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A review by blackbird27
Tristana by Benito Pérez Galdós
4.0
A birthday gift to myself some weeks back, and an excellent introduction to the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Spanish- and Portuguese-language fiction I intend to be investigating a lot more this year.
Benito Pérez Galdós is often described as the Balzac or Zola of Spanish letters, a prolific novelist whose fiction centers on the life of the bourgeoisie of Madrid in the nineteenth century. Tristana was first published in 1892, and although it could be considered congruent with that decade's New Woman (as seen in English letters), it's closer to being a satire on Romanticism, including the proto-feminism that went with its radicalism. Not that Pérez Galdós is unsympathetic to Tristana's artistic ambitions and desire to live a very twentieth-century life, unhampered by marriage and with full economic and intellectual independence; but part of his realism includes acknowledging the ways that men trap, bully, and ignore women (among other things, it's a fine early study in what is now called gaslighting) and the way circumstance and society conspire to smother independence and ambition, particularly in a woman.
But the magical central third of the book, in which Tristana expresses herself for pages and pages without the cool, ironic voice of the narrator or the devious, small-minded voices of the other characters to interrupt, is really what made this reading experience so memorable. If it begins half-satirically, and ends as a rather bleak farce, the middle, which is both extremely funny and wholly unironic, is one of the great joys of Belle Époque literature (that I know of), and reminds me of nothing so much as reading Tumblr, with its excited, nervous, precocious, linguistically eccentric, erudite, and above all feminine voice. I want to press it on several young women I know just for the pleasure of seeing them respond to it (with no doubt very mixed results).
Margaret Jull Costa's translation, then, was entirely successful for me, although I kept finding myself wondering what the original Spanish phrasing was, and I think perhaps next year I'd like to do a re-read with the Spanish text, once I've forgotten most of the particulars, to see what the effect is. (I actually might already have a pdf of an early Spanish edition somewhere, my collecting habits have gotten so eccentric.) In any case, I'm glad to have been introduced to Pérez Galdós, and now I'm especially curious to see Buñuel's (I understand rather free) adaptation.
Benito Pérez Galdós is often described as the Balzac or Zola of Spanish letters, a prolific novelist whose fiction centers on the life of the bourgeoisie of Madrid in the nineteenth century. Tristana was first published in 1892, and although it could be considered congruent with that decade's New Woman (as seen in English letters), it's closer to being a satire on Romanticism, including the proto-feminism that went with its radicalism. Not that Pérez Galdós is unsympathetic to Tristana's artistic ambitions and desire to live a very twentieth-century life, unhampered by marriage and with full economic and intellectual independence; but part of his realism includes acknowledging the ways that men trap, bully, and ignore women (among other things, it's a fine early study in what is now called gaslighting) and the way circumstance and society conspire to smother independence and ambition, particularly in a woman.
But the magical central third of the book, in which Tristana expresses herself for pages and pages without the cool, ironic voice of the narrator or the devious, small-minded voices of the other characters to interrupt, is really what made this reading experience so memorable. If it begins half-satirically, and ends as a rather bleak farce, the middle, which is both extremely funny and wholly unironic, is one of the great joys of Belle Époque literature (that I know of), and reminds me of nothing so much as reading Tumblr, with its excited, nervous, precocious, linguistically eccentric, erudite, and above all feminine voice. I want to press it on several young women I know just for the pleasure of seeing them respond to it (with no doubt very mixed results).
Margaret Jull Costa's translation, then, was entirely successful for me, although I kept finding myself wondering what the original Spanish phrasing was, and I think perhaps next year I'd like to do a re-read with the Spanish text, once I've forgotten most of the particulars, to see what the effect is. (I actually might already have a pdf of an early Spanish edition somewhere, my collecting habits have gotten so eccentric.) In any case, I'm glad to have been introduced to Pérez Galdós, and now I'm especially curious to see Buñuel's (I understand rather free) adaptation.