Juan Ramón Puyol, one of the grandchildren of the writer Luisa Carnés (Madrid, 1905- México D.F., 1964), “sometimes gets angry when his grandmother is cataloged within the taxonomy of 27”, explains Marta Sanz in her epilogue to the new edition of Tea Rooms. Working women. Because while it is true that she shares the time, the country, the profession of writing with those of 27…, it is also true that the canonical authors of that generation (Alberti, Aleixandre, Lorca, Cernuda…) were male and university students. Very different was the career of Carnés, who at the age of eleven started working in a hat shop, and was later a typist and employee in a tea room, before publishing, at the age of 21, her first stories in the press, and becoming in journalist and militant of the PCE.
Biographical data, as often happens, is reflected in the work. Tea Rooms is a social, choral, ardently political novel about young and poor women who, in order to get ahead, have to prostitute themselves (albeit in sweetened ways, like what is now called sugar daddy) or accept labor exploitation. And that, in addition, they run the risk, as soon as they want to have a sexual life, of ending up bleeding to death after sticking a knitting needle into the uterus.
Luisa Carnés is currently in the news today due to the announcement by Radiotelevisión Española of a new series based on Tea Rooms, which will start filming in August and will premiere in October on La 1. But this is only a new chapter in a long story: the from a novel that appeared in 1934… and disappeared for decades. Her author had gone into exile in Mexico, where she died without ever returning. Many years later, a young researcher discovered the book in the National Library; a small publisher from Oviedo, Hoja de Lata, agreed to reissue it in 2016… and it caused a sensation. It was translated into French and Italian, included in the reading recommendations of the Ministry of Education for Secondary and Baccalaureate, the playwright Laila Ripoll turned it into a play (premiered in the Madrid Fernán Gómez room in 2022) and caused the reissue of other texts of cards.
“The writer who did not appear in the photo of the Generation of ’27”, as Inés Martín Rodrigo defined her on ABC, “an indignant from 1934”, I would have baptized her…, the one who aroused so much curiosity and praise with her first and precocious stories, is again topical today. It is a good occasion to remember all those authors, in the plural, who were not in the photo of 27: Rosa Chacel, María Teresa León, Elena Fortún, María Martínez Sierra… And who ended up in exile, like Luisa Carnés, who after leaving Madrid Like so many Republicans, at the end of 1936, to move to Valencia, he went to Barcelona in 1937 and left it, also with his companions, just before Franco’s victorious troops entered the city, in January 1939. He tells it in his memoirs, also recently republished: From Barcelona to French Brittany. Read Carnés, it’s worth it.
Luis Carnes Tea Rooms. working women
Epilogue by Marta Sanz. Tin Sheet. 232 pages, 18.90 euros
