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Index
- Catherine O'Leary, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, University College Dublin
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- A Companion to Carmen Martín Gaite
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1 - Entre visillos
- Catherine O'Leary, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, University College Dublin
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- A Companion to Carmen Martín Gaite
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Summary
Solamente uno que vive aquí puede llegar a resignarse con las cosas que pasan aquí, y hasta puede llegar a creer que vive y que respira. ¡Pero yo no! Yo me ahogo, yo no me resigno, yo me desespero.
(Only a person who lives stuck in this place can resign herself to the things that happen here, and even believe that she’s alive, and breathing. But I can’t! I’m suffocating, I can't resign myself, I’m in despair.)
Introduction
Carmen Martín Gaite completed Entre visillos in 1957, and submitted it for consideration for the Premio Eugenio Nadal under the pseudonym Sofía Veloso (her maternal grandmother's name). It won the prize and the following year it was published by Destino. It remains one of Martín Gaite's most popular and successful books.
It is surprising that a novel containing such a negative portrait of post-war society experienced so little trouble with the censors. The reader's report on Entre visillos, dated 15 January 1958, includes the following comment:
Una historia provinciana de un grupo de chicas, sus estudios y sus amoríos. El argumento se centra en torno a la figura del nuevo profesor de alemán del instituto, desde que llega al pueblo a las vacaciones de Navidad. Convendría suprimir dos expresiones groseras, en las galeradas número 41 y 64. Puede publicarse.
(a provincial story about a group of girls, their studies and their loves. The plot centres on the figure of the new German teacher at the Institute from his arrival in the town to the Christmas holidays. Two crude expressions, on pages 41 and 64, should be suppressed. Publishable).
In handwriting, at the foot of the report, is the comment: ‘consultado Jefe de Sección no se toman en consideración las tachaduras propuestas’ (following consultation with the Head of Section, the proposed cuts are not to be considered). It is worth considering why it was so lightly censored. Aside from the arbitrary nature of the censorship process itself, other factors must be taken into account, such as the fact that Entre visillos was written by an unknown woman, contains elements of the established apolitical genres of autobiography, novela rosa and Bildungsroman, has no overt political message, and does not make obvious points about class and injustice.
Entre visillos artfully captures the atmosphere of relentless tedium of provincial life in post-war Spain.
9 - Lo raro es vivir
- Catherine O'Leary, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, University College Dublin
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- A Companion to Carmen Martín Gaite
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Summary
Las voces del pasado trepan por la espalda a manera de viento súbito.
(The voices of the past climb up one's back like a sudden gust of wind.)
Introduction
Carmen Martín Gaite's last novels reaffirm the concerns which preoccupied her over half a century of repression and transformation in Spain, and reaffirm her canonical status as one of the country's best-known and most widely read women authors. There is a notable vivacity in the protagonists which she chooses in her final works, a liveliness to their speech and linguistic register, which may attract readers of younger generations. Indeed, Martín Gaite’s universal appeal even towards the end of her writing career was borne out by the long queues of youthful Spaniards who patiently waited for autographs and book dedications at her stall at Madrid's book fair each year until her death in 2000. The critic Robert Saladrigas has paid tribute to Martín Gaite’s talent as a writer, declaring ‘escribe el más personal, rico y dúctil castellano en clave feminina’ (she writes the richest, most personal and maleable Castilian of any female author). In this and the next chapter we examine Martín Gaite's last two finished novels, both of which demonstrate her ongoing interest in women's lives and familial relations.
Lo raro es vivir, first published in 1996, recounts a time of trial and personal upheaval for 35-year-old professional archivist, Águeda Soler who was, in her student days, a rock singer-songwriter. Águeda's somewhat existentialist search through her personal family history is prompted by the presence of death in her immediate family circle – her mother is recently deceased and her grandfather, a stroke victim, is nearing the end of his life. Raro concludes with Águeda's emotional reconciliation with her dying grandfather and, in echo of Nubosidad, her retrospective mental reconciliation with her lost mother. The novel's epilogue narrates the birth of her daughter Cecilia, thus offering a positive vision of maternity. Memory and history are yet again woven together by Martín Gaite, this time in an optimistic narrative which takes as a point of departure a relatively new image in the author's fictional works, if one familiar in her discursive writing, that of the archive as both a public and a private repository of the past.
