Review of: Clara Janés. Los caballos del sueño. Barcelona, Anagrama, 1989, 221 pp

Jones, Margaret E. W.

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ESPAÑA COKTEMPORÁNEA prolongarse en exceso, como ya ha ocurrido en otros aspectos de la vida nacional. Una serie de 75 ilustracioners en blanco y negro, desde Picasso, 1911, hasta Juan Muñoz, 1987, completan la publicación. Para una mejor utilización de esta serie de estudios de tal complejidad y erudición un índice onomástico y de materias aliviaría en mucho las penas del lector. The Ohio State Universíty VICENTE CANT ARINO CREACIÓN Clara Janés. Los caballos del sueiio. Barcelona, Anagrama, 1989, 221 pp. Los caballos del sueño is a completely interiorized novel, yet paradoxically, íts quest-like structure relies heavily on associations wíth specific sites. Instead of a discernible plot, the novel traces the shífting dynamics of three characters (Alma, Lobo, Raúl) who meet in Pamplona as students and whose lives are intrincately enmeshed through friendship, !ove, and marriage. Hardly any ex-terior characteristics distinguish these people, but their relationship and philosophy define them amply: Alma (the most prevalent na-rrative voice) is abstract and seems only tenuously connected to reality; Lobo (to whom she is attracted, but with whom an ordi-nary relationship is impossible) becomes a rebel; Raúl marríes Alma, but soon betrays her through infidelíty, abuse, alcoholism. In their attempts at self-definition, the individuals move through various philosophical and metaphysical stages, beginning with the existentialist attitudes of their student days, moving to política! commítment (Raúl's communism) and ending with the key pro-vided by Alma: the spirituality of platonic lave. Alma's return to the places of bygone days suggests the circular nature of the text, in which temporal elements fínally merge with the physical return («antes, había que ir al antes», p. 208). In fact, her own quest pa-rallels a pilgrimage: she calls herself a «peregrina del amor» (p. 203) and toward the end of the book acknowledges the ínsig-nificance of carnal and material concerns: «Vana es la realidad. - 146 -RESEÑAS Vano el cuerpo ante la unión del alma... Pues a lo largo de ese caminar, perdiendo lastre, se ha perdido la materialidad, se ha alcanzado el verdadero objeto de amor» (p. 216). Using the Spa-nish mystics as her point of departure, Alma eventually finds in-spiration in the Islamic lave story of Leyla and Mejnun, and like them, realizes that renunciation would provide a framework far her life. The mystical overlay explains much of the abstract nature of the novel, in which the central theme of love becomes a spring-board far meditation on matters both abstract and transcendental. Severa! recurrent themes enphasize this outlook: the fleeting na-ture of the material and the emotional world in which nothing lasts, not even lave; the thin line that separates reality from un-reality; the fragility of the yo; the emptiness of existence (the word vacío appears time and again). Los caballos del sueño is also a novel about writing and lite-rature, particularly in the relationship between author and text. Alma is both author and character of most of the narration; far her, the act of writing is a creation of reality, and she acknow-ledges the clase bond between being and wríting. The work is filled with metaliterary references -«el sentir que la novela es la realidad» (p. 9); «escribir ... es un afán de ser» (p. 8)- yet Alma undermines the credibility of her text almost immediately, implying that the reconstruction of her story may be deceptive («todo lo que puedo contar es intención» [9]). In addition, severa! narrative voices (not so much in dialogue, but in parallel monologues) flesh out the text; various narrative frames (theater, diary, poetry) and considerable intertextuality (a large section structured on the Hamlet/ Ophelia relationship; quotations from T. S. Eliott, Shake-speare, the Turkish poet Fuzíli, and others) sensitize the reader even more to the influence of the literary text on Alma's reality. The characters' retrospection moves almost exclusively through an inner landscape; even the minimal plot elements are tightly controlled through memory and subjected to intensive explanations and analysis. Therefare the novel's merits rest on the philosophy that underpins the text and on the style that complements the rhythms of the thoughts and interactions. The painstaking dissec-tion of the past is complemented by a series of clearly demarcated opposites that both create tension and suggest a sort of totality through their possible reconciliation: existence/being; move-147 -ESPAÑA C01'TEMPORÁNEA ment/lack of change or motion; temporal/eternal; exterior/interior. Man y ref eren ces and images pit reality against dimensions of dreams, unreality, emptiness, imagination, etc. Yet the lyrical flow of the prose emphasizes the elusive, poetic and highly personal nature of the first-person narrative. The scparate yet connected texts of the three characters are various pieccs of a puzzle that fit together only at the end of the work through the reconciliation of past and present, of love and sacrifice, as revealed finally through Alma's acceptance of the solitude and emptiness which paradoxically open the <loor to love and to creative powers. University of Kentucky MARGARET E. W. JONES Carlos Blanco Aguinaga. Un tiempo tuyo. Madrid, Alfaguara, 1988, 122 pp. Despite its unassuming title, Carlos Blanco Aguinaga's novel Un tiempo tuyo subliminally invites the reader to take part in the mute dialogue which is implicit in the novelist's use of the po-sessive «tuyo». Just as the intriguing and unidentified «tú» - you spurs the reader's curiosity about the identity of the implied individual and the fictitious world in which (s)he dwells, the dialogic tú/yo modality serves as the basis for the structural underpinnings of the predominantly second-person narration. Within this sender-receptor framework also rest, it should be notcd, numerous metaphysical ambiguities which <leal with «tiempo» - time. What, in effect, emerges almost immediately from this short novel is equally evasive. What seems to be a highly intimate second-person, stream of consciousness recanting in the first chapter of but another narrator's life, in future chapters turns into a shifting «narrative voice» which encompasses varied life ex-periences together with switches from male to female voices. The initial simplicity of the unnamed narrator's childlike focalization of his mother evolves into a cumbersome and disturbing narrative plotting of dense multiple-personality meanderings that culminate in an amalgam of memories, psychological queries, half-uttered references to names, events, dates and places, fragmented songs, 148 -

Clara Janés: Los caballos del sueño

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Clara Janés: Los caballos del sueño

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