Abstract
Known primarily as an accomplished novelist, Rosa Montero has nevertheless written short stories throughout her career—as artistic primers or blueprints for novels—but they have received scant critical attention. This article considers a selection of tales about sexual relationships from her 1998 anthology of short stories, Amantes y enemigos, drawing some comparisons with her accounts of historical love affairs in Pasiones (1999). It concludes that, in these exceptionally well-crafted stories, the writer exploits the resources of the genre—its open-endings and epiphanies—both to expose romantic delusions as well as to fashion fleeting moments of transcendence. Her treatment of the theme of love in these stories is significantly more miscellaneous (and sometimes more optimistic), than in her novels and essays.
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Notes
Montero says that ‘a través de los cuentos […] te estás asomando a materiales narrativos que luego van a aparecer en tus novelas’ (Escribano 2006). Montero describes short stories as ‘exploradores narrativos’ (Montero 2006, p. 7). In an interview by Vanessa Knights, Montero describes how writing a story was enabling her to overcome writer’s block (Knights 1999, p. 263).
According to Andrews and Lunati, ‘[the short story] is the ideal medium for our times because each one seeks to highlight a single tiny aspect of our confusing reality’ (Andrews and Lunati 1998, p. viii). They note that the perception of the short story in Spain underwent a ‘profound change’ (p. xiv) during the 1980s.
‘It is precisely a notion of absolute transcendence and of individual agency that Rosa Montero attempts to recuperate in her fiction’ (Davies 1994, p. 180).
See Amell 1994, p. 2; p. 24.
Mollejo puts it slightly differently: ‘En los cuentos [de Montero] las parejas que fracasan lo vuelven a intentar, a pesar de que saben que las relaciones no son permanentes, ni probablemente duraderas’ (2002, p. 112).
‘Sólo a mí me podía suceder desbarajuste tal como el de ser monoándrico de corazón y poliándrico de actuación’ (Montero 1995b, p. 17).
‘Al descubrir en el siglo XVIII el moderno concepto de la felicidad y de la pasión, los humanos […] descubrimos también nuestra mayor desgracia’ (Montero 1999, p. 221). Earlier on she observes: ‘el amor pasión [es] tanto más valorado cuanto más individualista sea la sociedad’ (pp. 19–20).
‘Con el amor pasión se busca engañar a la muerte, se intenta alcanzar la agudeza del vivir, esos instantes intensos en los que llegas a creerte eterna. Con el amor cómplice se busca vencer a la muerte pero sin engaños, afrontar su existencia con el apoyo de otra persona’ (Montero 1995b, p. 110).
‘Debí de escribirlo alrededor de 1986’ (Montero 2006, p. 8).
The decay of local barrio culture is construed in similar terms in Crónica del desamor. The modern urban environment is described as ‘una soledad con muchas puertas’ (Montero 1995a, p. 212).
In Montero’s work, age-gap relationships are frequent, can be positive or negative.
Quoted in Reid (1977, p. 64).
‘Salió en El País Semanal en unas navidades: quizá las de 1988’ (Montero 2006, p. 8).
It is the most anthologized of her stories. See A. Ramos-Mesonero’s online bibliography. It also appears in Lucanor.
See Elizabeth Bowen: ‘[Chekhov’s] work was a system of irritations beautified’ (May 1994, p. 257).
This story (as well as ‘Parece tan dulce’, where a similar bedroom episode is described) therefore qualifies a scenario which recurs in her novels, as identified by Davies: ‘moments of tenderness and love between a man and a woman can only result from the incapacitation or subordination of one of them’ (when asleep, for instance) (Davies 1994, p. 142).
Rodríguez regards Amantes y enemigos more straightforwardly as a critique of the delusions of passion in an uncaring society: ‘Ante una realidad personal desoladora, los distintos personajes, inmersos, por lo general, en un entorno social problemático, buscan en la relación erótica un sentido ante su desconcierto vital y un consuelo frente a la soledad y la muerte’ (Rodríguez 2005, p. 35). Alternatively, it could be argued that Montero shows more freedom, thematically and artistically, in her short stories. In La ridícula idea de no volver a verte (Montero 2013), she describes her development as one of moving away from attempting to write ‘el gran libro sobre la condición humana’ (p. 142) towards trying to listen to ‘la canción colectiva’ (p. 143); in other words, from a singular to a more plural vision of the world.
As Amell observes, aging is feared by Montero’s characters because their greater proximity to death is, of itelf, unattractive to others, who do not wish to be reminded of their own mortality (Amell 1994, p. 65). Montero’s work often expresses horrified compassion for the plight of the elderly; memorably, for example, in Crónica del desamor (Montero 1995, pp. 69–71).
References
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Squires, J. Love is a Short Story: Rosa Montero’s Amantes y enemigos: cuentos de parejas . Neophilologus 100, 577–594 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-015-9469-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-015-9469-x