Marta Brunet

Marta Brunet Cáraves (born August 9, 1897 in Chillán , † October 27, 1967 in Montevideo ) was a Chilean writer and diplomat .

Life

Marta Brunet was born as the only daughter of Ambrosio Brunet Molina and Presentación Cáraves de Cossio. She spent the first years of her life on the hacienda Pailahueque in Victoria in the south of the country, where there was no girls' school. Therefore she had private tutors up to the age of 14, was otherwise self-taught and educated herself through intensive reading, the impressions of which she noted in notebooks. As a child she wanted to be a doctor; When her parents rejected this as unthinkable, she thought of another profession: a dancer. On her father's estate, she observed the landscape and the dreary life of the Chilean farm workers and farmers; but she also got to know their customs and legends. From 1911 to 1914 she traveled for three years through Europe, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. She spent in Spain from 1912 until the outbreak of the First World War . From 1919 to 1923 she lived again in Chillán, where she was a member of a group of young artists. She wrote poetry and short stories that were published in the magazine La Discusión in Chillán between 1919 and 1923. In 1923 she published her first novel, Montaña adentro , which received rave reviews and achieved several editions. At the age of 28 she moved to Santiago de Chile , where she was under the protection of the famous critic Hernán Díaz Arreta (better known under his pseudonym "Alone") and was introduced to the literary world by him (cf. Melón: 15). She was extremely nearsighted and suffered greatly from the death of her father, which also threw her into financial difficulties. In between, she even opened a palm reading salon to keep her head above water.

In 1933 Marta Brunet received the Premio de Novela of the Chilean Writers' Union , Sociedad de Escritores de Chile . A year later she became editor of the Zig-Zag publishing house and editor of the traditional women's magazine Familia . She held these functions until 1939. That year she was appointed Honorary Consul in La Plata by President Pedro Aguirre Cerda ; in Argentina she got to know the new spelling of Jorge Luis Borges and Eduardo Mallea and was integrated into the artistic circles there. From 1943 to 1952 she remained in Buenos Aires as a diplomat , but was then removed from office by the dictator Carlos Ibáñez without giving any reason (cf. Melón: 16); Articles by artists appeared in the daily newspapers who praised their function as cultural mediators and regretted their dismissal. In 1943 she received the Premio Atenea from the University of Concepción for her novel Aguas abajo .

In 1953 Brunet returned to Santiago, where she held lectures and courses at the Escuelas de Temporada at the invitation of the Universidad de Chile. In 1960 she traveled to Spain and underwent eye surgery in Barcelona to correct her extreme nearsightedness. She then went on further trips abroad. In 1961 she received the Chilean State Prize for Literature, Premio Nacional de Literatura, as the second woman after Gabriela Mistral .

In 1962 she was appointed cultural attaché to the Chilean embassy in Rio de Janeiro , and in 1963 to Montevideo. On October 27, 1967, death tore her out of an active professional life (she suffered a stroke while giving a lecture at the Academia de Letras de Uruguay in Montevideo).

plant

Marta Brunet is generally assigned to the current of criollismo , a Chilean variant of realism or naturalism , with a great predilection for the rural scenery, for names of typical Chilean plants and trees. Dialectal peculiarities of Chilean farmers are reproduced phonetically in a faithful manner. She was influenced by Émile Zola , Guy de Maupassant , Ernest Hemingway , William Faulkner and Maxim Gorki (cf. Melón: 40). Marta Brunet also developed an individual style that was not achieved by any of the representatives of Criollismo (cf. Melón: 6), from around 1943 onwards her writing began to move in the direction of psychological novels and became more cosmopolitan and universal. In her first criollistic novels, however, she broke with the tradition according to which the rural scenes were portrayed in the manner of an idyll: with her, the farmers are realistic, naturalistic types who also have their bad sides (cf.Melón: 47) . She also describes the excesses of superstition and fatalism.

Novels

• Montaña adentro , 1923 (Santiago: Editorial Nascimento)
• Bestia dañina , 1926 (Santiago: Editorial Nascimento)
• María Rosa, flor de Quillén , 1927 (Atenea magazine), 1929 as a book
• Bienvenido , 1929 (Santiago: Editorial Nascimento)
• Humo hacia el sur (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1946)
• La mampara , 1946 (Buenos Aires: Emecé)
• María Nadie 1957 (Santiago de Chile: Zig-Zag)
• Amasijo 1962 (Santiago de Chile: Zig-Zag)

stories

• Don Florisondo , 1926
• Reloj de sol , 1930
• Aguas abajo , 1943
• Raíz del sueño , 1949
• Solita sola , 1963
• Soledad de la sangre 1967 (Montevideo: Impresora Rex)

Children's literature

• Cuentos para Marisol , 1938
• Aleluyas para los más chiquititos , 1960

Poetry

• Novia del aire

Complete edition

• Obras completas , 1962 (Santiago: Zig-Zag)

literature

• Melón de Díaz, Esther (1975): La narrativa de Marta Brunet . San Juan: Editorial Universitaria Universidad de Puerto Rico. (Colección Uprex; 41 = Ser. Estudios literarios)
• Orozco Vera, María Jesús: La narrativa femenina chilena (1923-1980): escritura y enajenación. Zaragoza: Anubar Ed., 1995 (Textos de filología; 3) ISBN 84-7013-257-1
• Koski, Linda Irene: Women's experience in the novels of four modern Chilean writers: Marta Brunet, María Luisa Bombal, Mercedes Valdivieso and Isabel Allende. Ann Arbor, Mich .: Univ. Microfilms International, 1989 (Stanford, Calif., Stanford Univ., Phil. Diss., 1989)

Web links

• Marta Brunet at the Universidad de Chile (in Spanish)
• Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes (in Spanish)