ABSTRACT
Ana María Matute was 11 years old when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936 forever changing her life and that of all Spaniards. She refers to her impressions of the War in a letter to Janet W. Díaz dated 13 January 1965: “Obviously, the Spanish war was a decisive impact in my life .… I remember the burnings, the violence, those bodies that would appear at dawn in the outlying elds” (38). The Spanish Civil War and its brutal aftermath are central concerns of Ana María Matute’s literary production; she represented the War as a stark contrast between opposing political ideo logies and differing cultural worldviews. In 2010 she was awarded the coveted Cervantes Prize (Premio Cervantes), the top literary award for works in Spanish, and was occupying the K Chair in the Real Academia Española [Royal Academy of the Spanish Language] at the time of her death on 25 June 2014, as she was completing the novel Demonios familiares [Family demons].1 The Civil War is prominently featured in Matute’s novels such as En esta tierra (1955) [In this land], Los hijos muertos (1958) [The Lost Children] (Critics Prize 1958, National Literature Prize 1959), and the Civil War trilogy Los mercaderes [The merchants], with Primera memoria [School of the Sun], the inaugural novel of the trilogy, earning the prestigious Premio Nadal [Nadal Prize] in 1959.2 The novel, as it has been widely noted, takes place in 1936, in the early months of the War, as fourteen-year-old Matia painfully comes of age (Díaz, Jones, Brown, Anderson and Vespe Sheay, Cannon, Mayock, Gallagher, Omlor, among others). Matute returned her keen attention to familial ties and divisions, and to the traumatic historical event that dominated her writing and her understanding of the world in her last creation, Demonios familiares, an incomplete novel published posthumously in September 2014. Here, sixteen-year-old Eva is forced into adulthood in the midst of the confusing and violent months that go from June to October 1936. Divided in two sections, I “La ventana de los halcones” [The hawks’ window] (chapters one to eight) and II “Vértigo” [Vertigo] (chapters nine to eleven), the novel stops at the conclusion of chapter eleven.
