There are writers with an absolutely closed method that favors them in two respects: no novel started will end up abandoned in a drawer and the virtue of order and organization ends up serving them to face any literary challenge.
So it is easy to understand that Carmen Martin Gaite, one of our most brilliant writers will end up collecting more than 30 books and various prestigious acknowledgments.
La own author he recognized on more than one occasion this methodology that he was weaving together before developing the plot. There are those who speak of allowing a certain autonomy of the characters towards the resolution of the plot itself, (I have already cited the prolific Stephen King as the maximum exponent of this procedure) but the truth is that, as in so many other areas, the important thing is not the procedure but the good result.
And despite everything, Carmen Martín Gaite always knew how to present wonderful characters, full, endowed with a singular life of great depth that made them stand out above the narrative proposal itself.
The result, despite not being an author constantly dedicated to fictional narrative, is that the author's bibliography offers us a faithful glimpse of the deepest and most existentialist feeling in the face of all types of social vicissitudes that oppress or restrict freedoms.
Top 3 best novels by Carmen Martín Gaite
Between curtains
This 1957 novel composes a fascinating portrait of post-war Spanish youth. Between norms, moral guidelines and customs imposed no matter what, only the soul of young people can present a disruptive reality, at least in terms of the desires, the contradictions, the contrast between the desire for freedom and the limitations of those 50s.
We enter an Institute to which Pablo Klein returns as a teacher after having had to leave what was his home to end up tanning in remote places.
The synergy between the teacher and the students becomes a small cosmos of freedom, students like Natalia stand out as one of those introspective and critical characters, like a replica of the author herself who, once freed from conservatism, thanks to her new teacher , exposes the entire feeling of a Spanish youth kidnapped in the middle of a Europe that was looking towards modernity.
The bonds
A brilliant book of stories at the service of the author's intention to put characters above all things. Protagonists of various stories about individual universes and their clash with all social interaction.
Parallel lives between consolidated marriages, absences, feelings of guilt and searches for redemption with oneself. The ties are customs, what is expected of one as the assumption of any destiny.
Freedom has a high price, meekness hides the edges of the personality, fundamental edges to discover who you really are.
The back room
A novel with which the author won the National Narrative Award back in 1978. Although in the end the novel turns out to be a testimony, an essay, a narrative halfway between the writer's dreams and the ethereal world of his stories.
A writer in the end is his personal baggage. Beyond empathy with other people's characters, in the end the author's voice always prevails, with whipping of his thought, with brushstroke impressions at unsuspected moments, an old trick in which the author is camouflaged in history.
In the case of Carmen, always a profound narrator, she would end up leaving her soul in tatters and in this novel she confesses it in some way. A history of authenticity and essential literature.
