Doña Perfecta

A young engineer from Madrid comes to a small cathedral town to marry his cousin and finds the whole place — his aunt, the priest, the streets — quietly organized against him, because he has read the wrong books. Galdós wrote some eighty novels and is held the greatest Spaniard since Cervantes; this short, cold one is where he stopped being polite about clerical Spain. Fifty-eight plates, from El Greco to Sorolla, trace the austere Castilian light and clerical shadow that hang over Galdós's small, cold town.