Tusquets, Esther

b. 1936, Barcelona

   Writer

   Tusquets' reputation as one of contemporary Spain's most powerful and original women writers rests largely on four novels and a collection of short stories, each characterized by a search for existential authenticity through heterosexual and lesbian love, and by often biting social satire. Her highly acclaimed début came in 1978 with The Same Sea as Every Summer (El mismo mar de todos los veranos). Written (like all Tusquets" creative work) in Spanish rather than Catalan, this linguistically rich and complex novel is the first of three studies of middle-aged women from Barcelona's leisured bourgeoisie, each lonely, dissatisfied with her personal relationships and alienated from the myths and rituals of her social group. The slow, sensual prose evokes a university teacher's attempts to reconstruct her past and substantiate her present through a brief affair with a young woman student. In the 1979 novel Lone is a Solitary Game (El amor es un juego solitario) the relation between love and sex becomes more bitter and ritualized. The selfabsorption of the manipulative central character ensures that her affairs with a vulnerable young woman and a young, sexually inexperienced man cannot provide the existential relief she desires. The role-playing dimension is heightened in the 1980 novel Varada tras el último naufragio (Beached after the Last Shipwreck) and the focus is fragmented among four characters in crisis, as they reflect on their isolation and the impossibility of absolute intimacy. In the 1981 short-story collection Siete miradas sobre un mismo paisaje (Seven Glances at the Same Landscape) this fragmentation intensifies, as different narrators recount a young girl's rites of passage.

   Tusquets' 1985 novel Para no volver (Never to Return) is a study of social hypocrisy, authority and the impossibility of genuine dialogue, set among the Barcelona bourgeoisie of the Franco years. More recently, her children's writing, occasional journalism and high-profile role as director of publishing-house Lumen have enabled Tusquets to retain a leading role in Catalan intellectual life.

   See also: Catalan culture; gay writing; women's writing

   Further reading

   - Molinaro, N.L. (1991) Foucault, Feminism and Power: Reading Esther Tusquets, Lewisburg: Buckness University Press (explores Tusquets" aesthetics of power and resistance).

   - Nichols, G.C. (1989) Escribir, espacio propio: Laforet, Matute, Moix, Tusquets, Riera y Roig par sí mismas, Minneapolis, MN: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature, pp. 71–101 (includes a useful interview with Tusquets).

   - Servodidio, M. (1991) "Esther Tusquets's Fiction: the Spinning of a Narrative Web" in J.L.Brown (ed.) Women Writers of Contemporary Spain: Exiles in the Homeland, London: Associated University Presses, pp. 159–78 (examines the complex interrelations between Tusquets" characters).

   - Smith, P.J. (1992) Laws of Desire: Questions of Homosexuality in Spanish Writing and Film 1960– 1990, Oxford: Oxford University Press, chapter three (reads the first three novels as an attempt to represent lesbian desire).

   - Vásquez, M. (ed.) (1991) The Sea of Becoming: Approaches to the Fiction of Esther Tusquets, Westport, CT: Greenwood (excellent selection of essays, with annotated bibliography to 1989).

   ANNY BROOKSBANK JONES