Never to Return Book

Never to Return is a witty, penetrating account of a woman’s inner journey to understanding through her encounter with Freudian psychoanalysis. On the brink of turning fifty, Elena suddenly falls into a deep depression. Her husband has gone off to New York to celebrate the triumph of his cinematic career, accompanied not by his wife but by a lover half her age. Meanwhile her grown sons have left home to pursue their own lives and relationships. Fearing aging, loneliness, a failed love, and a failed life, she begins sessions with a reputable Argentine psychoanalyst. Elena’s experience of analysis provides the occasion for an intense scrutiny of self and world, while it raises basic questions about the psychoanalytic method and its implications for female emotional development. Complex and ambivalent, her narration offers both a sharply satiric view of analysis and a consideration of its possible power and effectiveness.

Esther Tusquets is a leading figure on the Spanish literary scene. Since the early sixties she has directed the distinguished Barcelona publishing house Editorial Lumen. Never to Return is the fourth in a series of critically acclaimed novels characterized by a winding, associative style that captures the vibrant ebb and flow of a woman’s inner life.

Publishers Weekly

Catalan author Tusquets dedicates her literary oeuvre to exploring the inner lives of women, and this fourth novel (first published in 1985) marks the last volume in an award-winning cycle (Love Is a Solitary Game; Stranded) to be translated into English. Elena, married with two grown sons, is turning 50. Her husband is in New York celebrating a film career that she helped him build, but he's with his young mistress. Uncertain of her future and feeling old, she enters therapy with a reputable Argentine psychoanalyst. However, she questions the efficacy of his cold, rigid analytic method even as she recognizes a parallel between psychoanalysis and parenting: that one participant gives all but must not expect reciprocal attentiveness. But if that's an insight, it doesn't much help: Elena's plagued by a need for the analyst's approval, and finds herself obsessing over a piece of pottery she gave him as a gift, neurotically dreading the day he discards it. Rich with nuances that may be relevant to the academic study of Freudian, Lacanian and feminist psychoanalysis (as the translator details in her afterword), Elena's story is a story of frustration, something the reader may well feel. Told through a dense, unbroken, almost breathless narrative that internalizes daily events, the book's stylistic structure accurately mimics the thought processes of a confused brain, immersed in depression and panic. That indeed is this novel's most interesting feature, but the narrative's exploration of psychoanalysis does little more than reiterate how the Freudian model of human experience fails to address female needs. (Sept.) FYI: Tusquets has been on the forefront of the Spanish literary scene since the early 1960s, when she began directing the Barcelona publishing house Editorial Lumen. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.