Miaow
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Descripción editorial
A Dickensian tale of ambition, family, and financial ruin by the most important Spanish novelist after Cervantes, this tragicomic novel about a patriarch struggling to keep his ungrateful family from ruin is at turns scathing and hilarious.
Ramón Villaamil has been a loyal civil servant his whole life, but a change in government leaves him out of a job and still two months short of qualifying for his pension. Initially optimistic that he’ll be able to find work and pull his family out of their financial straits, he spends his days visiting the administration, pestering his ex-colleagues to put in a good word for him, and begging his friends in high places for money. At home, Villaamil’s wife, daughter, and sister-in-law—whose feline appearances earn them the nickname “the Miaows”—are unimpressed by Villaamil’s failures, and the only joy left in Villaamil’s life is his young grandson Luis. When Luis’s disgraced father, the handsome and dastardly Víctor Cadalso, reappears in their lives with promises of easing their financial burdens, Villaamil has no choice but to allow him back into their midst, even as he knows there is nothing pure about Víctor’s intentions and his return might spell their ruin.
Benito Pérez Galdós’s satire of middle-class life bears comparison with the novels of Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac, serving up a scathing critique of the hypocrisy and corruption of nineteenth-century Spanish society and the dehumanizing rituals of work. Margaret Jull Costa's new translation brings out the tragedy, the comedy, and the vitality of Galdós's prose.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This wonderful novel by Tristana author Perez Galdos (1843–1920) peers into 1880s Madrid through the prism of the middle-class Villaamils family. There is patriarch Ramón, an unemployed civil servant desperately seeking one final appointment so he can retire soon after on a decent pension; his spendthrift wife, Pura; her sister, Milagros; and his daughter, Abelarda. Pura, Milagros, and Abelarda regularly frequent the theater, where they have derisively been dubbed the Miaows by fellow patrons for their catlike appearance. Their humiliation is contrasted with depictions of Ramón's "sweet and humble" young grandson, Luis, who charmingly and comically dreams of conversing with God about the fate of his family. Luis's mother died when he was a toddler, and upon the reappearance of his absentee father, Víctor, Ramón's son-in-law, who embodies the calculating, dishonest order of corrupt civil servants whom honest, hardworking Ramón abhors, the family fortunes become even more unpredictable. Perez Galdos reflects the characters' theatrical predilections in arch parenthetical asides, as in Pura's dressing down of her husband: "You'll never be anything, and if they do give you a job, they'll pay you a pittance, and we'll still be in the same mess. (Growing more heated)," and he flits with remarkable ease from the hilarious to the heartbreaking. This is a tragicomic triumph.
