The quintessential writer for the Spanish female audience is Maria Dueñas. His novels exude romanticism in its most literary sense. Both the scenography of a past that brings melancholy and the stories that lead us through tragic situations at times, as well as the idea of resilience, of the struggle to overcome, of hope ... a sum of aspects that end up composing a song to the life.
This author has a special predilection for stories between the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries, a temporary setting that perfectly serves her cause.
It is a world that advances without pause towards modernity but that still brings a feeling of connection with old customs, with roles of women already surpassed against which they had to fight earnestly in those days ... A kind of their own gender that has been been calling colonial literature and that only in María Dueñas, along with light gabas or, from your Spanish residence, also Sarah lark we find inward borders.
And at the same time, that recent past has an I don't know what of nostalgia, of times lived by parents or grandparents and that therefore link us directly with the most direct inheritance of who we are emotionally.
Undoubtedly a success to captivate readers mainly but also readers. Stories tinged with pink but also with blood, of old glories and decadence, a multitude of arguments with which María Dueñas composes her plots that, as I say, reach a more entirely conceptual consideration of the romantic, nothing to do with easy arguments but rather they develop together with all the social evolution of those days.
Top 3 best novels by María Dueñas
The Captain's Daughters
Family sagas, with their ins and outs, their nuances, their secrets and their discoveries, are a theme that María Dueñas handles with great brilliance. On this new occasion we travel to New York in 1936. Emilio Arenas runs a restaurant until a fatal accident ends his life.
Victoria, Luz and Mona, their daughters, decide to keep their father's dream in the Big Apple, only that being women and immigrants they will not have anything easy to get ahead. The setbacks of their situation at the death of their father lead the three sisters down difficult paths by which giving up seems the most reasonable at times.
But these three young women are determined to maintain the business, for the memory of their father but also for themselves, capable as they have been of crossing the ocean to continue that paternal work.
An adventure that takes us into realities not so distant and sometimes still recognizable about the hardness of taking a project in a place where everything is strange, but where the smallest and most hopeful details shine like real jewels.
The time between seams
With certain glimpses of real history, this novel starts from a fascinating manners that extends throughout the work but which in turn is accompanied by a history of passions, political conspiracies and old colonial glories of Spain. Sira Quiroga leaves Madrid to settle in Tangier with the man she loves.
What seems like an exotic and pleasant retirement ends up being a new hectic life for Sira in which she will have to give her best, without giving up, so that her world does not end up falling apart.
While Sira prolongs her passion for fashion and is required for the highest confections, she discovers that the person she loves is not who she seemed to be. A plot with unexpected twists and a firm invitation to fight to get life ahead. His most representative novel of this trend in colonial literature.
La templanza
Reading this title, with that suggestive word, which seems to awaken images of self-improvement, resilience, harmony..., invites us to think about characters who are going to lead us through that attitude necessary to face adversities of all kinds.
Mauro Larrea seems to be the character in charge of gathering all that temperance necessary to face the whole plot that is coming his way. His business ventures falter, while the appearance in his life of Soledad Montalvo threatens to completely destabilize him.
An exciting trip through Mexico, Cuba, a brilliant Jerez, exporter of great wines and covered by the tinsel of the prosperity of the moment, all scenes of a turbulent history of passions, failures and glories, where temperance is more than ever fundamental to go through the ups and downs of life with guarantees of survival, despite leaving shreds of your soul in the attempt ...
I started with The Time Between Seams and I liked it a lot, then I read La Temperance and I didn't like it: I agree with Rosa, very slowly, it gives the feeling that she started writing with an idea and ended up with a completely different one and in the end she didn't. there is a lot of cohesion, the argument is somewhat disjointed. However, I'm going to give Las Hijas del Capitán a chance, which seems to have liked more.
Thanks for your input, Laura!
I have the same opinion
There is no use leaving a comment. I already left it and they did not accept it for not saying that the novels of María Dueñas have enchanted me, because the truth is that they are true "chestnuts"; at least two of them.
For tastes there are colors!
Sorry, Rosa. We've been out of service for a few days.
Everything is uploaded.
Thanks for your contributions.
And you may be right in that every time she is denser as an author, losing that freshness of a good story over the staging of the day ...
The first Maria Dueñas novel that I read was the Captain's Daughters, which I liked a lot, so without hesitation, I bought Temperance and Oblivion Mission. Temperance, it took me a lot to finish it, with so much travel, so slow that I jumped from one thing to another; with too much description to arrive at an end devoid of description, for my taste. Strange !
Without much enthusiasm and with fear that it would be just as slow, I began to read Misión Olvido; I got tired of so much history, so much going forward and backward, and out of boredom I left it for chapter 20 or so.
This woman, for my taste, turns things around too much; things that are sometimes lost in the memory of so much and so much research, so it is difficult to follow the story
It takes an elephant memory to follow their stories.