Introduction

Nubosidad variable (Variable Cloud), first published in 1992, marked a splendid return for Martín Gaite to adult fiction after a 14-year gap following El cuarto de atrás. Written partly in letter form and partly in a confessional notebook style, the new novel subtly develops some of the author's previous key interests, including interpersonal communication and its relationship to the written text; the theme of personal identity, particularly women's identity, and the role of literary models in conditioning it; and questions of history and memory as important determinants of one's sense of self. The book also marks an continuation of her prior interest in the material world and the symbolic importance of physical space and material objects in influencing identity. Finally, it explores in a contemporary context the theme of motherhood, a matter broached from a different social perspective in the author's earliest short stories and given a postmodern treatment in her next novel, La Reina de las Nieves (The Farewell Angel).

Nubosidad recounts the renewal of a friendship between middle-aged housewife Sofía Montalvo and practising psychiatrist Mariana León, formerly close childhood pals who went their separate ways in early adulthood but meet again by chance at the opening of an art exhibition. Each in the throes of a mid-life crisis, they reflect on their youthful friendship and the ups and downs of their experiences in the intervening years. Finding themselves thoroughly dissatisfied with their personal and, in the case of Mariana León, professional lives, they turn to one another to rebuild their old friendship and, through an imagined exchange of personal stories, their shattered emotional worlds.