Women's Fiction, Literary Styles & Movements - Fiction, European Peoples & Cultures - Fiction & Literature, Spanish Fiction
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Overview
Sofia is mother of three grown-up children and trapped in a loveless marriage to their estranged father Eduardo, a self-preoccupied businessman. Mariana is a psychiatrist with a successful Madrid practice, a shrewd woman of brittle emotions, incapable of forming stable relationships with men. These two women on the threshold of middle age were close friends at schools but grew apart, one of them inheriting the other's lover. Meeting accidentally at a party, they realise that they retain a deep-felt need to confide in each other. While Mariana escapes Madrid for a coastal resort to seek respite in solitude from a damaged love-affair, Sofia walks out on her husband and finds refuge in her children's chaotic apartment. The two women fill notebooks with their insights and recollections and engage in a correspondence in which they lay bare their souls. They pool these deeply dredged findings about themselves and discover, as they realise on meeting again, that they have written a novel ... Variable Cloud a probing, limpid, cruelly witty dissection of married (and unmarried) life in all its absurdities and self-deceptions. Here is a brilliant - and chilling - exercise in self-awareness.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
As their lives reach crises in middle age, two women, former school friends who had grown apart, reach out to each other through an exchange of impassioned letters in Gaite's effusive epistolary novel. Mariana Leon, a psychiatrist and TV pundit, flees Madrid for a friend's empty house in a coastal resort, where she obsesses over Raimundo, a suicidal, manic-depressive writer who seems part friend, part patient, part lover. Her old friend, Sofia Montalvo de Luque, walks out on her vain, hypercritical husband, Eduardo, a business executive who talks only about money, and moves in with her three rebellious children, who share a disorderly apartment. In alternating voices mixing letters with notebook excerpts and invented stories, the two women relentlessly analyze their relationships, erotic fantasies and trips abroad. Strewn with allusions to Kafka, Dali, Bunuel, Tagore and Katherine Mansfield, their outpourings incorporate meditations on memory, love, sex, the treacherous nature of words, chance and the difficulty of confronting one's past without embellishing it. A bestseller in Spain, this sophisticated novel, Gaite's first to be translated into English, is likely to capture a more select readership here. (June)Kirkus Reviews
Variable Cloud ( Jul. 18, 1996; 374 pp.; 1-86046-061-5): A chronicle of female friendship, expressed largely through an exhaustive exchange of letters between two women who resume their long-dormant intimacy when each must grapple with the demons of middle age and unravelling relationships. Sofia, a wife and mother who leaves her mercenary, emotionless husband, and Mariana, a psychiatrist who can't help obsessing over her depressive lover, share their views on sex, politics, literature, and many other topics in a discursive, allusive correspondence and communion that is, alternately, absorbingly dramatic and painfully dull. This ambitious 1992 novel from one of Spain's leading writers (now translated into English for the first time) was a major success in Gaite's homeland, but may find a relatively lukewarm response in a culture where feisty criticisms of lamebrained machismo are not a novelty.Book Details
Published
October 19, 1995
Publisher
The Harvill Press
Pages
81
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9781860460616