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Boston. 1981. Little Brown. 1st English Language Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0316546771. Translated from the Spanish by Helen R. Lane. 195 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Paul Bacon. keywords: Literature Translated Spain. FROM THE PUBLISHER-Things aren't what they are, my girl, but what we remember them to be. The second of Juan Marsé 's internationally acclaimed novels to appear in English, Golden Girl is a dazzling exploration of the vagaries of memory and desire, and of one man 's obsession with what he might have been. Luys Forest — a sixty-year-old man of letters whose novels and commentary on the post-Spanish Civil War years have now passed into obscurity — has holed up in the old family house at Calafell to finish his autobiography. He receives no visitors, answers none of his mail, and never appears in public save for his daily late afternoon walk on the beach, accompanied by his dog, Mao. Forest is in the midst of final revisions to his memoirs when his insouciant, gypsylike niece Mariana comes to stay with him, presumably to interview her once-illustrious uncle for a magazine article, though it soon becomes apparent that she has other motives as well. The charming seductress offers to type a clean copy of the corrected manuscript — a text tediously overlaid with deletions and insertions — and interviews Forest nightly in her dim, cluttered bedroom smelling of marijuana and mint tea. Pursuing memories as illusory as dreams, Forest responds to Mariana 's irreverent, probing questions with a curious mix of half-remembered truths, deliberate falsehoods, and fabrications that turn out to be true. Lulled by the midnight hour and warm whiskey, he recalls his fatal attraction to the beautiful, wealthy Monteys sisters, one of whom he married, the other he never forgot; the symbolic gestures of defiance that foreshadowed by many years his break with the Falangists; his father's imprisonment and torture by that same party; his contempt for the friend who cuckolded him, and who died the accidental death Forest feels certain was meant for him; the gossip and slander that circulate still in the town of his birth. Charged with barely submerged eroticism and haunting flashes of the surreal, Golden Girl exposes the candor and delusion with which we approach the shadowy past. A best-seller in Spain, it has been translated into Dutch, French, and Swedish, and is being made into a movie. A native of Barcelona, Spain, Juan Marsé began publishing stories in literary magazines in 1958, while working as an apprentice in a jewelry factory. He has subsequently written five novels while working as a laboratory assistant in the Pasteur Institute in Paris, script-writer, translator, journalist, publicity editor, waiter, and editor-in-chief of the magazine Por Favor. His highly acclaimed works have won the Premio Sésamo for short stories, the Premio Biblioteca Breve, and the Premio Planeta, and in 1973 The Fallen was awarded the Premio Internacional de Novela México. Currently writing full-time, Marsé lives with his wife and two children in Barcelona. Helen R. Lane has received both NBA and PEN awards for her translations. She lives in France. inventory #5528.
