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.
Benito Pérez Galdós is the best Spanish writer of the nineteenth century.
—Mario Vargas Llosa
Pérez Galdós is the supreme Spanish novelist of the 19th century. His scores of novels are rightly compared with the work of Balzac and Dickens who were his masters, and even with Tolstoy's.... The secret of the gift of Galdós lies, I think, in his timing, his leisurely precision and above all in his ear for dialogue...
—V.S. Pritchett
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.
—Raymund A. Paredes, Los Angeles Times
Pérez Galdós is one of the treasures of 19th-century Spanish fiction.
—William Ferguson, The New York Times
[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.
—Hispanic Review
Galdós immersed himself in the realities of his day and recorded them accurately.
—Symposium Magazine
If Zola is the Wagner of nineteenth-century realism (and George Eliot perhaps its Brahms), then Benito Pérez Galdós is its Shakespeare, or at least the Shakespeare of the late comedies and romances. . . . His Madrid is as full of mystery as Balzac's Paris.
—Frederic Jameson
This wonderful novel by Tristana author Perez Galdos peers into 1880s Madrid through the prism of the middle-class Villaamils family . . . a tragicomic triumph.
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
