Novel
The Island
Primera memoria
Ana María Matute · 1960
Synopsis
Summer 1936, on an island in the Balearics. Matia, an adolescent, has lost her mother; her father is far away. She lives with her grandmother, who rules the house with authority but supervises the children little, together with her cousin Borja, whimsical and unpredictable, with whom she teams up. She becomes friends with Manuel, a mysterious boy. The war that has just broken out barely touches the village, but the children discover in it loyalty, hatred and desire.
Context
The novel won the 1959 Nadal Prize and appeared in 1960 from Destino. It opens the trilogy Los mercaderes, devoted to the civil war, in which the conflict nevertheless remains far from the village. The French translation by Antoinette Bloch appeared as early as 1960 under a title that does not translate the Spanish, taken up by Myriam Chirousse in her new translation of 2021. In English, the book has been translated under the title School of the Sun by Elaine Kerrigan, then under the title The Island by Laura Lonsdale, in 2020.
Who it is for
A coming-of-age novel in which the war stays in the distance and everything passes through the eyes of a teenage girl.
Prizes and reception
Nadal Prize 1959; first part of a trilogy, retranslated into French and English in the twenty-first century.