Novel
The Back Room
El cuarto de atrás
Carmen Martín Gaite · 1978
Synopsis
On a stormy night, a novelist who cannot sleep is visited by a man dressed in black, who has come, he says, for an interview. The conversation drags on, and she slips between waking and dreaming. The visitor's questions bring back her childhood during the civil war and her youth under the dictatorship: the streets of Salamanca, sentimental novels, an imaginary island invented long ago, Bergai. Little by little, one no longer knows what belongs to memory, to dream or to invention.
Context
The novel appeared in 1978; it was the first by its author published in Spain after Franco's death. It mixes memoirs, the mystery story and a reflection on writing, and borrows from the sentimental novel as from the fantastic, whose hesitation it keeps: the reader can never decide between the real and the imagined. The narrator bears the author's features, and it is through the objects and readings of everyday life that the Spain of the Francoist years returns. The English translation appeared in 1983.
Who it is for
A nocturnal conversation in which everything remains uncertain; it helps to know a little about the lives of women in Spain between 1939 and 1975.
Prizes and reception
National Prize for Literature in 1978; it is also the first of the author's books translated into English, by Helen Lane.