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Galdos has been called the Balzac or Dickens of Spain, and "Fortunata and Jacinta" (1887) is his masterpiece. Set in Madrid between 1868 and 1875, it treats both political tumult and personal obsession, telling the story of two women who love the same man - one his mistress and the other his wife.
- Sales Rank: #1276515 in Books
- Brand: Brand: University of Georgia Press
- Published on: 1986-06
- Original language: Spanish
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 840 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
This new translation of Spanish novelist Perez Galdos's 19th century tale depicting society during the Alfonsine restoration of 1875, a masterpiece patterned on Balzac and Dickens, provides a read that is startlingly fresh and immediate. Fortunata, a glorious woman of the people, struggles all her life against the angelic, bourgeois Jacinta; both adore Jacinta's charming, selfish husband, the sybarite Juanito. Perez Galdos (18431920) steeps his story in scenes of working- and middle-class Madrid that are panoramic and intimate: the streets and reeking tenements, shops and stalls that open like mouths, the fashion trades, cafes where idlers thrash out politics, the pharmacy where Fortunata's sickly husband Maxi goes mad with jealousy, the convent in which the passionate Fortunata is locked to repent her promiscuity, the twin beds where Juanito caresses Jacinta with lies. Gentle Jacinta buying a baby she thinks is Fortunata's is just one of the novel's shrewd, unforgettable characterizations that reveal the commercial nexus and often animal thirst for power infecting the populous Perez Galdos world. A vast, savory novel in the great tradition, this is not to be missed.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This masterpiece of Spain's greatest novelist after Cervantes, appearing on the centennial of its composition, complements the same publisher's issue of another overlooked classic, Alas's La Regenta ( LJ 3/1/84). The sprawling plot and polyphonic structure resist easy summary but essentially focus on the interrelationships of two married couplesthe refined but barren Jacinta and her pampered, philandering husband, whose mistress, the lowborn but fertile Fortunata, is wed to a sickly schizophrenicinto whose lives swarms a hive of secondary characters from all walks of 19th-century Madrid life. Gullon's translation is much more readable, contemporary, and accurate than Lester Clark's partial translation (Penguin, 1973). An essential acquisition. Lawrence Olszewski, P.L. of Columbus & Franklin Cty., Ohio
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Language Notes
Text: English, Spanish (translation)
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Life in all its complexity and frustration
By Dan Harlow
"There is no human being, no matter how despicable he may seem, who cannot stand out in something.”
This line from early in the novel is spoken in relation to the character Izquierdo, a useless man (up to that point), who is a braggart but also surrogate father to a little boy, the near feral Pitsuo. The line is interesting because while at first glance it might seem a positive statement - it could be an internet platitude - Galdós does not actually say that the something anyone can stand out in would be a good something. There is no judgment made here at all, in fact. And it is this lack of judgment which raises this novel from mere ordinary masterpiece to one of the 10 greatest novels ever written.
For a novel this long and with so many characters, summing it up is a challenge, however I think it would be fair to compare it to Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”. In Tolstoy’s novel Anna is a woman who wants to live life the way she chooses but continually is pushed back down by a society that refuses to accept her ideas. She is judged by society and family, and her fate is unfortunate. The same is true with Fortunata. Though unlike Anna she is not of the upper-class (in fact she is from the lowest class), her pride and stubbornness cause her an endless series of trials and devastations. She is a woman who wants to live how she sees fit to do so, but cannot and she pays dearly.
Another parallel between the novels is through the Tolstoy’s Levin and Galdós Guillermina. Both are held up as examples of the ideal life (as imagined by the author). Levin tries to be a peasant and Guillermina does the work of a saint through her orphanage. Both characters have their flaws (though Guillermina’s are more subtle and only once does she really stumble in the novel), and both characters act to balance the tide of the other major character (Levin : Anna, and Guillermina : Fortunata).
To continue the comparison, both novels invest the reader deeply into their respective cultures of the novelist. Tolstoy drops us headlong into upper-class Russian society of the mid to late 19th century, and Galdós recreates nearly every avenue, shop, and slum of Madrid around the same time period. We inhabit vibrant, breathing worlds full of color, noise, pettiness, sadness, and beauty as written only by authors intimately familiar with them in real life. Future archaeologists, armed with little more than these two novels could recreate a convincing simulation of Russia and Spain of the 19th century.