Prevailing critical views
At the end of her writing career, Martín Gaite continued to explore themes which had preoccupied her since the time of ‘El balneario’.
5 - Fragmentos de interior
- Catherine O'Leary, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, University College Dublin
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Summary
Tú no les hagas caso a ninguno, te lo tienes que tomar como si vieras una película.
(Don't pay attention to any of them, you’ve got to treat it as though you were watching a film.)
Introduction
Fragmentos de interior was written in three months, from January to March 1976, and was published by Destino the same year. It was submitted to the censorship office on 7 June 1976 and was authorized without cuts on 9 June. The censor's report in this case details the family's living arrangements, describing ‘una familia anormal’ (an abnormal family), a family ‘en la que domina un ambiente influenciado por las corrientes actuales de plena libertad’ (in which an atmosphere influenced by the current trends of absolute freedom dominate). The censor highlights the lesson to be extracted from the novel: ‘La parte positiva de la novela, aparte de su calidad literaria, es el demostrar una vez más que la desunión de los cabezas de familia lleva al desastre’ (the positive part of the novel, besides its literary quality, is in demonstrating once more that the separation of the heads of families leads to disaster). The only section to cause some concern was the reference to terrorist trials, though the censor points out that this reflects what has already been published in a certain section of the press and, therefore, is not worthy of censure. The censor's reservations about society reflect the conservatism of the now rudderless regime, but there is a recognition in the very act of authorizing this novel of the changes that were afoot.
Fragmentos de interior is set in the time and place in which it was written: Madrid in 1975. It accurately depicts the city as it experiences a period of change and expansion and explores relationships – social, familial and amorous – in a fast-changing society. This society is viewed with the fresh eyes of Luisa, the servant girl whose arrival in and departure from Madrid three days later mark the beginning and end of the novel. As with Los parentescos, the very structure of the bourgeois family at the centre of Fragmentos de interior is evidence of a society transformed: the parents, Diego and Agustina, are separated and Diego lives with his new partner, Gloria. His daughter, Isabel, also lives with them, while his son, Jaime, stays occasionally.
Introduction
- Catherine O'Leary, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, University College Dublin
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Summary
What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory – meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion – is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.
William Maxwell, So Long, See you Tomorrow
Carmen Martín Gaite was born in Salamanca on 8 December 1925, ‘a las doce de la mañana de un día frío y soleado’ (at midday on a cold, sunny day). She spent many of her summers in Galicia, in the village of San Lorenzo de Piñor where her mother was from, and her writing references both Salamanca and Galicia, the former most obviously in Entre visillos (Behind the Curtains), while the latter is the setting for Las ataduras (Binding Ties), Retahílas (Yarns) and El pastel del diablo (The Devil's Cake). Galicia is also present elsewhere, Martín Gaite claimed, in the acceptance of the mysterious in her work and her ‘forma de entender y navegar la vida’ (way of understanding and navigating life), which she credits to her Galician roots. The daughter of parents ‘de una calidad humana excepcional’ (‘Bosquejo’, 11) (of exceptional human qualities), she was brought up in a liberal, well-to-do family context; well-known writer Miguel de Unamuno was a family friend. The civil war and later Francoist regime had an impact on Martín Gaite's life, and much of her early writing is an engagement with, and a criticism of, the injustices that she saw in post-war society.
As young girls, Carmen Martín Gaite and her sister Ana were educated at home, with a series of private tutors, but the author credits her father with influencing her towards art, history and literature. Rather than a convent school, Carmen Martín Gaite attended the Instituto Femenino de Salamanca, the model for the ‘caserón destartalado y frío’ (‘Bosquejo’, 15) (large, rundown, cold building) that Natalia attends in Entre visillos. In 1943, she began studying for a degree in Filología Románica at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Salamanca.
