Ana Maria Matute

Ana María Matute Ausejo (Barcelona, July 26, 1925-Barcelona, June 25, 2014) was a Spanish novelist who was a member of the Royal Spanish Academy —where she held the seat « K»— who in 2010 won the Cervantes Prize. Matute was one of the most personal voices in twentieth-century Spanish literature and she is considered by many to be one of the best postwar Spanish novelists.

Biography

Ana María Matute was the second of five children of a conservative and religious family of the Catalan petty bourgeoisie. Her father, Facundo Matute Torres, was a Catalan owner of the Matute S.A. umbrella factory, and her mother was María Ausejo Matute. They had five children.

His life in Barcelona helped him see the most industrialized city in Spain and get up close to social, economic and political events. All this was manifested in his story Very Happy (1968), where the figure of the person exploited by industrial life and his orders appeared. During his childhood, Matute lived for a considerable time in Madrid, but few of his stories talk about his experiences in the capital of Spain.

When Ana María Matute was four years old, she fell seriously ill. For this reason, her family took her to live in the hometown of her grandparents, Mansilla de la Sierra, a small town in the mountains of La Rioja. Matute said that the people of that town influenced her work. This influence can be seen in the anthological work Historias de la Artámila (1961), which deals with the people that Matute met in Mansilla, as well as in Paulina (1960), a children's work that shows influences from Heidi (1880), such as the love of nature and the girl's relationship with her grandfather. In this work, a certain autobiographical character is also deduced, since the main girl suffers from a serious illness and for this reason her aunt takes her to the mountains to live with her grandparents. Despite this, Matute affirmed that she was not a autobiographical novel.

Ana María Matute was eleven years old when the Spanish Civil War began in 1936. The violence, hatred, death, misery, anguish and extreme poverty that followed the war deeply marked her and her life. narrative. Matute's is childhood stolen by the trauma of war and the psychological consequences of the conflict and the postwar period in the mentality of a girl. This is reflected in her first literary works focused on "astonished children" who saw and much to their regret, had to understand the nonsense that surrounded them. Neorealist characteristics can be observed in works such as Los Abel (1948), Fiesta al Noroeste (1953), Small Theater (1954), Dead Children (1958) or Soldiers Cry at Night (1964). In all these works —which begin with great lyricism and little by little submerge into an exacerbated realism—, the gaze of the child or adolescent protagonist is the most outstanding and marks an affective distance between reality and feeling or understanding.

While he lived in Madrid he attended a religious school. He wrote his first novel, Little Theater, at the age of 17, although it was not published until 8 years later (1950). In 1949, she submitted Luciérnagas to the Nadal Award, "but she was eliminated in one of the final rounds" however, censorship prevented publication. Her problems with the Franco regime were not limited to this aspect, since in May 1972, a ban on going abroad was applied to her, preventing her from going to a children's literature congress in Nice.

On November 17, 1952, Matute married writer Ramón Eugenio de Goicoechea. In 1954, her only son, Juan Pablo, was born, to whom she dedicated a large part of her children's works. She separated from her husband in 1963. As a result of Spanish law, she Matute did not have the right to see her son after the separation, since her husband obtained guardianship of the child, and this caused him emotional problems.

She found love years later, alongside French businessman Julio Brocard, with whom she shared a passion for travel. Brocard died in 1990, on July 26, Hooch's birthday. She was already suffering from depression, and the loss of her great love plunged her further into it.

In 1976, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. After several years of great narrative silence, in 1984 she won the National Prize for Children's and Youth Literature with the work Only a bare foot . In 1996 she published Olvidado rey Gudú and that same year she was elected an academic of the Royal Spanish Academy where she occupied the "K" seat, becoming the third woman to be part of this institution. She read her induction speech in 1998.

Matute was also an honorary member of the Hispanic Society of America. There is a literary award named after him and his books have been translated into 23 languages.

In 2007 he received the National Prize for Spanish Letters for his literary work as a whole.

