Variable Cloud [Hardcover]

Carmen Martin Gaite (Author), Carmen Martin Gaite (Author), Margaret Jull Costa (Author, Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1996

Features two modern women, and their mistakes in love.

Editorial Reviews

From 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.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Variable Cloud ($24.00; 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. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 374 pages
• Publisher: Harpercollins (July 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1860460615
• ISBN-13: 978-1860460616
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.8 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,512,900 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not so good as I had expected, August 31, 2001

By 

Silvia K. Mateo (Málaga, Málaga Spain) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Variable Cloud (Panther) (Paperback)

Me ha gustado, no digo que no, pero... no tanto como esperaba, sinceramente. Y mira que me da rabia, porque Carmen Martín Gaite siempre me ha resultado una de las personas más lúcidas y tiernas del panorama literario español. La muerte de esta mujer me produjo una sincera pena.
En el caso concreto de Nubosidad variable, la encuentro un tanto pretenciosa al principio, aunque después este aspecto desaparece de la novela a medida que los personajes protagonistas se van perfilando y la trama se concreta. No quisiera yo añadirme al tópico de "literatura de mujeres" o "para mujeres", ya que no creo en él en absoluto (el otro día escuché en un conocido programa de radio a una oyente-lectora que afirmaba impávida que "existe una literatura para XX y otra para XY", y ninguno de los esfuerzos de mi admirado José Luis Velasco para convencerla de lo contrario lograron conmoverla), pero... ¿por qué en algunas -sólo en algunas- novelas escritas por mujeres, los personajes masculinos siempre salen retratados como auténticos idiotas??? (Me ha pasado recientemente con Almudena Grandes y ahora con ésta novela).