Playwright Lucía Miranda discovered ‘Little Red Riding Hood in Manhattan’ when she was a preteen. His mother gave him one of the first editions at a Madrid Book Fair. For Carmen Martín Gaite the event was more than just a literary event: it was a party. She bought dresses for the occasion and signed copies with a complicity that made her train one of the longest. Lucía waited there for her turn with her mother and got her signature in hers. “Since then the book has always accompanied me,” he says. Now that the centenary of Martín Gaite’s birth arrives in 2025, Miranda directs the theatrical adaptation of the iconic work, which will premiere at the Teatro de La Abadía from January 23 to February 23, within the framework of the celebrations around this great figure of 20th century Spanish literature. Related News standard No The legacy of Martín Gaite already rests in Salamanca “fulfilling the wish of all those around her” Henar Díaz The exhibition of the collections of the writer from Salamanca at the International Center of Spanish “will allow us to better understand her creative process and the social, cultural and literary context of Spain in the mid-20th century»Mission accomplished, Carmiña would think smiling if she had known the story. Because Gaite paid great attention to intergenerational dialogues and conflicts. Through that prism, he addressed in novels, poetry and essays universal themes such as the transmission of values, emotional inheritance and the tensions between the expectations of the past and the desires of the present, a legacy that continues to resonate strongly. José Teruel, director at Siruela of the seven volumes of his complete works, finds that same vital concern in ‘Retahílas’ (1974): “He creates two voices in monodialogue from different generations trying to explain what was not known how to clarify in due time” , he explains. Like Carmiña, his biographer points out this as one of his favorite novels, along with ‘The Back Room’ (1978). In both, “Martín Gaite manages to make writing simulate the flow of orality, and this is the most difficult thing in literature,” explains Teruel, who has gathered his favorite texts in ‘Selected Pages’ in the aforementioned editorial on the occasion of the anniversary. . Image from the theatrical adaptation of ‘Little Red Riding Hood in Manhattan’, by Lucía Miranda Dominik ValvoBorn in 1925 in Salamanca (which has declared 2025 as the Year of Carmen Martín Gaite), she grew up in a family that marked her vision of the world. His parents, José Martín and María Gaite Veloso, had a liberal and progressive spirit that they put into the education of their daughters, Ana and Carmen. That was the breeding ground from which several recurring themes emerged in his work: memory, family and human relationships. At the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters he met young writers such as Agustín García Calvo and, above all, Ignacio Aldecoa. She meets him again when she decides to move to Madrid in 1950, after graduating, and introduces him to her friends: Alfonso Sastre, Jesús Fernández Santos and Josefina Rodríguez (who adopted the surname Aldecoa after marrying). Social injustice Shortly afterwards, before marrying Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, she helped in a parish dispensary in Puente de Vallecas. There she came into contact with the harsh reality of extreme poverty and her conscience as a bourgeois lady from the provinces was shaken forever, as she recognizes in ‘Waiting for the Future’. Teruel (who reproduces the story ‘A Clear Conscience’ in ‘Selected Pages’) states that Carmen described as ‘aesthetics of redemption’ the idea that charity can justify a clear conscience without addressing the roots of social injustice. With her particular fusion between history and personal experience, the writer reviews both her childhood and adolescence as well as the Civil War and the years that followed. He explored the oppressive routine resulting from a rigid society in his debut novel, ‘El balneario’ (1955, Café Gijón award), which he later developed in a feminine key in ‘Entre visillos’, with which he won the Nadal in 1957, a year later. that Ferlosio, then still her husband, did it with ‘El Jarama’. National Narrative Award in 1978, ‘The Back Room’ closes a thematic cycle by connecting the concerns of his previous titles with a freer and more symbolic look. It is the second novel that will be brought to the theater on the occasion of the centenary in La Abadía, with an adaptation by María Folguera and direction by Rakel Camacho that will star Emma Suárez from February 27 to March 16. ‘From daughter to mother, from mother to daughter’ Brings together ‘From Your Window to Mine’ and ‘The Autumn of Poughkeepsie’The coexistence between the personal and the literary device is the stylistic essence of a use of language called Carmen Martín Gaite, according to the director of his complete works. Both maintain a particular pulse in ‘From Your Window to Mine’ and ‘The Autumn of Poughkeepsie’. Two short and intense texts that his biographer publishes for the first time in the same volume: ‘From daughter to mother, from mother to daughter’, which will be published in March. They are also two of his most emotional pieces: a dream with his mother, and an evocation with his daughter, Marta. Grief and literature In them “the experience of bond and loss, the intimate diary and fabulation, reality and sleepwalking, as well as her dimension as daughter and mother coexist, with perfect harmony and skill,” according to her biographer. They are written on dates (1982 and 1985, respectively) very close to the death of the two most important women in his life. “Due to their emotional force, they are perhaps the most successful titles in his work of how raw intimacy is not understood if it is not distilled through the filter of a dream or a story: ‘The secret is not said, it is told,’ he notes in one of his ‘Notebooks of everything’,” says Teruel. Lucía Miranda adds ‘Little Red Riding Hood in Manhattan’ to this journey of mourning through literature. In a poetic and symbolic way, the story “invites us to think about the price of being free and how we face losses in order to move forward. It is luminous, but also deeply human,” he reflects. New York The three works also share a common backdrop closely linked to it: New York. During her stays in the Big Apple, she immersed herself in an environment that fueled her creativity, from reading Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’ in her 119th Street apartment to the paintings of Edward Hopper. ‘Vision of New York’ The collages she made during her stay in the Big Apple are republished’Vision of New York’, now republished by Siruela, captures this experience through the collages that she began to make to keep her hands busy and quit smoking. The pieces, discovered by his sister Ana María in her house in El Boalo, in the Madrid mountains, will be the protagonists of an exhibition curated by Teruel at the Casa del Lector (El Matadero), which will open in March 2025. Spiritual autobiography The experimental method would also influence his essay ‘The Neverending Tale’, where he addressed open narrative and the search for new ways of telling. It is precisely this facet of Martín Gaite that his biographer highlights most: «He conceived the essay as an authentic spiritual autobiography. His essays adopted a narrative channel and he expressed on multiple occasions his aspiration to achieve an unattainable resemblance to the oral story. After his second stay in New York he regained strength and, upon his return, celebrated his reconciliation with life with the publication in 1987 of ‘The amorous uses of the Spanish postwar’, with which he won the Anagrama Essay award. The following year he received the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature and in 1990 he completed his return to fiction with ‘Little Red Riding Hood in Manhattan’, “our Matilda”, as Miranda calls her, which highlights Gaite’s quality and potential to transcend generations. From ‘Alley Dead End’ to the unfinished ‘The Kinships’, the author of ‘Variable Cloudiness’ left behind an enormous legacy that will be reflected in an exhibition organized by the National Library, Spanish Cultural Action, the Junta de Castilla y León, the International Spanish Center of the University of Salamanca and the Martín Gaite Foundation. This traveling exhibition, whose calendar is soon to be defined, will be accompanied by an international congress and conferences. A great opportunity to move beyond the anecdote that has enveloped the writer. “We continue to insist on his representation, on his berets, on his character, on his fight against time through strident colors, but not on his important cultural significance,” says Teruel, who highlights his role as a witness and legatee of the generation of the 50s. «This should be one of the objectives of this centenary: to reveal the complexity of the Gaite», he concludes.
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