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Esther Tusquets: El mismo mar de todos los veranos (The Same Sea as Every Summer)

The narrator, a university professor, tells her story in one long monologue in this post-modernist, feminist novel about the impossibility of love. She is staying in the seaside home of her childhood – the same sea every summer – and is very much alone. Her son and her mother might know where she is but probably do not care and maybe her husband also knows but he would care even less. She has an affair with Clara, a Colombian student of hers, even mockingly kidding herself that Colombia is somehow exotic, but Clara, a devoted fan of Peter Pan, eventually grows up (Wendy grew up is how Tusquets put it) and moves on. The narrator lives essentially in a world without men – her son and husband being seen as only marginal – but at the end seems to imply that she will have to leave her world to return to the”real”, heterosexual world. Love – homosexual or heterosexual – is essentially impossible

Publishing history

First published in Spanish 1978 by Editorial Lumen
First published in English 1990 by University of Nebraska Press
Translated by Margaret E. W. Jones