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Resumen del libro

An impassioned correspondence between two former school friends as they reach crisis in middle age, from the prize-winning Spanish novelist Carmen Martin Gaite. Sofia is a mother of three grown-up children and trapped in a loveless marriage to Eduardo. Mariana is a successful psychiatrist, incapable of forming stable relationships with men.

As their lives reach crises in middle age, these 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, 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, 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.

Biografía del autor

Carmen Martín Gaite (Salamanca 1925-Madrid 2000), novelista, poeta, ensayista y traductora, publicó su primera novela x{0026}lt;em El balneariox{0026}lt;/em en 1955 y es una de las más destacadas representantes de la generación de la posguerra. De sus libros hay que destacar x{0026}lt;em Entre visillosx{0026}lt;/em (Premio Nadal 1958), x{0026}lt;em Ritmo lentox{0026}lt;/em (1963), x{0026}lt;em El cuarto de atrásx{0026}lt;/em (1978), x{0026}lt;em El cuento de nunca acabar x{0026}lt;/em (1983), x{0026}lt;em Usos amorosos de la postguerra españolax{0026}lt;/em (Premio Anagrama de Ensayo 1987), x{0026}lt;em Nubosidad variablex{0026}lt;/em (1992), x{0026}lt;em Lo raro es vivirx{0026}lt;/em (1996) o x{0026}lt;em Irse de casa x{0026}lt;/em (1998). Carmen Martín Gaite ha recibido también los premios Príncipe de Asturias 1988 y el Nacional de las Letras Españolas 1994.