One of the most celebrated writers of criticism in nineteenth-century Spain, Leopoldo Alas, known by his pseudonym Clarin, employed his satirical talent to powerful and humorous effect in fiction as well. In one of his best-known novels His Only Son, Bonifacio Reyes, a romantic and flautist by vocation - and a failed clerk and kept husband by necessity - dreams of a novelesque life. Tied to his shrill and sickly wife by her purse strings, he enters, timidly, into a love affair with Serafina, a seductive second-rate opera singer, encouraged by her manager who mistakes Bonifacio for a potential patron. Meanwhile Emma, Bonifacio's wife, experiences a parallel awakening and in the midst of a long-barren marriage, surprises them both with a son - but is it truly Bonifacio's? In the accompanying novella Dona Berta, the heroine of the title, an aged, poor but well-born woman forfeits her beloved estate in search of a portrait that may be all that remains of the secret love of her life. More sensitive than scathing in his social satire, Alas is a writer of great humor, naturalistic detail, descriptive beauty, and moral complexity.
His frail and pitiful characters - irrational, emotional actors drawn inexorably toward their foolish fates - are yet multidimensional individuals, often conscious of their own weaknesses and stymied by their very yearnings to be more than the parts they find themselves playing.
Product code: 9781681370187
| ISBN |
9781681370187 |
| Dimensions (HxWxD in mm) |
H202xW127xS16 |
| Edition |
Main |
| No. Of Pages |
344 |
| Publisher |
The New York Review of Books, Inc |
| Brand |
NEW YORK REVIEW OF B |