En un ejercicio de modernidad sin pretensiones, Carmen Martín Gaite se lanza aquí a la autoficción, en un momento en el que, desconozco por completo, si este género estaba muy consolidado, y con una historia de argumento sencillo pero de gran armazón. Casi al principio nos hace un resumen de su plan: “Pretender al mismo tiempo entender y soñar: ahí está la condena de mis noches.”
Y pretender explicar el proceso de creación literaria, con su bagaje de libros, sus fugas y pérdidas del hilo, con la memoria de su propia vida, no debe ser nada fácil, pero consigue trasladarnos una gran parte de esa experiencia con una novela que mezcla también la fantasía, el misterio, y la memoria histórica. Pero no corre nunca toda la cortina que nos deje ver lo más profundo, porque “solo la distancia revela el secreto de lo que parecía estar oculto”.
El humor y el ingenio que se infiltran en toda la historia, creo, que nos dan una pista del carácter de Martín Gaite, que no deja de ironizar sobre el mundo que le tocó vivir y sobre ella misma.
Las metáforas llenan el libro desde el título, con ese cuarto de atrás, “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 solo 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. Las piedrecitas blancas, las miguitas, y los refugios, o el escondite inglés como fórmula que utilizan los recuerdos para sorprendernos.
Y me quedo con la estela que nos ofrece para poder de llegar a Cunigan o a la isla de Bergai:

“A Bergai se llegaba por el aire. Bastaba con mirar a la ventana, invocar el lugar con los ojos cerrados y se producía la levitación. «Siempre que notes que no te quieren mucho —me dijo mi amiga—, o que no entiendes algo, te vienes a Bergai. Yo te estaré esperando allí». ( )

Although this is a metafictional work, it is done in a very low-key, casual way, and rather naturally subverts a lot of tropes. There is a lot of ambiguity as well. The narrator is an obvious portrait of the author, so there are mentions of her work and writing. Halfway through the book, the narrator notes that after the death of Franco, many memoirs appeared, but she doesn’t want to write a typical memoir. Indeed, the reminiscences of her childhood are fragmented and non-chronological, and some important facts (her marriage) are mentioned once, then dropped. Besides the novel being an anti-post-Franco memoir, it also departs from the familiar novelistic structure of one character relating their story to another. Usually when this happens, the viewpoint shifts from the first character to the storyteller, or the person who the story is being told to is a very minor character. The majority of the story is about the person doing the telling. But here, the questioner is an ambiguous man in black who could have several possible identities, and his life intrudes on the story in one chapter. The discussion between the narrator and the man in black is a large part of the novel and things jump from subject to subject, and there is some conversational sparring. Because of this, the story moves around a lot, but it feels very natural – like a somewhat rambling conversation. There are several different styles – most notably, a stream-of-consciousness half-awake first chapter and one that consists of a phone conversation but is also a pastiche of the romantic dramas written by the narrator and her friend as girls. A recurrent motif is the popular music and culture of the day – I think someone familiar with the era might have found that more meaningful, but that didn’t hinder my enjoyment of the book. I quite liked the structure, was absorbed by the narrative (such as it was), and found the author’s descriptions to be sharp and memorable.

The first chapter is very interesting, written in an almost stream-of-consciousness style as the narrator is about to go to sleep. Her thoughts wander all over, and eventually she gets up, although it isn’t entirely clear whether this happened or whether she dreamed it. Is the letter that she finds real or imagined? The first chapter also introduces possible identities for the man in black: the literal man in black from the print “Luther’s Discussion with the Devil”; the letter writer of the possibly apocryphal letter; or the ideal confidante from her dreams. It’s also possible that he could be a journalist, although coming to call after midnight, as he does in the next chapter, seems suspect. In any case, the discussion between the narrator and the man in black makes up much of the rest of the book, although in alternating chapters – there’s one with their conversation, followed by one involving kitchen reminiscing by the narrator, followed by another conversation, then one chapter that consists of a phone call between the narrator and a mysterious woman. Then there’s a chapter describing the end of their conversation and one wrapping it up, with the narrator wondering whether it happened or was all a dream.

The narrator’s confusion seems plausible enough – she mentions that she has been forgetting things lately, but there could be other explanations. Whole thing is a dream? Man in black is screwing with her? Her uncertainty contributes to the ambiguous situation and the anti-standard memoir feel. During the conversation, the narrator talks about being blocked in her writing and various projects she considered which adds to the meta structure. References to popular songs, movies, and celebrities of her childhood are frequent – sometimes they almost feel more real than her actual life, again destabilizing the narrative. Fictional places are also touchstones for the narrator; one is a place mentioned in a song, the other the world that she and her friend created in their stories. The more conventional glimpses of her life are interesting though – an aborted infatuation, the death of a relative, bomb shelters, thoughts on Franco’s daughter, childhood friends. One of my favorites was her musing on the different classes of dressmakers. Certainly an odd book, but it flows well and has that kind of dream logic so you go along with it. ( )

This is another book I read a number of weeks ago and did not write a review for at that time. I really enjoyed it, in fact, it was probably one of my favorite books of the past six months or so. It's a story about a woman who is only identified as C who is suffering from insomnia/writer's block and is trying to fall asleep as she thinks about Tzvetan Todorov's book on fantastic literature. She is then visited by a man in black who bears a resemblance to a man in black in a picture she's got tacked to her bedroom wall. He gets her to talk about her first book, which leads to conversations about her life during the Franco regime. The back room in her family's house was a refuge of sorts for her, but when the war came and went and was replaced by postwar scarcity, it was steadily occupied by the material needs of her family. They had a bunch of poultry in escabeche back there, which seems kind of gross to me, the idea of storing meat in a briny mixture for extended periods of time. Anyway, as she talks to the man in black she mixes in a steady stream of references to popular songs from the Franco era (Carmén Martín Gaite was preparing a scholarly text on postwar love lyrics at the same time as she was writing this novel) and also some references to Robinson Crusoe. There's also an extended phone conversation with a woman who may have been in contact with the man in black. The whole memoir aspect of the book, with the protagonist telling her story to a listener, corresponds to the little boom of such stories in the years immediately after Franco's death when lots of people started wanting to publish their own stories after remaining silent for so many years.

It's really a fantastic book...I'm writing this a few days after I finished reading Manuel Puig's El beso de la mujer araña, and I think they've got a lot in common. They both incorporate popular culture, whether it be the songs that C cites in this book or the movies that Molina tells in Puig's novel, into complicated yet readable stories. They both restrict one layer of the story into fairly tightly-enclosed spaces--the jail cell in El beso; C's apartment in El cuarto--while expanding another layer outward as the people telling the stories do their thing. Molina remembers the movies he's seen and plucks them out of his memory based on what he thinks Valentín should hear at that point in time, while C weaves the lyrics from popular songs into a conversation that leads the reader through a life that encompasses the rise and fall of Franco. Very similar, but also very different. Martín Gaite's book goes a bit farther with the role of the storyteller (C), and from a pretty early stage you're invited to begin comparing the development of the story that's being told with the actual book you're reading.

There was one part that I particularly enjoyed: C is talking about this song where the lyrics are all about this mysterious place called Cunigan, or Cunigan's, or something like that (I returned the book to the library). It's a bar/restaurant or something, but the funny thing is, C was a kid when the song was popular, and when she went to Madrid she was always watching people passing by and wanting to follow them because she imagined that they were on their way to Cunigan, and it might be just around the corner! It was a funny way of representing the way that pop lyrics are interpreted by children who don't necessarily understand what's going on. It also fit well into the context of the story, where fantasy and reality intermingle in subtle ways. ( )