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Martin Gaite, Carmen. The Back room
In this, the first of Carmen Martin Gaite's works to be translated into English, the winner of Spain's National Prize for Literature gives us a deceptively simple narrative that fans out into a curious hybrid genre: equal parts fantasy, memoir, history, and coming-of-age novel. The protagonist, a writer closely resembling the author herself, is awakened in the night by a man demanding an interview she cannot remember having scheduled. What transpires can perhaps best be described as a single-set dramatization of a psychoanalytic interview, complete with flashbacks. He questions her closely about her past, about her art, about the pages that seem to mysteriously pile up next to the typewriter even as the interview proceeds...