Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

La ridícula idea de no volver a verte by Rosa Montero

2015; American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese; Volume: 98; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/hpn.2015.0017

2153-6414

María Fernández-Lamarque,

Aging, Health, and Disability

Reviewed by: La ridícula idea de no volver a verte by Rosa Montero María Fernández-Lamarque Montero, Rosa. La ridícula idea de no volver a verte. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2013. 237 Pp. ISBN 978-8-432-21548-3. Rosa Montero (1951) is a Spanish journalist and novelist, who has published over a dozen novels and short stories and was awarded the Premio Grizante Cavour in 2005 for the best foreign book published in Italy for her novel Te trataré como a una reina (1983). Her work has also been translated into more than twenty languages. Most of Montero’s novels depict both female and male characters and their social and gender struggles. Rosa Montero currently works for the Spanish newspaper El País and is considered one of the representatives of “new journalism,” a style that mixes information and literature. In her latest novel, La ridícula idea de no volver a verte (2013), Montero revisits three of her common axes: gender struggle, writing and its liberating function, and the question of mortality. The inextricable relationship between mortality and self-referential writing—in other words, writing as a mean of survival and individual recreation—permeates Montero’s latest novel. In fact, this topic is recurrent in her work, as it was explored in La hija del caníbal (1997) and La función Delta (1981) as well. In La ridícula idea de no volver a verte, Montero narrates the life of Polish scientist and first female Nobel Prize winner, Marie Curie, who, in addition, is also one of the only two Nobel Prize winners ever in two different disciplines: Physics (1903) and Chemistry (1911). In this Montero’s thirteenth novel, a second person narrator recounts the life and struggle of Marie Curie, born Maria Sklodowska, as a scientist and female in nineteenth century France. The narration alternates between Marie Curie’s struggle with the death of her husband Pierre Curie, and Montero’s own struggle with the loss of her husband, Pablo. Part autobiographical, Montero intercalates passages of Marie Curie’s life paralleling her own experiences, and as Marie Curie, she uses writing as a means of dealing with her own mourning as a source for her own self-reinvention. Based on Marie Curie’s own diary and biographies by her youngest daughter Ève Curie, and also by Barbara Goldsmith and Sarah Dry among others, Montero’s sixteen-chapter novel leads the reader to various passages of Curie’s life. The novel’s fresh, clear, original, and intimate style offer a fascinating voyage from Curie’s childhood in Poland, to her relationship with her father, the impact caused by the early death of her mother, and Marie’s first love and truncated [End Page 185] relationship with Casimir. Also covered is her eleven-year marriage with physicist Pierre Curie, the birth of her two daughters, the couple’s shared passion for science, their untiring work with very limited resources, and ultimately the discovery of Polonium and their extensive exposure to its radiation, causing their premature debilitating health conditions. Montero’s work includes thirteen hashtags in this novel. This feature is used often in information technology to highlight a special meaning; Montero uses them to highpoint the recurrent themes in the novel related to the central protagonists, Curie and herself. The inclusion of this original and modern characteristic emphasizes the topics that circulate within the novel, as these hashtags relate to mortality, writing, societal demand, “otherness” and creativity, central themes within the novel. The hashtags also serve as a parallel in the structure of the novel correlating Montero’s own biography and Marie Curie’s. One central theme is the strong impact of Marie’s husband’s death, and her devotion to Pierre’s memory. Montero’s narration includes passages from Marie’s diary, the most striking being the recount of Marie keeping the remains of Pierre’s brain in a handkerchief for years. The novel also describes Marie’s later relationship with physicist Paul Langevin, followed by a public scandal orchestrated by Marie’s detractors, and her consequent disappearance from the public scene in 1912. The scandal’s consequence was an attempt to remove the...