A Companion to Carmen Martín Gaite
- Catherine O'Leary, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes
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One of Spain's most important twentieth-century women writers.
Conclusion
- Catherine O'Leary, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, University College Dublin
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- A Companion to Carmen Martín Gaite
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6 - El cuarto de atrás
- Catherine O'Leary, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, University College Dublin
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Summary
Me lo imagino también como un desván del cerebro, una especie de recinto secreto lleno de trastos borrosos, separado de las antesalas más limpias y ordenadas de la mente por una cortina que sólo se descorre de vez en cuando; los recuerdos que pueden darnos alguna sorpresa viven agazapados en el cuarto de atrás, siempre salen de allí, y sólo cuando quieren, no sirve hostigarlos.
(I also imagine it as the attic of one's brain, a sort of secret place full of a vague jumble of all sorts of miscellaneous junk, separated from the cleaner and more orderly anterooms of the mind by a curtain that is only occasionally pulled back. The memories that may come to us as something of a surprise live in hiding in the back room. They always emerge from there, and only when they want to. It's no use trying to flush them out.)
Introduction
El cuarto de atrás, written between November 1975 and April 1978, was first published in 1978 by Destino and was awarded the Premio Nacional de Literatura that year. By the time Martín Gaite was writing El cuarto de atrás, censorship, while still in place, was no longer as strict as it had been; it was abolished in 1978. When the novel was submitted to the censors in June 1978, the somewhat negative report mentions the author's fame, briefly outlines the plot, and notes ‘el prisma antifranquista con que contempla el proceso de la vida nacional’ (the anti-Francoist prism through which she views the process of national life). The censor also disputes the publisher's contention that this novel represents the inauguration of ‘un género absolutamente original’ (an absolutely original genre), before concluding that ‘en las actuales circunstancias su contenido carece de objección’ (in the current circumstances, its content is not objectionable). The novel was authorized, but the reference to the current climate suggests that it might have been censored at another time. Brown argues that the changes in censorship explain Martín Gaite's return in this novel to the autobiographical themes of Entre visillos. While it deals with themes explored in Entre visillos, the political commentary and style, as well as the focus on communication, memory and the narrative process, all signal the work of a freer and more mature writer. Unlike the earlier novel, El cuarto de atrás focuses more on the inner world and solitude of the author.
Bibliography
- Catherine O'Leary, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, University College Dublin
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4 - Retahílas
- Catherine O'Leary, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, University College Dublin
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Summary
Toma hilo, dame hilo.
(Take a thread, give me a thread.)
Introduction
Retahílas was published by Destino in 1974, just before the death of Franco, at a time when Spain was engaged in a tentative transition period. It was submitted to the censors on 11 May 1974 and a verdict of authorization was returned on 13 May. The short censor's report stated:
Carmen Martín Gaite vuelve a recordarnos ‘Entre visillos’ con esta novela esencialmente femenina y de gran calidad, llena de matices que a veces nos recuerdan una comedia de Strindberg, otras a Katherine Mansfield, relatándonos la historia de una anciana señora gallega que desea ir a morir al lugar y hogar de nacimiento, no pisado desde hace tiempo por los familiares. Ambientada a principios de siglo, el contenido no ofrece nada que objetar. Está lleno de reminiscencias.
(Carmen Martín Gaite reminds us again of Behind the Curtains with this novel that is essentially feminine and of great quality, full of nuances that at times remind us of a Strindberg play, at times Katherine Mansfield, telling us the story of an old Galician woman who wants to go to die at the place of her birth, where family members have not set foot for a long time. Set at the start of the century, the content offers nothing objectionable. It is full of reminiscences.)
This report is interesting insofar as it seems to show that the censor had not read the novel. Not only does he fail to identify correctly the protagonist, but also the time in which the novel is set. The report therefore constitutes a depressing indictment of the censorship process, especially when one realizes the impact that these reports could have on an author.
