His Only Son
with Dona Berta
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
The unlikely hero of His Only Son, Bonifacio Reyes, is a romantic and a flautist by vocation—and a failed clerk and kept husband by necessity—who 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, 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 Bonifacio’s? In the accompanying novella, Doña 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.
While largely unknown outside of Spain, Leopoldo Alas was one of the most celebrated writers of criticism in nineteenth-century Spain and employed his satirical talents to powerful and humorous effect in fiction. His Only Son was Alas’s second and final novel, full of characteristic 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Alas's classic 19th-century Spanish comic novel makes its English-language debut; it's a wry reckoning with the "social novels" of Balzac, but written with the sardonic cheek of Cervantes. The hero is Bonifacio Reyes, a hapless ex-clerk and amateur flutist who sponges off his capricious wife, Emma Valcarcel, from a once-illustrious family known for their "love of the cape," and her Mephistophelian uncle and financial adviser, Don Juan Nepomuceno. But Bonifacio, like a male version of Flaubert's Bovary, is determined to live as though he's the protagonist of a romantic novel and takes up a disastrous affair with a second-rate opera singer named Serafina, who thinks she has found in Bonifacio a wealthy patron. As Bonifacio transforms himself into the benefactor of Serafina's salon of bohemians, his tyrannical wife undergoes a transformation of her own (or believes she does), which culminates in an "intimate polka" with the baritone Minghetti and a pregnancy that Bonifacio insists on regarding, despite all evidence to the contrary, as a miracle. For all its superb period trappings, there is something bitterly current about this tale of debt and midlife crises. Included in this volume is the novella "Do a Berta," about a spinster who forsakes her one love (her cat) for a painting of the beloved captain who long ago failed to return. Like His Only Son, it is a send-up of engagement with the arts, making for a book of wonderful, essential tragicomedy.
