Tristana (NYRB Classics) - Tapa blanda

[Pérez Galdós’s] prophetic gift for singling out those issues that were bound to transcend and outlast his own milieu was equaled only by his knack for keeping them controversial and alive in his fiction by refusing to take a clear-cut position on them.

Galdós immersed himself in the realities of his day and recorded them accurately.

Tristana is a peach. An utterly delicious novel, even better than the Buñuel film.

Galdós was the great novelist of Madrid, chronicling bourgeois, urban manners with a clarity and understanding critics have found comparable to that of Dickens, Balzac and Flaubert.

Pérez Galdós is one of the treasures of 19th-century Spanish fiction.

“[Pérez Galdós’s] prophetic gift for singling out those issues that were bound to transcend and outlast his own milieu was equaled only by his knack for keeping them controversial and alive in his fiction by refusing to take a clear-cut position on them.”

“Galdós immersed himself in the realities of his day and recorded them accurately.”

Don Lope is a Don Juan, an aging but still effective predator on the opposite sex. He is also charming and generous, unhesitatingly contributing the better part of his fortune to pay off a friend’s debts, kindly assuming responsibility for the friend’s orphaned daughter, lovely Tristana. Don Lope takes her into his house and before long he takes her to bed.

It’s an arrangement that Tristana accepts more or less unquestioningly— that is, until she meets the handsome young painter Horacio. Then she actively rebels, sets out to educate herself, reveals tremendous talents, and soon surpasses her lover in her open defiance of convention. One thing is for sure: Tristana will be her own woman.

And when it counts Don Lope will be there for her.  

Benito Pérez Galdós, one of the most sophisticated and delightful of the great European novelists, was a clear-eyed, compassionate, and not-a-little amused observer of the confusions, delusions, misrepresentations, and perversions of the mind and heart. He is the unsurpassed chronicler of the reality show called real life.