Martín Gaite includes epigraphs and a series of definitions of the term Retahílas at the start of the book, drawing the reader's attention to the form of the novel itself, and to its main theme of communication through dialogue. Framed by the largely narrative prelude and epilogue, the novel is a dialogue between two characters, 45-year-old Eulalia and her 22-year-old nephew Germán, who have travelled to the old family home in Louredo, Galicia, to await the death of her grandmother, his great-grandmother. The location itself marks a symbolic return to the past. The prelude is suggestive of a mystery story.
7 - Nubosidad variable
- Catherine O'Leary, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, University College Dublin
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Summary
Siempre, hasta en sueños, funciona en mí la metáfora del teatro. Abandonarse al sueño o a la ensonación es como entrar en el teatro y al salir recordar la función sólo a medias, a sabiendas de que se va a borrar si no tenemos ocasión de comentarla con alguien.
(Even in dreams, I find the metaphor of the theatre a valid one. Abandoning oneself to dreams or to daydreaming is like entering the theatre and only half-remembering what went on when you leave, knowing that it will all be lost if we don't get a chance to talk to someone about it.)
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.
Dedication
- Catherine O'Leary, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, University College Dublin
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Contents
- Catherine O'Leary, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, University College Dublin
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13 - Theatre and Poetry
- Catherine O'Leary, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, University College Dublin
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Summary
Siempre se piensa en un público, ahí está el aliciente de escribir y de inventar un espectáculo. Yo necesito sonar con que me oyen, imaginar a ese público, igual que te imagino ahora a tí.
(you always think of an audience, that's the attraction of writing and inventing a play. I need to dream that they are listening to me, to imagine that audience, just as I’m imagining you now.)
Introduction
The breadth of Carmen Martín Gaite's literary output is impressive, and although her dramatic and poetic works are not always of a standard with her fiction, they merit study within the context of her long writing career because they articulate themes extensively explored elsewhere. Furthermore, Carmen Martín Gaite's first creative excursions were in verse, although it took twenty years and the efforts of a publisher to bring these works to light. Her interest in drama is equally significant for an overview of her work, as so many of her novels draw on a theatrical leitmotif to explore questions of identity and communication with others. We therefore devote this chapter to Martín Gaite's dramatic and poetic works, beginning with the former, as they began to be published first, and concluding with the latter, as some of their themes also point towards Martín Gaite's writings for children, the subject of our last chapter.
Martín Gaite's theatre
Martín Gaite's interest in theatre is evident from the many references to the theatre and masks in her novelistic works. She admitted that ‘yo a muchos de mis personajes los veo explícitamente como personajes de teatro’ (I see many of my characters explicitly as theatrical characters). As a student, she was involved in student theatre and at one stage considered becoming an actress. She adapted the theatrical works of various other authors for staging in Spain. As noted in Chapter 11, she completed a version of Gil Vicente’s Don Duardos in 1972, adding some new scenes. She adapted Tirso de Molina’s El burlador de Sevilla for the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico in 1988 and it was staged at the Almagro Festival that year, directed by Adolfo Marsillach. In 1990, her version of El marinero by Fernando Pessoa was staged in the Teatro Cervantes in Alcalá de Henares, according to Hormigón.
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Further Reading
- Catherine O'Leary, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, University College Dublin
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12 - El cuento de nunca acabar
- Catherine O'Leary, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, University College Dublin
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Summary
La tendencia a vivir la vida como si fuera una novela se perfila desde muy temprano.
(The tendency to live life as if it were a novel develops very early on.)
