Stranded

Spanish feminist writer Esther Tusquets has won a discriminating following in this country with two earlier novels published in translation, Love Is a Solitary Game and The Same Sea as Every Summer. Stranded is a novel about love and betrayal among friends and lovers, husbands and wives. For years, Elia and her husband Jorge have spent their summers with their friends Eva and Pablo at a resort town on the Costa Brava. This summer, Elia arrives alone-silent, desolate, and wishing to become as inert as a stone. Jorge has left her and her world has collapsed. Her friends can do little to help. Eva, a liberal lawyer, is devastated when she learns that her husband Pablo has begun an affair with a girl half his age in a desperate attempt to recapture his youth and creativity. Eva is further hampered by the presence of Clara, a moody teenager with a history of molestation who has fallen in love with Eva. Each of these characters is desperately dependent upon another for a sense of self-worth, and only Elia emerges at the end with a liberating feeling of independence-though even this may be illusory. Using a stream-of-conscious technique reminiscent of Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf, Tusquets explores the idea "that the loss of love is always hard bitter sad that its end is always painful for everyone and surely much more so for women."