Introduction

When Carmen Martín Gaite passed away in 2000 it is said that she did so clutching several of the notebooks, or ‘cuadernos’, where she regularly recorded her thoughts and commentaries on the writing process and the incidents of life. These ‘cuadernos’ gave rise in 1983 to one of her most personal books, El cuento de nunca acabar (The Never-Ending Story). Structurally digressive and generically hybrid, combining elements of the diary, the essay and the autobiography with more fictionalized anecdotes, Cuento was first published between El cuatro de atrás in 1978 and Nubosidad variable in 1990. But the impression of a hiatus in Martín Gaite's novelistic career which these dates suggest is deceptive, for, sandwiched between two of her most important works, Cuento represents a point of convergence between essay writing and narrative fiction as it constitutes a Cervantine reflection on writing as well as an illustration of the creative process itself.

Cuento is made up of four parts, followed by a brief comment on the book's initial dedication to the author's friend Gustavo Fabra, with whom she discussed creative writing and its relationship to literary theory on a regular basis. The first part consists of seven prologues which explain the structure and rationale of the book itself. The second and most substantial part, containing nineteen short reflections and discursive commentaries, explores issues ranging from children's fiction and intersubjective dialogue to literary reception, the relationship between public and private worlds, and the theme of love. The third part is dated and structured like letters or diary entries, and reflects on the on-going process of composition of Cuento itself, and the fourth part contains a series of headed paragraphs which, perhaps with greater homonogeneity than in the second part, constitute a reprise of themes treated there.

The tone of Cuento is highly personal, frequently confessional and consistently reflective as it considers narration from the point of view of both form and function.