Never to Return

Catalan author Tusquets dedicates her literary oeuvre to exploring the inner lives of women, and this fourth novel (first published in 1985) marks the last volume in an award-winning cycle (Love Is a Solitary Game; Stranded) to be translated into English. Elena, married with two grown sons, is turning 50. Her husband is in New York celebrating a film career that she helped him build, but he's with his young mistress. Uncertain of her future and feeling old, she enters therapy with a reputable Argentine psychoanalyst. However, she questions the efficacy of his cold, rigid analytic method even as she recognizes a parallel between psychoanalysis and parenting: that one participant gives all but must not expect reciprocal attentiveness. But if that's an insight, it doesn't much help: Elena's plagued by a need for the analyst's approval, and finds herself obsessing over a piece of pottery she gave him as a gift, neurotically dreading the day he discards it. Rich with nuances that may be relevant to the academic study of Freudian, Lacanian and feminist psychoanalysis (as the translator details in her afterword), Elena's story is a story of frustration, something the reader may well feel. Told through a dense, unbroken, almost breathless narrative that internalizes daily events, the book's stylistic structure accurately mimics the thought processes of a confused brain, immersed in depression and panic. That indeed is this novel's most interesting feature, but the narrative's exploration of psychoanalysis does little more than reiterate how the Freudian model of human experience fails to address female needs. (Sept.) FYI: Tusquets has been on the forefront of the Spanish literary scene since the early 1960s, when she began directing the Barcelona publishing house Editorial Lumen.