We Had Won the War

This is a memoir of life in post-Civil War Barcelona by the late Spanish novelist Esther Tusquets (1936-2012). She traces her life from the age of three in 1939 to her graduation from the U. of Barcelona in 1959. Her memoir provides a look at life as a member of an upper-middle-class Catalonian family who had sided with the victorious Franco during the war and thus provides an interesting contrast to the many works that have been written from the perspective of the losing side of the Spanish Civil War. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Esther Tusquets (1936-2012) is the author of a highly praised narrative cycle (translated into English as The Same Sea as Every Summer, Love Is a Solitary Game, Stranded, and Never to Return), which caused a sensation when the books came out in the late 1970s and 1980s, just after the end of the long and repressive Franco regime. With their daringly innovative content and prose style, the series broke new ground for the Spanish novel and for women’s writing. She published six novels, three story collections, five autobiographical works, and two children’s books. From 1960 until her retirement in 2000, Tusquets directed the distinguished Barcelona publishing house Editorial Lumen, which promoted the freedom of intellectual and artistic expression as the country evolved from an authoritarian dictatorship into a modern democracy.
Barbara F. Ichiishi received a BA in French literature from Mount Holyoke College, an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD in Spanish from the University of Iowa. She is the author of The Apple of Earthly Love: Female Development in Esther Tusquets’ Fiction, and the translator of some of Tusquets’ major works, including her novel Never to Return, her story collection Seven Views of the Same Landscape, her memoir Private Correspondence, and her historical memoir We Had Won the War. She has published articles on Spanish and Latin American women’s literature, and is co-translator of Edouard Glissant’s historical drama Monsieur Toussaint.