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Overview
"First-rate, one of the major works by a woman in Spain during the last quarter-century. It treats many dualities of particular interest in women's writing, among them youth versus aging, marriage or domesticity versus career and self-realization, and conventional sexuality versus a greater sexual equality. Montero addresses a broad range of complex questions with maturity and insight."-Janet PerezSynopsis
In La función delta (1981), the second novel of the best-selling Spanish author Rosa Montero, the real world is as unmapped and treacherous as ever for her countrywomen, but more universal concerns impinge. Translated into English by Kari Easton and Yolanda Molina Gavilán, The Delta Function explores a woman's fears of being abandoned, of being alone, and of dying. A unique double narrative structure throws into relief time's effect on her self-identity, sexuality, and relations with others. Readers will be inspired to confront and rethink their own version of the world around them.
Library Journal
The second of Montero's novels to be translated into English, this work touches on some of the same themes (feminism, homosexuality, loneliness) as the well-received Absent Love ( LJ 12/91), but the main focus here is the protagonist's preoccupation with aging and death. The time frame alternates between a momentous week in 1980 when Lucia was a rising film producer in her thirties and her final days in the year 2010 when she is dying from a brain tumor. Part diary, part memoir, this chronicle comments on the opening up of Spain in the post-Franco period but offers universal appeal by approaching difficult questions. The ``delta function'' of the title is the mathematical formula used by Lucia's boyfriend to distill the concept of love into its ideal state, which Lucia unsuccessfully pursues. The characterizations are richer than those in Absent Love , while the narrative style inventively views the same events from two different points in time. Of interest for academic libraries and public library literature collections.-- Mary Ellen Beck, Troy P.L., N.Y.