Esther Tusquets, a great Spanish writer, died on July 23 at the age of 76. I feel like a horrible person because when I heard the sad news, the first thing that crossed my mind was, “God, now she will not be able to write any more books.”
I highly recommend Tusquets’s first and most famous novel The Same Sea as Every Summer. I first read this novel for an undergrad course at the age of 24.
“What a stupid novel,” I thought. “None of this makes any sense.”
When I reread the novel this year, I finally managed to glimpse what it was all about. The novel was written when Tusquets was 42, and the mature female sexuality that imbues its every page is not something that a 24-year-old woman can even begin to comprehend. What I find really funny is that the professor who assigned the novel was male. Since male sexuality develops in a different direction (has a different vector? Would that be a correct way of putting it?) than female sexuality, it probably never occurred to him that his all-female seminar of 20-year-olds was simply not physiologically equipped to understand the novel.
Here is just a random quote from the novel to give you an idea:
The howl that can unhinge the universe, that’s powerful.
R.I.P., Esther Tusquets.
P.S. Why are so many writers dying this summer? Carlos Fuentes, Hector Tizon, Ray Bradbury, now Tusquets. This is making me very sad.
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