Agueda, a 35-year-old woman who has lived and loved hard, has just lost her mother. Finding her precarious equilibrium besieged, she struggles to keep her curiosity about the world intact. In an effort to give her life structure, she returns to her old, unfinished doctoral dissertation: a study of an extravagant and enigmatic 18th-century adventurer. Inexorably, her investigation leads to profound reflections on her own strange childhood, her parents’ equally strange marriage, and her own emotional landscape. Introspective, but with the pace and intrigue of a thriller, Living’s the Strange Thing will keep the reader engrossed until the end. Carmen Martín Gaite is one of Spain’s most distinguished novelists; in 1978, she was awarded the Spanish National Prize for Literature.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From the Publisher
Agueda, a 35–year–old woman who has lived and loved hard, has just lost her mother. Finding her precarious equilibrium besieged, she struggles to keep her curiosity about the world intact. In an effort to give her life structure, she returns to her old, unfinished doctoral dissertation: a study of an extravagant and enigmatic 18th–century adventurer. Inexorably, her investigation leads to profound reflections on her own strange childhood, her parents’ equally strange marriage, and her own emotional landscape. Introspective, but with the pace and intrigue of a thriller, Living’s the Strange Thing will keep the reader engrossed until the end. Carmen Martín Gaite is one of Spain’s most distinguished novelists; in 1978, she was awarded the Spanish National Prize for Literature.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
From the Inside Flap
As compulsive as a thriller, this award-winning Spanish writer?s drama of broken dreams, lies, and the search for love is an intense meditation on the strange adventure of living.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A wonderful writer!,
By
This review is from: Living's the Strange Thing (Paperback)
Carmen Martin Gaite was totally new to me; I only discovered her work during a month-long stay in Spain. Billed as one of the most important female Spanish novelists of the 20th century, the reputation is well-deserved. Agueda is a woman in her 30's whose mother has died. The book takes place over a one-week period as she prepares to face her grandfather, living in a nursing home, unaware of the death of his daughter--or is he? In a series of flashbacks and inner journeys, Agueda is revealed as a woman very like her mother, but nevertheless estranged from her. A former writer of popular songs (NOT a rock singer as the book jacket suggests), Agueda is now a researcher and archivist. Her work on the story of the mad Vidal y Villalba, an 18th c. adventurer, becomes a metaphor for her discovery of the undercurrents of her own life.
Perhaps the plot sounds familiar, but the insights were to me new and startling. My favorite scene occurs early in the book, when Agueda lunches with a professor who discovered the story of Vidal. They talk of life as a succession of choices, each choice narrowing the range of possibilities. "It was so impoverishing--he said--having to adhere so rigidly to what you'd chosen, rejecting anything else as merely an interesting possibility. . .our thirst for infinity banging against the bars of our cage. . .you go in one door and then there's only one corridor that gets darker and darker with doors at the end through which you must pass, ever narower and more imperious." And yet the professor gives Agueda the gift of the Vidal story to follow. Sounds a bit heavy but it's not. Agueda is a flesh and blood woman, struggling as all do with relationships, work and family. But with Gaite's gorgeous prose it all seems new and fresh and insightful. Highly recommended!
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A middle-aged woman has just lost her mother,
By Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Living's the Strange Thing (Paperback)
A middle-aged woman has just lost her mother and struggles to find a new life and role, turning to an unfinished doctoral dissertation studying a mysterious 18th century explorer. Unfinished business soon turns to a series of strange links to her own past, bringing Carmen Martin Gaite's LIVING'S THE STRANGE THING to life.
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
the need to be oneself,
This review is from: Living's the Strange Thing (Paperback)
As the main character slowly starts to recover her sense of things after a very "confusing" period, she starts to feel the rage and shame that she had previously been too ill to experience. The confusions and hesitations were partly ways to avoid a confrontation that she felt too weak to face. She must try everything in order to get rid of Roque, but the one thing that will do it is stepping up and being herself. He seems not to see that she is too different from him, that she is not interested in him, and that she regrets having sometimes let him have things his way, which might have disappointed other people who had put some faith on her. sorry! She is angry at having allowed him to laugh at her and so many others, nice people, with his way-too-paranoid attention-seeking strategies. Why does he think that people have to be constantly worrying about what he might do? Why does she have to suffer seeing others worry about her, doing things to humour her, just because this person, who she has never seeked, springs out of nowhere acting as if they know one another! Can't he see that he is just a stranger? Is he proud to know that she has had to hide under a series of masks out of confusion and fear? Ah, but "his" inability to see things as they are is costing him a lot more, since he seems to be allowing this thing to damage his personal interests notwithstaning the whole ridiculousness and futility of it all.
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