But we must leave Tolstoy and Anna at their train station in St Petersburg because while there are many parallels between the two novels, Galdós turns his attention not to how society affects the individual, but how individuals affect the society they live in. Galdós is interested in the worlds we create, either in our own minds (madness and fixation are key themes in this novel), but also in reality with the ever changing of the Spanish government of the time and the formation and dissolution of the various tertulia (gossip and discussion groups).
“Fortunata and Jacinta: Two Stories of Married Women” has been called the second greatest Spanish novel - Don Quixote being the first. And both novels are interested in similar ideas: what is real? Don Quixote is, obviously, mistaken in his observations (we all know of his famous windmills), but Galdós is more realistic. He forces us to ask ourselves why Fortunata can’t, in fact, find happiness with Juanito. Yes, we know society would never permit such a thing since Juanito is married in the eyes of God and society to Jacinta, but that’s a much different construct than believing a windmill is really a monster. Galdós is asking us to question why we accept society as it is, he just does it more subtly than Miguel de Cervantes did. There no real reason why Juanito can’t just leave his wife for someone he might love more, it’s just a construct of society that prevent him (as well as the fact that he’s a “player” and doesn’t really love anyone anyway).
Guillermina, this novel’s Saint, is also asking these same questions, but in a much different way and does so much more proactively. Instead of sulking around wishing reality were better, she actually does something about it - she’s harasses anyone and everyone to give money, bricks, timber, fuel, even a hat or a pair of pants for her orphanage. Businessmen, clergy, the wealthy and even the poor with something to give are not safe from her alms requests, and if you don’t have something to give, she’ll put you to work. She shakes up the dusty, lazy masses and gets them onto something more productive.
And all the characters engage in their own world building, no matter how small (Dona Lupa’s fake, cotton breast), to Maximiliano’s lunacy, to Feijoo’s pragmatic (and very modern) world view and advice for Fortunata, and even poor Mauricia (who looks just like Napoleon) and her drunken delirium. One character, the above mentioned Izquierdo, finds work as an artist’s model posing as famous historical figures, and another, Ballester, sees himself as capable of truly loving Fortunata. Everyone here is possessed by their own demons and delusions, hopes and fears, and it all mixes up to create fabric of life where everyone is interconnected - a theme Tolstoy explores in War and Peace where every person contributes to and is affected by the tides of history.
As I read over my notes for this novel I realize I’m only touching the very surface here. This is a massive novel, not just in size (over 800 pages in my hardcover edition), but massive in its beauty, too. Though Galdós is not given to long, overly poetic descriptions of nature, there is still an enormous amount of beauty here, but it’s always countered by the reality of whatever given situation the characters find themselves. We may see a beautiful countryside one day, and over the next few weeks have that view blocked by a church being built. No image serves one purpose, everything here is working overtime to show us life in all its complexity and frustration.
On a personal note I was greatly moved by this novel. I feel as if I were to one day walk down to my mailbox only to discover the world’s largest and most perfectly cut diamond just laying right there on the sidewalk in broad daylight with everyone walking right past it and not seeing it. In fact I’m actually mad that this novel is not spoken in the same breath as Anna Karenina, or Don Quixote, or Ulysses, or Middlemarch, or Moby Dick. This is a novel of the same quality and greatness as the greatest of the masterpieces ever published, yet it is almost nearly forgotten - and is, currently as I write this, out of print in English. Madness.
And so now, like one of the characters in the novel, I feel as if I should become obsessed with the idea of telling the world about Galdós and his nearly forgotten masterpiece. I want to read everything the man ever wrote, then re-read it, and spend my life writing about what I’ve read, and go digging through academic journals for the handful of people who have written scholarly work on him so I can look them up, correspond with them, and start book groups devoted to nothing but Galdós! Perhaps this could be my new reality, like a character in the novel who chooses for whatever stubborn, mad, or illogical reason to do what he wants for reasons he’s not quite sure of.
And maybe I’ll wind up like Maximiliano who stands before his future where on one hand he’s entering a monastery because he’s seen the light or on the other he’s being committed to an insane asylum because the light he sees is only corrupting him.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent if overlong realist novel
By Steven Davis
Fortunata and Jacinta is widely considered to be the greatest Spanish novel of the 19th century. The setting is Madrid in the 1870s, a time of great political turmoil. While the novel references some of the historical events taking place at the time, its focus is an intensely detailed and realistic portrait of the characters who inhabit it.
Juan Santa Cruz, the spoiled only child of a prosperous merchant family, has grown up to become an idle playboy. The latest object of his attentions is Fortunata, the beautiful and free-spirited niece of a local market vendor. She becomes his mistress. Appalled at the possibility of a connection to someone so far below their own social level, Juan's parents hustle him into courtship and marriage. His bride is Jacinta: pretty, refined, saintly, and loving. For a while, Jacinta makes her husband forget about Fortunata.
Meanwhile, Fortunata has caught the eye of Maximiliano Rubín, a sickly young pharmacy student. "Maxi," pious and chaste, makes it his project to redeem Fortunata from her poverty and her sinful past. He is determined to make her his wife, even though she confesses she can never love such a pathetic creature. Besieged by a flood of priestly advice from all sides, Fortunata consents to a loveless marriage to save her soul. But once she's another man's wife, Juan Santa Cruz, bored with Jacinta, comes back into her life. The ecstasy and anguish she has experienced in the past is nothing compared with what's to come.
Fortunata is the novel's pivotal character and its central idea. Crude and illiterate, yet beautiful and artlessly charming, violent yet loving, spiteful but forgiving, she both enchants and exasperates everyone around her. Everyone is always trying to change Fortunata--to reform her, tame her, and educate her--and she is always trying to change herself. Yet in the end, one closest to her admits that all these efforts were in vain:
I wasn't the only one who was deceived; she was, too. We defrauded each other. We didn't take nature into account, the grand mother and teacher who rectifies the errors of those of her children who go astray. We do countless foolish things and nature corrects them. We protest against her admirable lessons, which we don't understand, and when we want her to obey us, she grabs us and smashes us to bits, as the sea does whoever tries to rule it.
The intractability of human nature is demonstrated in the public sphere as well as the private. During the period of Fortunata and Jacinta Spain went through several governments, from monarchy to republic and back to monarchy. These events aren't directly shown in the novel--the characters' lives are remarkably unaffected, in fact, by their country's state of virtual anarchy--but we see opinions and convictions vacillate as frequently as the political winds change. Just as Juan Santa Cruz always wants the woman he shouldn't have, the public is always in favor of the faction that is out of power at the moment.
Fortunata and Jacinta is about a place almost as much as it is about people. Pérez Galdós describes Madrid in loving detail: the rhythms of daily life, the sounds and smells of the market place, the ebb and flow of trade, the traffic jams and quiet alleyways, the hullabaloo of café society. The physical world is constantly a part of the novel in the texture of clothing, the taste of a confection, the distant sound of a piano, and the vibration from booted feet climbing the stairs.
Pérez Galdós writes in the realist tradition of Balzac, depicting human nature and behavior as he sees it. It is up to the reader to decide if Fortunata is a devil or an angel. The author is transparent and non-judgmental, providing physical description and letting his characters' thoughts and speech convey feelings and ideas. This does make for some long and relatively uneventful passages, and there are some prolonged and not indispensable side trips into the affairs of some lesser characters. In the end, though, Fortunata and Jacinta is a rewarding novel, not as great as, but similar in many ways to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.
16 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
The best Spanish novel after "Don Quijote"
By Buenoslibros.es
Don Benito Perez Galdos is the most important novelist of the Spanish language, right after Cervantes.
This is his masterpiece. Galdos has many great works, but this one has all the ingredients that you may find in his other smaller works.
It is a huge work, the size of "War and Peace" or "Middlemarch", but it reads like a short story. I remember reading it during my college time, and not being able to put the book down, getting late too often to appointments, or just daydreaming trying to picture the streets of Madrid in the 19th century, the faces of the two leading ladies...
Absolutly wonderful. A must read for anyone interested in high quality literature of any language. If you speak Spanish and you still haven't read "Fortunata y Jacinta" this must be your top priority.
You will not regret it.
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