Series:

European Women Writers

2 total works

Cover of Same Sea as Every Summer
Poetic and erotic, El mismo mar de todos los veranos (The Same Sea As Every Summer) was originally published in Spain in 1978, three years after the death of Franco and in the same year that government censorship was abolished. But even in a new era that fostered more liberal attitudes toward divorce, homosexuality, and women's rights, this novel by Esther Tusquets was controversial. Its feminine view of sexuality--in particular, its depiction of a lesbian relationship--was unprecedented in Spanish fiction. Now its complex moods and rhythms have been caught in an English translation by Margaret E. W. Jones that has won the Kayden National Translation Award.

The disillusioned narrator of The Same Sea As Every Summer is a middle-aged woman whose unhappy life prompts a journey into she past to rediscover a more authentic self. However, events force her to realize that love or trust will inevitably be repaid by betrayal. This pattern assumes various forms in a story that moves forward as well as backward, playing out in Barcelona among the haute bourgeoisie. Richly textured with allusion, The Same Sea As Every Summer is also a commentary on post-Civil War Spanish society by an author who grew up during the repressive Franco regime. Esther Tusquets's other novels include El amor es un juego solitano (1979) and Para no volver (1985).

Cover of Never to Return

Never to Return

by Esther Tusquets

Published 1 August 1999
"Never to Return" is the story of a middle-aged woman in the throes of a personal crisis prompted by her brief, intense experience with psychoanalysis. On the brink of turning fifty, Elena suddenly falls into a deep depression brought on by her husband's odyssey to New York to celebrate the triumph of his cinematic career, a trip he takes not with Elena but with an unknown lover half her age. At the same time, Elena must come to grips with the transition of her grown-up sons to their own lives and relationships. Fearing aging, loneliness, a failed love, and a failed life, she begins sessions with a reputable Argentine psychoanalyst. As she undergoes treatment, she develops a sharply satiric view of the analytic endeavor and, at the same time, an appreciation of its possible power and effectiveness. A novelist, publisher, and editor, Esther Tusquets has been for several decades a leading figure on the Spanish literary scene. Since the early sixties, she has directed Editorial Lumen, a distinguished publishing house in Barcelona. In the past twenty years, she has become widely known as a writer of fiction.
She is best known for a tetralogy of novels, the fourth of which is "Never to Return". Barbara Ichiishi is the author of "The Apple of Earthly Love: Female Development" in Esther Tusquets' Fiction and the cotranslator of Edouard Glissant's Monsieur Toussaint.