On March 12, 2009, the writer deposited the first edition of the book Forgotten King Gudú in the Letters Box of the Cervantes Institute.

Likewise, in November 2010 he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious in the Spanish language, which was presented to him in Alcalá de Henares on April 27, 2011.

In 2012 he was part of the jury for the Miguel de Cervantes Award.

Matute was a professor at the university and traveled to many cities to give lectures, especially to the United States. In her speeches she talked about the benefits of emotional changes, the constant changes of the human being and how innocence is never completely lost. She said that although her body was old, her heart was still young.

He died in Barcelona at dawn on September 24, 2014 after several days with cardiorespiratory problems.

Literary style

Ana María Matute deals with many political, social and moral aspects of Spain during the post-war period. Her prose is very often lyrical and practical. In her novels, Matute incorporates literary techniques associated with the modernist or surrealist novel. With all these qualities and literary talent, Matute is considered "an essentially realistic writer", since as she herself states: "If we are capable of imagining, it is because what we imagine is also real". Many of her books deal with the period of life spanning from childhood and adolescence to adulthood. Thus, her narrative is characterized by fantasy and lyricism, presenting very important themes such as: unrecoverable childhood, lack of communication, human, cainism, injustice, violence, loneliness, helplessness and death.

Matute uses a lot, as a primary source, pessimism, which gives his novels a clearer sense than the reality of life. "Alienation, hypocrisy, demoralization, and malice" are characteristics that are commonly easy to find in the fiction of his works. One of the most common characteristics of it is the use of the trilogy: a literary work that is composed of three novels or stories that have both common and different characteristics. Many critics consider that his best work is the trilogy The Merchants , which is made up of Primera memoria , The soldiers cry at night and The Trap. About his work it is said that "although the plots of each of his novels are independent, they are united by the general theme of the civil war and the portrait of a society dominated by materialism and self-interest."

Censorship of his work in Spain

During the Franco dictatorship, his work was subject to objections and warnings and suffered corrections, erasures and complete rejections. "Franco's censorship will come to hinder both the creation process and the course of its reception, due to the excessive interventions applied to Matute". The same author repeatedly points out the restrictions exercised:

The censorship had oppressed the writers. Censorship was totally stupid and arbitrary. [...] It was kind of demeaning. We had to live so we wanted to write, inventing arguments and tricks.

Ana María Matute en Gazarian-Gautier, Marie-Lise (1997). Ana María Matute: the voice of silence. Madrid. p. 89.

In an interview from 1990, Matute recalls that period again:

Censorship was something that gave us a lot. When I started writing in the newspapers they banned me even whole articles. Then my eyes were opened even more. We were young people with a lot of enthusiasm, with a lot of enthusiasm, but with hands tied.

Ana María Matute en Farrington, Pat (2000). «Documenta: Interviews with Ana María Matute and Carme Riera». Journal of Iberian " Latin American Studies 6 (1). p. 76.

Censorship did not fall exclusively on novels. The book of micro-stories Los niños tontos was rejected for publication in the first instance due to the objections of the censor María Isabel Niño Más, who understood these micro-texts as "authentic nightmares", by &# 34;bad example" for children. Subsequently, an ecclesiastical censor, Francisco Aguirre, ruled that "although they deal with children, they are not for children, I believe that their publication can be allowed", in December 1956.

The censorship reproaches to Matute's work were notable especially from its beginnings until the 1960s, at which time the author became internationally renowned.

