Winter Reading

Even in California, the winter months feel like a good time to start on a big fat novel. I am currently about halfway through Benito Pérez Galdós’s Fortunata and Jacinta, and no matter what happens in the next 400 pages, I can pretty assuredly say that it is an absolutely major nineteenth-century novel (a competitive category that, as we readers all know, had more than its fair share of excellence).

I have vague memories of running across Pérez Galdós’s name and perhaps even his work in my high school Spanish classes, but no one I’ve spoken to recently seems to have heard of him. Yet he was considered by many to be the greatest Spanish novelist of the nineteenth century. This book, widely described as his masterpiece, came out around 1887, and it covers the years from roughly 1869 to 1875 in Madrid. And I do mean covers. The basic skeleton of the plot—which should cause you to snatch up the book right away—is that Fortunata is the mistress and Jacinta the wife of Juanito Santa Cruz, the privileged young man who is technically the book’s central character. But though Juanito, as a child, appears within the first few pages, it takes the narrator about eighty or a hundred pages to introduce us to the two women, who are really more important in the story. In the meantime, this curious narrator indulges himself by giving us every possible detail about life in Madrid, a capital city that nonetheless had an almost small-village feel at that point. So along the way we see a wealthy woman and her male attendant making multiple daily trips to the food stalls of the street markets, or hear extended analyses of the kinds and colors of cloth worn by Madrid women of different classes, or learn the minutiae of a minor character’s regular café visits, including where he places the sugar bowl as he watches the waiter pour the proper amounts of coffee and milk into his glass. This stuff is not boring at all; on the contrary, you seem to be experiencing directly the texture of life as it was lived at the time. And the narrator himself is a kick: unnamed and often absent from the action, he nonetheless has a voice and opinions and direct acquaintance with some of these people, though he also describes intimate scenes (for instance, between Jacinta and her husband, when they are discussing his affair with Fortunata) at which he couldn’t possibly have been present.

In that sense, he reminds me of Dostoyevsky’s narrators, though he’s a lot more cheerful than they are. The profuse sense data he repeatedly offers us makes me think of Zola—especially the Zola of The Ladies’ Paradise, my favorite of his novels—or perhaps the Arnold Bennett of The Old Wives’ Tale. Like them, Pérez Galdós is fascinated by the way people live their daily lives: he can’t bear to leave a thing out, and the result is a novel that introduces us to a whole world we might not have known about, much in the way Eça de Queiros’s The Maias introduces us to late-nineteenth-century Portugal.

And, by the way, when you’ve finished the 815 pages of Fortunata and Jacinta, feel free to start on one of the other novels I mentioned in that last paragraph—all fine selections for winter reading. Be sure, though, to choose Margaret Jull Costa’s translation of The Maias, and no other, if you want to see why it is one of the greatest novels of all time. For the Pérez Galdós, unless you read Spanish, you will have no option but the Penguin edition, which is ably translated by Agnes Moncy Gullón (though with the usual annoyingly educational footnotes that Penguin insists on including).