Introduction
When Carmen Martín Gaite passed away in 2000 it is said that she did so clutching several of the notebooks, or ‘cuadernos’, where she regularly recorded her thoughts and commentaries on the writing process and the incidents of life. These ‘cuadernos’ gave rise in 1983 to one of her most personal books, El cuento de nunca acabar (The Never-Ending Story). Structurally digressive and generically hybrid, combining elements of the diary, the essay and the autobiography with more fictionalized anecdotes, Cuento was first published between El cuatro de atrás in 1978 and Nubosidad variable in 1990. But the impression of a hiatus in Martín Gaite's novelistic career which these dates suggest is deceptive, for, sandwiched between two of her most important works, Cuento represents a point of convergence between essay writing and narrative fiction as it constitutes a Cervantine reflection on writing as well as an illustration of the creative process itself.
Cuento is made up of four parts, followed by a brief comment on the book's initial dedication to the author's friend Gustavo Fabra, with whom she discussed creative writing and its relationship to literary theory on a regular basis. The first part consists of seven prologues which explain the structure and rationale of the book itself. The second and most substantial part, containing nineteen short reflections and discursive commentaries, explores issues ranging from children's fiction and intersubjective dialogue to literary reception, the relationship between public and private worlds, and the theme of love. The third part is dated and structured like letters or diary entries, and reflects on the on-going process of composition of Cuento itself, and the fourth part contains a series of headed paragraphs which, perhaps with greater homonogeneity than in the second part, constitute a reprise of themes treated there.
The tone of Cuento is highly personal, frequently confessional and consistently reflective as it considers narration from the point of view of both form and function.
14 - Children's Literature and Los parentescos
- Catherine O'Leary, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, University College Dublin
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Summary
Metió la moneda en la ranura, dijo: «¡Miranfú!», se descorrió la tapa de la alcantarilla y Sara, extendiendo los brazos, se arrojó al pasadizo, sorbida inmediatamente por una corriente de aire templado que la llevaba a la Libertad.
(She put the coin in the slot, said ‘Miranfú!’, the cover over the drain opened and Sara, stretching out her arms, threw herself into the passage, and was swallowed up by a current of air which carried her to Liberty.)
Introduction
Carmen Martín Gaite's literary reputation rests firmly on her work as a author of adult fiction, but, as with many other women writers, she has focused extensively on childhood in her work, and there are significant cross-overs between her writing for adults and children. Entre visillos, like Carmen Laforet's Nada, has rightly been been regarded as a Bildunsgroman in a feminist mode; from a different, less theoretical, perspective, however, both works are also narratives of initiation for teenage girls. As we have seen, La Reina de las Nieves, one of Martín Gaite's late works, deliberately plays with fairy tales, which are more usually the preserve of children's fiction. El cuento de nunca acabar explores the importance of children's literature for the origins of narrative and reading competence, as well as offering insights into adult–child communication and an arguably rosy view of childhood. The author's last, unfinished, work, Los parentescos, is written through the eyes of an adolescent and shares much in common with her three children’s fictions, El castillo de las tres murallas (The Three-Walled Castle) and El pastel del diablo, anthologized as Dos cuentos maravillosos (Two Marvellous Stories), and Caperucita en Manhattan. In closing this volume with an analysis of these four works, we not only demonstrate the homogeneity of Martín Gaite's extensive obra but also conclude, fittingly, with her very last creative composition.
In her children's literature Martín Gaite sets out to convey in a more direct form many of the preoccupations of her adult fiction, particularly as regards the possibilities for girls of self-realization and the acquisition of intellectual autonomy. Her concerns echo many early ideas from Entre visillos, where the effects of oppressive small-town existence on Natalia are keenly painted but an outlet via writing is hinted at rather than firmly worked out.
3 - Ritmo lento
- Catherine O'Leary, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, University College Dublin
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Summary
Ya he caído en hablar de mis cosas y no me puedo parar; pero antes de seguir, diré para mi descargo que no le doy valor a lo que cuento por tener relación con mi historia personal, sino en cuanto que estos hechos privados tejen el proceso que me ha traído a mirar y entender las cosas de una determinada manera.
(now I’ve started talking about my things and I can't stop myself; but before I go on I’ll say in my defence that I don't value what I’m saying for its relationship to my personal history, but rather insofar as these private facts weave the process which has led me to look at and understand things in a certain way.)
