11

 El mismo mar de todos los veranos

El amor es un juego solitario

Varada tras el último naufragio 

The titles of these three novels are in the 11-syllable line.  The backbone of the meter is the strong accent on syllable six. 

 El mismo mar de TOdos los veranos

El amor es un JUEgo solitario

Varada tras el ÚLtimo naufragio 

That's what makes the line a meter, not must a random number of syllables.  You could say the line is more constrained at the cadence 

de todos los veranos

un juego solitario

el último naufragio 

These are 7 syllable lines.  So the first four syllables are free. The iambic pattern is fine: 

El mismo mar

But the first or third syllable can be accented: "El amor"

The English pentamer feels different, because syllables are more weighted, and average word length shorter.  You are going to find a lot of 8-9 word lines, and some lines of 10 words:

A little touch of Harry in the night

To be or not to be, that is the question 

The country cocks do crow, the clocks do toll

Never again would the bird's song be the same

I have been one acquainted with the night 

I was thinking there are two way of approaching it. There are individual lines that are just self-contained and great examples, but the real achievement is the paragraph of several lines in a row, where each line is still a great example on its own, but the effect is of the sequence of metrical phrases, some crossing the line.  My daughter was explaining to me that the secret of good trumpet playing is to have a continuous flow of air between the notes. The beginning student will play each    note    by    its     self, and have difficulty with legato. 

There is almost a Charlie Parker quality to passages of great rhythmic stretchiness:

Now entertain conjecture of a time

When creeping murmur and the pouring dark

Fills the wide vessel of the universe.

From camp to camp through the foul womb of night.

The hum of either army stilly sounds...  

No two lines are alike.  

El mismo mar

 There was a novel very well known at the time, El mismo mar de todos los veranos.  It doesn't seem to have last--no new editions or critical studies. Esther Tusquets, the author, was very well known and this was the first of a trilogy.  The title is memorable because it is a perfect eleven syllable line of poetry (if it were a line of poetry.) Another novel in the series is "El amor es un juego solitario" which follows the same metrical pattern.  

MVA

 I own several books by María Victoria Atencia. They are part of my research library, my personal collection in my own field. I have taught poems by her in class, put her on the reading list. Yet I have never written about her work, simply because I never had an idea about her that was worth developing into an article. This doesn't reflect any lack of interest in her work, any lack of respect for her work or her person (I met her once at MLA).  

There are other poets in this category too. What you write should be a fraction of all the things you know about.  

CBT (iii) / spoiler alert

 I finished Corazón tan blanco. I guess it is fine if that's the kind of thing that you like. Everything exists in triplicate here. Every character, every situation, is not only squared by cubed. The intertext is there for you to find: Macbeth, from which the title of the novel comes. 

The narrator's father, Ranz, the only character in the novel who is a full, well-rounded character, murdered his first wife to marry the second. Confessing his crime to wife 2 on the honey moon, he sets in motion her suicide. He then marries the sister of wife 2, the mother of Juan, the narrator.  

He confesses to Luisa, Juan's wife, while Juan listens from an adjoining room.  This is the logical solution, of course,  

CTB [ii]

 Now we have a chapter about the narrator meeting Luisa, while they are interpreting between a Margaret Thatcher like figure and a prime minister of Spain. There is a long digression about the work of translation, where the translator acts as conduit without remembering any of the information later. 

The narrator talks about bribing some gypsies play their music further from his house so he can work. Later, he questions how he did it, thinking he should have been more diplomatic. Then, a digression of a girl in a stationery store that he had a crush on as a teenager. She still works there and he goes in to buy some items before his wedding. She is slightly younger [both in their 30s] and he has a little fantasy about having courted her when they were young rather than just going in to buy pencils without ever talking to her.  

He has doubts about the wedding, reinforced by his father, Ranz.  We get a long look at the father (whereas we know almost nothing about the narrator's wife, Luisa). He is an art dealer and has also worked at the Prado. An anecdote about how the father convinced a museum guard not to set a painting on fire. The father is corrupt, using his knowledge of art to trick people and get extra money. 

I am seeing cleverness in this novel, not brilliance. He is able to go off on interesting tangents in a kind of tour-de-force way. Perhaps my lack of interest in fiction of this type  is to blame here, but it is hard to believe that this is the best book of Spanish literature in a 50 year period. 

The narrator himself is rather bland and faceless. 

I am 27% into the book and beginning a chapter about the narrator's mother (Juana) the suicidal sister (Teresa) and the rather (Ranz).  

CTB

 I decided to read Corazón tan blanco. I was in Spain and saw a list of the 50 best books since Franco's death (50 years ago).  That was at the top. I had read only one by Marías before, El hombre sentimental, and was underwhelmed by the grey prose and banal soap-opera plot. 

1st chapter:  The suicide of a woman just back from her honeymoon. The widower will go on to marry the sister of the woman who shoots herself. The narrator is the son of the widower and this younger sister. The widower had been married and widowed once before. 

2nd chapter. The honeymoon of the narrator with Luisa. Both are translators / interpreters, so a lot of emphasis on language / communication. Luisa gets sick in Cuba. The narrator, standing on a balcony, is interpolated by a mulata woman who thinks he is her lover, in the next room in the hotel. The narrator eavesdrops through the wall separating between their two room. The action of the novel is displaced: we care more about the plot between Miriam (Cuban mulata) and Guillermo (Madrid Spaniard) than between Luisa and nameless narrator. Miriam wants Guillermo to kill his wife (a woman in Spain who is supposedly dying anyway.) The narrator reflects on the veracity of the Guillermo's story, and wonders what side to take. Miriam sings the same song the narrator's Cuban grandmother used to sing.  Everything seems doubled in the novel so far.  Two honeymoons, two sisters, two Cuban women singing the same song, two Spaniards in the same hotel. Two sick Spanish women (Luisa, and Guillermo's wife). A man who has been widowed twice.    

We don't know which side of the family the Cuban grandmother is on.  It is typical of Marías to have multiple, international settings for this novels. This is a moment when Spanish literature is self-consciously trying to be more international.  The idea is to write novels that work well in translation to other European languages, as Spain enters NATO and the EU and emerges from the Franco period of isolation. In fact, the book was a big hit in Germany. The narrator is multi-lingual and interprets at a high level (between heads of state). 

The prose is bit like Juan Benet, with long, serpentine sentences, but this style serves a different purpose than in Benet.  

Granular

 Lorca studies is extremely granular.  No detail seems too insignificant. As Andrew Gelman likes to say, "God is in every leaf of every tree."  

There are several advantages. 

Avoidance of factual error. 

Avoidance of oversimplification.  (Well, you would think a granular subfield would not be prone to this, but it is.  The best antidote is granularity.) 

The third benefit is that insights can emerge from close attention to detail--insights not available from a bird's eye view.  

Of course, you have to be on the lookout for this insight.  The individual detail itself is not as important as the juxtaposition of two or more details that together show something new.   

A granular approach that is only granular is dull, lacking in insight.  A bird's-eye view that is blithe, indifferent to detail, is hollow.