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Magical Manhattan Mystery Tour
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19882 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1992 |
2,488 Words |
| Author
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Marie-Lise Gazarian-Gautier
Marie-Lise Gazarian-Gautier is professor of Spanish and Latin
American literature at St. John's University in Jamaica, New
York. She is the author of Interviews With Spanish Writers
(Dalkey Archieve Presss, 1991), Interviews With Latin
American
Writers (Kalkey Archive press, 1989), and Gabriela Mistral,
the Teacher From the Valley of Elqui (Franciscan Herald
press,
1974, originally published in 1973 by Editorial Crespillo in
Buenos Aires as Gabriela Mistral, la maestra de Elqui). She
is coauthor with Zenaida Gutierrez-Vega of the book Carmen
Conde de viva voz (Senda Nueva de Ediciones, 1992). |
CAPERUCITA EN MANHATTAN
Carmen Matin Gaite
Madrid: Ediciones Sirvela, 1990
205 pp.
Caperucita en Manhattan (Little Red Riding Hood in Manhattan) is a book from Spain that is a definite must for the American reader. Carmen Martin Gaite, one of Spain's foremost novelists, has written an extraordinary story that has charmed Spanish children and adults alike. Now in its ninth edition, it was published in Madrid by Ediciones Sirvela in 1990. A short novel, 205 pages, it is illustrated by the author herself. The image of the Statue of Liberty that appears on the book jacket is by Norman Rockwell.
Martin Gaite is fond of all forms of art. When I interviewed her in New York some years ago--she was teaching a writers' workshop at Barnard College--she told me that life in Manhattan was so intense that it did not lend itself to writing. As a result, she worked on collages inspired by Manhattan scenes, which she kept in a notebook. As she said to me at that time.
[In New York] I would rather be a painter or a photographer than a writer. It is as if the words were crushed into tiny pieces and became useless. Here there is to time either to write or to think carefully. Sometimes, when I take the subway, I feel as if images were riding on the express train and ideas on the local. Images run much faster than thoughts. And the local train remains behind, it does not reach me, I lose sight of it. I am on the express, riding in the train of images. In Spain, for me, it is the other way around.
Little did she now then that her next novel, although written in Spain, would be set in Manhattan and that the two main characters would be a ten-year-old child, named Sara Allen, and the Statue of Liberty.
Martin Gaite was born in 1925 in Salamanca, a provincial city that dates back to the Middle Ages and takes pride in its university founded in the early thirteenth century. Her novels are written from the perspective of the insider looking out, for, as she claims, the women of her generation were conditioned to see the world from "behind the curtains." This would explain why writing is to her a game that allows her to dream and take off when she feels limited or enclosed by reality. As she told me, "There is very little difference between truth and lies, dreams and reality." Little Sara, too,
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