The Delta Function (European Women Writers) - Hardcover

Montero, Rosa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0803231520 ISBN 13: 9780803231528

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 1992

Synopsis

In La función delta (1981), the second novel of the best-selling Spanish author Rosa Montero, the real world is as unmapped and treacherous as ever for her countrywomen, but more universal concerns impinge. Translated into English by Kari Easton and Yolanda Molina Gavilán, The Delta Function explores a woman's fears of being abandoned, of being alone, and of dying. A unique double narrative structure throws into relief time's effect on her self-identity, sexuality, and relations with others. Readers will be inspired to confront and rethink their own version of the world around them.

About this title

About the Author

Kari Easton is a Spanish instructor at Portland Community College and Yolanda Molina Gavilán is an instructor of foreign languages at Tokyo American Community College.

Reviews

The second novel from well-known Spanish journalist Montero to be translated in the Nebraska European Women Writers Series. Like last year's Absent Love, it deals with the joys and hardships of women's liberation in the post-Franco years. The year is 2010. Lucia Ramos, a one-time film director, is dying of cancer. She keeps two diaries, one chronicling the last months of her life, the other Easter Week 1980, when her first and only film opened. In that crucial week of her life, she was abandoned by one of her two lovers and, deciding to give up her difficult, independent lifestyle, moved in with the other. The tone in both diaries is disappointingly similar--melancholy, reflective. True, it's in part because the world in 2010, as rather vague allusions suggest, has grown more regimented and hierarchical. Lucia's generation, it's implied, was the last to suffer through painful social experiments. But the pungency, anger, and flashes of black humor that peppered Absent Love are largely missing here. There is, however, an appealing asperity to Montero's outlook on life, a rejection of the world connected in some unspoken way with the Catholic background. It turns out the heroine's movie had the same title and plot as Montero's first novel, a runaway bestseller. The double diary, the imagined terminal illness--this is how Montero distances herself from her own celebrity and success. The novel's hospital nurses--Maria de Dia, Maria de Noche--become almost allegorical figures, again with religious overtones, of life and death. And the final chapter, set on Easter Sunday, poetically fuses both diaries in a time outside of time where life and death, joy and sorrow commingle. Rare flashes of humor and poetry against a generally flat background. Could the translation be partly to blame? -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The second of Montero's novels to be translated into English, this work touches on some of the same themes (feminism, homosexuality, loneliness) as the well-received Absent Love ( LJ 12/91), but the main focus here is the protagonist's preoccupation with aging and death. The time frame alternates between a momentous week in 1980 when Lucia was a rising film producer in her thirties and her final days in the year 2010 when she is dying from a brain tumor. Part diary, part memoir, this chronicle comments on the opening up of Spain in the post-Franco period but offers universal appeal by approaching difficult questions. The "delta function" of the title is the mathematical formula used by Lucia's boyfriend to distill the concept of love into its ideal state, which Lucia unsuccessfully pursues. The characterizations are richer than those in Absent Love , while the narrative style inventively views the same events from two different points in time. Of interest for academic libraries and public library literature collections.
- Mary Ellen Beck, Troy P.L., N.Y.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0803231520
• ISBN 13: 9780803231528
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 267