determine who he is—or, indeed, whether he is even real at all and not just an extension of her dreams or her writing—she is drawn into a conversation with her unexpected guest. What she tells him becomes the story of a woman coming of age in the repressive Spain of the Franco era.
 In The Back Room Carmen Martín Gaite spins out a hypnotic evocation of one woman's life counterpointed against the social history of modern Spain. The growth of a personal identity and the terrors of fascism are woven together within the delicate fabric of this dreamlike narrative. The result is an intimate and existential confessional—part autobiography, part fiction. In direct and simple language, Martín Gaite envisions life within a world besieged. This, her finest work, explores the back room of memory with a quiet but irresistible power.
 "The winner of Spain's 1978 National Prize for Literature, Gaite's postmodern novel interweaves dreams and fantasies with autobiography and Spanish history, resulting in a book that is complex and elusive, but more than worth the effort."—Publishers Weekly
 "Some of the cultural specifics in this 1978 novel from Spain—songs, doll furniture, movies—may be meaningful only for Spanish readers. But Martin Gaite's novel, the first in Columbia's new Twentieth Century Continental Fiction Program, is artful and engaging nonetheless, a book of intelligent moods modulating into one another."—Kirkus Reviews
 "… intensely serious, literary and wryly humorous, [her] mesmerizing, labyrinthine sentences induce a sense of wandering the corridors and topiaried gardens of Marienbad."—Sunday Times
 Carmen Martín Gaite was one of Spain's leading novelists. She was the author of numerous works of fiction and criticism, including Variable Cloud and The Farewell Angel. The Back Room was the first of her novels to appear in Spain after the death of Franco, and the first to be translated into English. In 1978 it was awarded Spain's National Prize for Literature.

Literature & Fiction

Lane, Helen

United States

City Lights Publishers

An impassioned correspondence between two former school friends as they reach crisis in middle age, from the prize-winning Spanish novelist Carmen Martin Gaite. Sofia is a mother of three grown-up children and trapped in a loveless marriage to Eduardo. Mariana is a successful psychiatrist, incapable of forming stable relationships with men. As their lives reach crises in middle age, these two women, former school friends who had grown apart, reach out to each other through an exchange of impassioned letters in Gaite's effusive epistolary novel. Mariana, a psychiatrist and TV pundit, flees Madrid for a friend's empty house in a coastal resort, where she obsesses over Raimundo, a suicidal, manic-depressive writer who seems part friend, part patient, part lover. Her old friend, Sofia, walks out on her vain, hypercritical husband, Eduardo, a business executive who talks only about money, and moves in with her three rebellious children, who share a disorderly apartment. In alternating voices mixing letters with notebook excerpts and invented stories, the two women relentlessly analyze their relationships, erotic fantasies and trips abroad. Strewn with allusions to Kafka, Dali, Bunuel, Tagore and Katherine Mansfield, their outpourings incorporate meditations on memory, love, sex, the treacherous nature of words, chance and the difficulty of confronting one's past without embellishing it.

Variable Cloud

HARVILL/SECKER

Living's The Strange Thing

The Harvill Press

Sofia is mother of three grown-up children and trapped in a loveless marriage to their estranged father Eduardo, a self-preoccupied businessman. Mariana is a psychiatrist with a successful Madrid practice, a shrewd woman of brittle emotions, incapable of forming stable relationships with men. These two women on the threshold of middle age were close friends at schools but grew apart, one of them inheriting the other's lover. Meeting accidentally at a party, they realise that they retain a deep-felt need to confide in each other. While Mariana escapes Madrid for a coastal resort to seek respite in solitude from a damaged love-affair, Sofia walks out on her husband and finds refuge in her children's chaotic apartment. The two women fill notebooks with their insights and recollections and engage in a correspondence in which they lay bare their souls. They pool these deeply dredged findings about themselves and discover, as they realise on meeting again, that they have written a novel ... Variable Cloud a probing, limpid, cruelly witty dissection of married (and unmarried) life in all its absurdities and self-deceptions. Here is a brilliant - and chilling - exercise in self-awareness.

Contemporary

Harpercollins

Sofia is a mother of three grown-up children and trapped in a loveless marriage to Eduardo. Mariana is a successful psychiatrist, incapable of forming stable relationships with men. The two women fill notebooks with their insights and recollections, and engage in a correspondence with each other.

Harvill Pr

El mayor encanto de esta novela se deriva de la sabiduria con que la autora consigue mantener encandilada la atencion del lector.

Retahilas (Spanish Edition)

Destino

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gaite, Carmen Martin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Gaite, Carmen Martin

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gaite, Carmen Martin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Love Customs in Eighteenth-Century Spain

Conversaciones creadoras: Mastering Spanish Conversation (English and Spanish Edition)

Courtship Customs in Postwar Spain/Usos Amorosos De LA Postguerra Espanola (English and Spanish Edition)

The Back Room

Variable Cloud

Living's The Strange Thing

Variable Cloud

Variable Cloud

Retahilas (Spanish Edition)