Anna Maria Matute / Translated by: Ali Ibrahim Ashkar
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Anna Maria Matute / Translated by: Ali Ibrahim Ashkar
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Party in the Northwest
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The puppeteer Dingo's carriage hits a young child while passing through the village of Artemilla, the miserable village from which he fled years ago to join a troupe of acrobats, aspiring to make his entire life a continuous festival. He resorts to his old friend, Juan Medinao, to help him in this predicament, but his contact with the village master will finally awaken the details of the painful past, and with them he will begin a relentless journey through memory, recalling his relationship with his father, his mother’s suicide, and the mixture of hatred and love that he felt towards his brother. Stepbrother.
In this small-sized novel, but with a big impact, Anna Maria Matute is able to delve into the depths of her characters, searching for the deep scars that childhood leaves in their souls, revealing with keen insight and high sensitivity the most complex and profound human feelings, in a dense narrative that makes room for emotional feelings. Inferiority, fear, isolation, and hatred can tell their story too.
After his return to the island, Manuel decides to dig into the past to recover the details of the murder of the man he adopted. He also tries to get to know more about the wife of Khatha, the mysterious man whom he had only met briefly, but who left a great impression on him. “Khitha,” the absent man, is the most present in the novel, and his presence will change the fate of the lives of its characters, including his wife, who irrevocably left her previous life and went on to rediscover herself after her meeting with him.
In the novel “Soldiers Cry at Night,” Anna Maria Matute attempts to experiment with new narrative methods based on mixing the narrators’ voices so that the speech of all the characters seems, in one way or another, to be one continuous dialogue. The dense, highly sensitive and delicate spectrum of characters in this novel will continue to haunt the reader and motivate him to re-read the book, which ended prematurely, leaving many outstanding questions.
It is a strange memory, the memory of a child whose grandmother brought her to her home on the island of Majorca, due to the death of her mother, the illness of her nanny, and her father’s busyness. The war surprised her one holiday when she was fourteen. She accurately records in her memory everything she sees, including trees, rocks, sea, air, lights, colors, events, and the echoes of war far and near at the same time, and cowardice, betrayal, and treachery. She records feelings of hatred, revenge, fear, and love, her first love that is devoid of lust due to the absence of instinct. When she becomes a woman, and she is still playing with dolls, her doll is Black Gorogo, the chimney sweep that she brought from afar, from one of Andersen’s stories. So the times mix with each other, and the present moment calls for the near and distant past moment, and the latter may be longer than the first moment because it took its place in the memory and settled, and therefore parentheses, doubles, and abundant details abound without making one feel bored. Because all of this is written in a sublime language and in the style of a first-class writer: Anna Maria Matute.
The novel “The First Memory” won the Nadal Prize in 1959, which is one of the most prestigious and prestigious literary awards in Spain.
Cristina Fernandez Cubas does not introduce her heroines to us easily. She takes us on straight paths at first glance, and at one moment, she turns everything upside down. We discover that her characters are torn between two realities, the separation between which is very precise: the fixed reality, and the imagined or delusional reality. . One of them overpowers the other at times, and at other times a reconciliation occurs between them, without us knowing which of them truly exists, and which of them does not exist.
“Nona’s Room,” which won the Critics’ Prize in Spain (2015) and the National Narrative Award (2016), is a magnifying glass through which we see the complexities of the human soul and the mystery that surrounds our lives without us always succeeding in observing and understanding it. In it, “Cubas” reconsiders childhood and maturity. And loneliness and family, revealing to us that nothing is really as it seems, writing all of this in transparent language and in a unique style that gives it a detective touch, with skill and lightness.