Introduction
Ritmo lento was completed in 1962, and came second to Mario Vargas Llosa’s La ciudad y los perros (The Time of the Hero) in that year's Biblioteca Breve literary competition. Its publication by Seix Barral in 1963 coincided with the start of the Latin American boom, and followed the publication of Martín Santos's Tiempo de silencio. As a result, Ritmo lento made less of an impression than might otherwise have been expected. After Ritmo lento, Martín Gaite abandoned fiction for over a decade to concentrate on academic and other non-fiction works.
The novel was examined by the censors in 1963. Despite some confusion regarding characters (the censor comments on the protagonist stabbing his mother, rather than his father), and reference to ‘unas páginas un tanto macabras’ (some rather macabre pages), the censor concluded, bizarrely, that ‘la novela es aceptable, incluso serenadora’ (the novel is acceptable, even calming).
Ritmo lento represented a change in direction away from social realism for both Martín Gaite and the Spanish novel. Like Tiempo de silencio, it signalled a move away from the collective to psychological explorations of individual perspectives, and involved experimentation with narrative structure. Brown argues that ‘independently, yet contemporaneously, both these works inaugurated the new social novel in Spain.’ Martín Gaite herself acknowledged the influence of Italo Svevo's La conciencia de Zeno on this novel (Pido la palabra, 252). Ritmo lento could be described as a psychological narrative; its innovation is its portrait of the mind of David Fuente, an individual at odds with society.
The novel contains a prologue, eleven chapters and an epilogue.
Frontmatter
- Catherine O'Leary, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, University College Dublin
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- A Companion to Carmen Martín Gaite
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- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 03 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 19 March 2009, pp i-iv
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10 - Irse de casa
- Catherine O'Leary, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, University College Dublin
-
- Book:
- A Companion to Carmen Martín Gaite
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 03 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 19 March 2009, pp 171-184
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
La geografía del tiempo está surcada por caminos de memoria y grutas de olvido.
(The geography of time is scored through by the paths of memory and caverns of forgetfulness.)
Introduction
Irse de casa tells the story of the return of 64-year-old Amparo Miranda to her home town in Spain, which she left as a young girl with her unmarried mother, Ramona Miranda, a gifted seamstress. Now a mother herself to two grown-up children and widow of a wealthy empresario, Amparo is a successful fashion designer who has lived most of her life in New York. But, as with many of Martín Gaite's protagonists, she feels dissatisfied with her current life. The novel thus narrates a literal and metaphorical journey back to origins, during the course of which Amparo, despite avoiding many of her former friends, becomes reconciled with her past and so finds a renewed focus for her future.
Alongside Amparo's story are a number of secondary or supporting narratives which, as Martín Gaite herself describes them in the novel, criss-cross like train tracks at a junction, illustrating the complexity and richness of life’s social fabric across several generations. One of these sub-plots recounts the tale of Olimpia, the Spanish town's aristocratic heiress whose idiosyncrasies amuse her neighbours. Another deals with Manuela Roca, a divorcée with a rather strained family set-up. Her estranged husband Agustín, a doctor and friend to Olimpia, and his sister Tarsi, who runs a hair-dressing and beauty salon, also feature. Abel Bores, Amparo's former ami de coeur, plays a significant role in the novel's dénouement. Finally, Amparo's son Jeremy has an important supporting role as the writer of a film script which anticipates uncannily his mother's return to Spain and provides a metafictional frame for the novel.
Many of Martín Gaite's standard concerns are evident in Irse, not least the motif of a journey of self-discovery that is effected through both exchanges with others and personal reflection on the past. The author returns to themes such as companionship and loneliness; the restrictions of gender stereotypes and consequences of patriarchal social roles; and the figure of the chica rara, which reappears as if in a recuperation of elements from earlier works. Indeed, one might say that the chica rara category again includes chicos raros, in a gesture back to David Fuente of Ritmo lento and Pablo Klein of Entre visillos.