Works

Novels

• The Abel (1948)
• Fiesta al Noroeste (1952)
• Little theater (1954), Planet Award
• In this land (1955). censored version of Cheers.which was published in full and with its original title only in 1993.
• The dead children (1958)
• First memory (1960), Premio Nadal 1959, 1st part of the trilogy The merchants.
• The soldiers cry at night (1964) 2nd part of the trilogy The merchants
• Some boys (1968)
• The trap (1969) 3rd part of the trilogy The merchants.
• The tower lived (1971)
• The sea (1975)
• Forgotten King of Guru (1996)
• Aranmanoth (2000)
• Uninhabited paradise (2008)
• Family demons (2014)

Stories

• The boy next door (1944)
• Little life (1953)
• Fool kids. (1956)
• New life (1956)
• Time (1957)
• Halfway (1961)
• Stories of the Artamila (1961)
• The repentant (1961)
• Three and a dream (1961)
• The river (1963)
• The Virgin of Antioch and other accounts (1990)
• Nowhere (1993)
• The True End of Sleeping Beauty (1995)
• The golden tree (1995)
• The king (1996)
• House of prohibited games (1996)
• The store; The teacher; All the brutality of the world (1998)
• The moon gate. Full stories (2010)
• The music (2014)

Children's works

• The country of the board (1957)
• Pauline, the world and the stars (1960)
• Green grasshopper and apprentice (1960)
• The Game Book for Other Children (1961)
• Crazy horse and carnival (1962)
• The "Ulises" moth (1965)
• Paulina (1969)
• The apprentice (1972)
• Just a barefoot. (1983)
• The green grasshopper (1986)
• The black sheep (1994)
• All my stories (2000)

Awards and recognitions

• Special mention in the Nadal Prize (1948) by The Abel
• Premio Café Gijón (1952) by Fiesta al Noroeste
• Planet Prize (1954) by Little theater
• Premio de la Crítica de narrativa castellana (1959) by The dead children
• National Narrative Prize (1959) by The dead children
• Nadal Prize (1959) by First memory
• Lazarillo Award for Children’s Literary Creation (1965) by The Ulysses's Bowl
• Fastenrath Award of the Royal Spanish Academy (1968) by The soldiers cry at night
• Ministry of Culture. Book of Youth Interest (1976)
• National Prize for Child and Youth Literature (1984) by Just a barefoot.
• Barcelona City of Literature Award in Castilian Language (1995) by The True End of Sleeping Beauty
• Special Critical Eye Award (1997) by Forgotten King
• Alcalá City Award for Arts and Letters (2001)
• International Terenci Moix Prize (2006) for its literary career
• Premio Nacional de las Letras Españolas (2007) al conjunto de su obra
• Creu Award of Sant Jordi (2009)
• Finalist of the Prince of Asturias Award for Letters (2010)
• Miguel de Cervantes Award (2010)
• Bilbao Book Fair Critics Award (2011)
• Ondas Mediterráneas Special Mention RIET (2012)

Predecessor: José Emilio Pacheco	Miguel de Cervantes Award 2010	Successor: Nicanor Parra Sandoval
Predecessor: Carmen Conde	Académica de la Real Academia Española K 1998-2014	Successor: Federico Corriente Córdoba

Since January 2022, a street in his hometown, Barcelona, has been named after him, between the districts of Gràcia and Horta-Guinardó.

References

External links

• Wikiquote hosts famous phrases of or over Ana María Matute.
• Official page of Ana María Matute
• Ana María Matute at www.escritoras.com (online)
• Special: Ana María Matute, Cervantes Award 2011
• Speech at receiving the Cervantes Award on April 27, 2011
• Page on the Anthology War Parties
• Spanish Women Writers
• Memory, childhood and civil war: the narrative world of Ana Maria Matute. Bórquez, Nestor Horatio. Olivar, vol. 12, no. 16. ISSN 1852-4478
• Embroidered postcards of childhood: the war in the novels of Ana María Matute. Bórquez, Nestor Horatio. II International Congress of Contemporary Spanish Literature and Culture. Transatlantic dialogues. ISSN 2250-4168
• Report on Ana María Matute in the TVE Imprescindibles program

• Video of Jury Jury Jury XI UNED Short Narration Award, chaired by Ana María Matute, and composed by Josefina Aldecoa, Jesús Munárriz, José Romera Castillo, at the Conde de Suchil hotel in Madrid, in the programme broadcast on TVE-2 (20 June 2000): https://canal.uned.es/mmobj/index/id/9506