‘Carmen Martín Gaite. A biography ‘by José Teruel: Complex and free

But this dedication, having so many data, having known its literature so thoroughly, could be a danger, if José Teruel had opted for an accumulation strategy.

The crucial issue, which nourishes the fortune of this biography, is the same as the author herself: from a narrative poetics. José Teruel writes the life of Carmen Martín Gaite, better, he tells the reader, trying to show him the reasons for his complexity, but also the options of his unique literary genius. As happens to every narrative There is selectionbut above all it privileges a sense of searching for the keys to their personal and literary wealth that I dare to venture will be the one that is left, as the years go by, it is already happening, well above the generation of big names that accompanied it in their literary adventure.

I will not quote everyone, it will be enough to say that dead Ignacio Aldecoa And Luis Martín-Santos, the two friends who might understand her, who lost very soon, was confronted so much to her husband Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, as to its interlocutor Juan Benetwho did not know how to understand her, perhaps they did not accept it, I would even dare to say that they could not stand below a value they did not recognize.

One of the great merits of José Teruel’s biography is that the vital and literary reasons formed an inseparable warp for a generation that had chosen the search for style as a march of its modernity. A biography is all the more valuable the more he tells a person in the context of his time, with his options, his doubts, his complex decisions. The reader who has not read Martín Gaite can recover in this biography all Madrid’s postwar life, coffees and gatherings, birth after newspapers ‘Diario L6’ (in which he wrote his reviews), ‘The country’, the literary collections (destiny, nostromo, taurus, alphaguara, alliance, anagram, lumen and tusquets).

And then the tragedy that the so -called movement caused in young The daughter whose death Tour the impressive pages of the end of the biography. It happened to Marta, what his partner Carlos Castilla, (son of the famous psychiatrist) or Eduardo Haro Ivars. A CHANGE MADRIDthat lucidly carmiña Martín Gaite, warned not to belong to him, since she was of that other generation, the one that Josefina Aldecoa baptized as “children of war.”

But he did not resign, he did not stop at his time. This biography is the impressive portrait of a restless woman, who then jumps to the United States, to look for the future. And internally, when he perceived that his novel vein could not say how much he wanted to imagine a kind of poetics of the narrative essay, also the ‘collages’ of ‘New York Vision’ or the sociology of love uses, of the 18th century and the postwar period. Biography travels through the importance that Martín Gaite He had the discovery of New York, and the modernity of Hopper, or the rabid and unpredictable perplexity to which the big city subjected him.

Multiplicity of styles

The statue of freedom was worshiped because if there is another face that this biography shows is precisely that of a woman who always embraced freedom, she was even a family victim of having respected her extremely. But for the importance of Spanish culture to be free, as this biography is revealing, to The fight to get your own voice, yours, That it was rare, because almost all the others had the handle of ideology, which for many was also a prison.

Of thought and style. José Teruel examines the multiplication of styles of Martín Gaite, who wrote poems, stories, theater, novels essays, ‘Collages’, biographies, articles, conferences, autofigurations. The biography emphasizes that such multiplicity It had a background unit, a poetic lucida vital reason. In Carmen Martín Gaite literature and life were inseparable. Having shown it, better, having known how to count it, is the best of this necessary, demanding and noble book. I do not know a case as a writer who owes so much to a researcher.