Martin Gaite's back room

the back room is a novel of Carmen Martin Gaite set in Spain in 1975. This book talks about everything that happened in the Spanish Civil War and the postwar period, until Franco's death and she was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978 for its complexity and good narration.

Although it is a difficult book to understand, it is worth the effort, since the author intertwines her real memories with imagination to tell the main character's story. In this lesson of a PROFESSOR we want to make you a summary of the back room so you can learn about this important time in the history of Spain.

Carmen Martín Gaite, author of other hits such as between net curtains, she is the author of this novel so studied and analyzed in study centers. Therefore, here we leave you a complete summary.

the back room starts when the protagonist is in bed (which is the same way she ends the novel) in a state of sleep, while her thoughts come together in her head without being able to differentiate well which are real and which are imagined.

The protagonist has a lot of the author, that is why at no time is it denied that she is talking about herself. At that precise moment they come to mind childhood memories mixed with romantic novels and in this situation of insomnia she decides to get up to look in her sewing box.

While she is fiddling with the box, it spreads out and each of its elements takes her to a different place, lost among the memories and imagination. For example, a love letter that takes her directly to the beach where she met her love.

the protagonist is woken up by a phone call. She is answered by a man who says that she is here for the interview. She can't remember this man or that he had any interviews, but she decides to bring him up. They sit down to chat and they spend hours talking about literature philosophy and war.

In a conversation break when she goes to the kitchen to make some tea, she comes face to face with the back room and all the memories of her that she gives off of her: the books that her mother read to her, the way of being alone at home, her deepest thoughts, etc. and the protagonist realizes that she can only see that room when her mind is totally liberated.

When she returns to the office with the man they start talking about politics and he offers her a hallucinogenic pill so that she can bring to light even more repressed memories. Meanwhile, the leaves of the novel that she is writing the protagonist they are stacked on the table, until a gust of wind comes and scatters them all.

In a fit of exhaustion, she asks the man to take care of her things while she gets some rest. The protagonist begins to think that that man is not quite real and that he looks a lot like one of the characters in the novel she's writing. and based on elements of the character's reality.

When the protagonist wakes up, is back in her bed with no sign of the man in black, but with a novel written by her near her bed titled The back room.

Now that you have read the summary of the back room, let's talk about the topics that are discussed. And there are certain highly visible topics treated in the novel and who are the ones who carry the threads of history. Without knowing these points in depth, it will be easier for us to get lost in the pages of this book.

Loneliness

The protagonist creates a imaginary interlocutor, probably taken from the very novel that she is writing, to be able to interact with him and have an interesting conversation. This shows us the solitude that the protagonist is experiencing.

The man is the perfect interlocutor listen to everything she says and gives her conversation so she can follow her train of thought.

The fantasy

The fantasy in this book she is very intertwined with reality, so that the boundaries are so fuzzy that we can hardly perceive them. The fact that the protagonist takes a pill in her own dream makes us think of the need she has to fully release the imagination that is asleep within her.

At the end of the play it is not entirely clear which moments have been real and which have been imagined And the same goes for the characters.

Now you know the summary of the book the back room and the two main themes that the novel deals with. If you are interested in continuing to learn about this or a related topic, do not hesitate to consult the reading section.