Overview

"Ever since the beginning of the world, living and dying have been two sides of one coin, tossed in the air... But for me - to be perfectly honest - living's the strange thing."" The protagonist of this novel, a 35-year-old woman who has lived hard and loved hard, has just lost her mother. Struggling to keep her curiosity about an inexplicable world intact, she finds her precarious equilibrium constantly besieged by resurfacing oddballs from her past and her own tendancy to daydream. To force a little structure into her life, she decides to pick up her old, unfinised doctoral dissertation about an extravagant 18th century adventurer. As she wades through old papers in a dusty archive, she is forced to confront her own strange childhood, her parent's strange relationship and the feelings that bond her to the strange architect she shares a life with."

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9781843430377

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Ponderous account of a woman coming to terms with the death (and life) of her mother, as related by Spanish novelist Gaite (The Farewell Angel, 1999, etc.) in a deeply obsessive, introspective voice. Agueda Soler, a 35-year-old graduate student in Madrid, works as a library archivist by day and devotes her spare time to the evolving draft of her dissertation, a study of an obscure 18th-century adventurer who roamed through Europe and South America in search of wealth and influence. Meantime, Agueda has a boyfriend named Tomas, an architect who is frequently away on business. As the story opens, Agueda is summoned to her grandfather's nursing home, where the director asks her whether she would be willing to impersonate her recently deceased mother in order to spare her ailing grandfather the shock of learning of his daughter's death. Somewhat taken aback, Agueda promises to consider the request and returns home. As she then goes about her daily chores, she is overwhelmed by a flood of memories and dreams of her family and home. Like most of us, she has ambivalent feelings about her parents: Her father (still alive) and her mother divorced while Agueda was a girl, and for years before her mother's death she had little contact with either parent. Her mother was a well-known painter, and her death was widely noted in the press. As she packs up her mother's artwork and belongings, Agueda comes to feel an identification with her that she had always resisted as a child, and she returns to the nursing home ready to take on the strange new role. Beautiful, extremely moving in its outline and sentiments, but a much different matter on the page: overlong, rambling, monotonous. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Carmen Mart-n Gaite (1925 - 2000) was one of Spain's most distinguished novelists. Her novels Variable Cloud and The Fallen Angel were both published by Harvill.

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