Living's The Strange Thing

As compulsively page-turning as a thriller, Carmen Martin Gaite's drama of broken dreams, lies, and the search for love is an intense meditation on the strange adventure of living

Idiosyncratic, wilful, cute, a choppy blur of emotion and erudition, cocky, confrontational conversation and fragmented urban commentary, it starts off resembling something by Russell Hoban or Josephine Saxton - or even Janet Frame

Carmen Martin Gaite writes evocatively and gracefully, and has some intriguing things to say about story-telling, and about the prisons we create for ourselves

Carmen Martin Gaite (1925 - 2000) was one of Spain's most distinguished novelists; in 1978, she was awarded the Spanish National Prize for Literature. Her novels Variable Cloud and The Fallen Angel were also published by Harvill.

As compulsively page-turning as a thriller, Carmen Martin Gaite's drama of broken dreams, lies, and the search for love is an intense meditation on the strange adventure of living 
 
"Ever since the beginning of the world, living and dying have been two sides of one coin, tossed in the air - But for me - to be perfectly honest - living's the strange thing" 
 
The protagonist of this novel, a 35-year-old woman who has lived hard and loved hard, has just lost her mother. Struggling to keep her curiosity about an inexplicable world intact, she finds her precarious equilibrium constantly besieged by resurfacing oddballs from her past and her own tendency to daydream. To force a little structure into her life, she decides to pick up her old, unfinished doctoral dissertation about an extravagant 18th century adventurer. As she wades through old papers in a dusty archive, she is forced to confront her own strange childhood, her parents' strange relationship, and the feelings that bond her to the strange architect she shares a life with.

The Farewell Angel

"A Proustian journey into the interior, a dazzling psychodrama and, arguably, one of the best novels out of Spain in recent decades" Kirkus Reviews

This remarkably intricate 1994 novel by the veteran Spanish author (of, most recently, Variable Cloud, 1996) won her country's National Prize for Literature. It reveals, through a series of skillfully juxtaposed overlapping scenes (set both in the present and in a painstakingly remembered past), the ongoing ordeal of Leonardo Villalba, recently released from prison (for his complicity in an unspecified scandal) and now compelled to explore both the mystery of his wealthy parents deaths in an automobile accident and the enigma of his own detached, affectless personality. 
 
The key to these secrets is Hans Christian Andersen's tale The Snow Queen, which bears crucial symbolic relevance to Leonardo's emotional opacity, the imperious grandmother who essentially raised him, and the strange new owner of Quinta Blanca, the clifftop house where the seeds of Leonardo's compromised manhood were sown. 
 
A Proustian journey into the interior, a dazzling psychodrama and, arguably, one of the best novels out of Spain in recent decades.

Blurring the boundaries between real life and a dream, this richly imagined, meticulously crafted tale by Spanish novelist Gaite (Variable Cloud) borrows from a fairy tale to redeem a young man's past. Moments after his release from prison in the 1970s (he was arrested for involvement in a "shady deal"), Leonardo Villalba, a restlessly ruminative but despondent soul, learns of the death of his financier father and icily distant mother in an automobile accident. He arrives home in Madrid like the prodigal son and, unable to grieve, embarks on a vertiginous journey to reclaim his emotions. Revisiting Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen, which his grandmother often read to him as a child, Leonardo imagines himself as Kay, the fabled young boy who grows estranged from his best friend, Gerda, after a splinter of glass enters his eye and turns his heart cold. Consumed by his own riddle of identity and committed to piecing together a plausible narrative of his life, Leonardo conjures the specters of his father and his beloved grandmother, whose visitations turn his attention to the Quinta Blanca, his grandmother's large seaside home where he spent much of his childhood. Startled by his failure to remember that he sold the Quinta Blanca to a reclusive writer soon after inheriting it from his grandmother, the somnambulant Leonardo resolves to buy it back. While studying correspondence stored in his father's safe, he discovers a likeness between the serendipitously procured essays of Casilda Iriarte, the Quinta Blanca's current owner, and letters from the mysterious "Sila." Beyond confirming his suspicion that the "lady of the Quinta Blanca" and Sila are one, a Christmas visit to the Quinta Blanca dislodges Leonardo's splinter of glass, reveals the secret between his father and the lady of the Quinta Blanca and renders Leonardo twice orphaned. By the sheer force of her prose in this liquid translation, Gaite delivers an engrossing tale inhabited by deeply human characters and passionate landscapes. The novel glistens with intelligence and heart. 
 
The Farewell Angel was awarded the Spanish National Prize for Literature in 1994.

Carmen Martin Gaite (1925 - 2000) was one of Spain's most distinguished novelists; in 1978, she was awarded the Spanish National Prize for Literature. Her novels Living's the Strange Thing and Variable Cloud were also published by Harvill.

"A Proustian journey into the interior, a dazzling psychodrama and, arguably, one of the best novels out of Spain in recent decades" Kirkus Reviews 
 
On the day he is released from prison in Madrid, Leonardo learns of his parents' death in a car crash. He returns to their empty town house, a rich young man now, but with a life to reconstruct out of fragments. At first all he wants is to be atone to took over books, diaries, and old photographs, the mute witnesses to his own childhood and his parents' wretched marriage. But in time he concentrates on the Quinta Blanca, the white house by the cuff edge where his grandmother used to nourish him on stories, especially Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen". 
 
When Leonardo revisits this childhood home at Christmas as the guest of its new owner, Casilda, he, too, has the sliver of ice removed from his heart by the one woman capable of doing so, and his own redemption is at hand. 
 
The Farewell Angel is about storytelling, about the determining power of stories to harm and to heat. Centered around a lighthouse and the sea-washed rocks beneath it, this haunting novel is a triumph of subtle narrative by the prize-winning author of Variable Cloud.

Carmen Martin Gaite

A chronicle of female friendship, expressed largely through an exhaustive exchange of letters between two women who resume their long-dormant intimacy when each must grapple with the demons of middle age and unravelling relationships. Sofia, a wife and mother who leaves her mercenary, emotionless husband, and Mariana, a psychiatrist who can't help obsessing over her depressive lover, share their views on sex, politics, literature, and many other topics in a discursive, allusive correspondence and communion that is, alternately, absorbingly dramatic and painfully dull. This ambitious 1992 novel from one of Spain's leading writers (now translated into English for the first time) was a major success in Gaite's homeland, but may find a relatively lukewarm response in a culture where feisty criticisms of lamebrained machismo are not a novelty.

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.

Carmen Martin Gaite

Praise for Variable Cloud

A chronicle of female friendship, expressed largely through an exhaustive exchange of letters between two women who resume their long-dormant intimacy when each must grapple with the demons of middle age and unravel ...

Books by Carmen Martin Gaite

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter