READIN

🦋 Iberian lit.

Before the movie this afternoon, Ellen and I swung by Montclair Book Center. Ellen picked up Anne of Green Gables, which she has been wanting to read with Sylvia. I went looking to see if they had cheap used copies of any Saramago titles that I haven't read, and found The Stone Raft; and while I was browsing through the used books I found something I'd never heard of before but that looks interesting: Fortunata and Jacinta, by Benito Pérez Galdós (tr. Agnes Moncy Gullón, 1986) -- a weighty 19th-century novel set in Madrid. I'm looking forward to reading it -- the first couple of pages are good reading -- and speculating that it may give me some background for Saramago and other modern Iberian novelists.

A nice passage, from the end of the first chapter. The narrator is describing how Juanito Santa Cruz changed from an avid reader and thinker in college to an anti-intellectual adult:

Living was relating to others, enjoying and suffering, desiring, hating and loing. Reading was artificial borrowed life... He claimed that the difference between these two ways of living was like the difference between eating a chop yourself and having someone tell you how and when someone else ate it, making the story a really good one of course -- describing the expression on the person's face, his pleasure from chewing the meat, his satisfaction upon swallowing it, and then his placid digestion.

posted evening of Sunday, October 26th, 2008
➳ More posts about Fortunata and Jacinta
➳ More posts about Benito Pérez Galdós
➳ More posts about Readings

Respond:

Name:
E-mail: (will not be displayed)
Link:
Remember info	Send