Here is the masterpiece by the father of the modern Spanish novel: a
tour de force of nineteenth-century fiction, a tale of jealousy and
adultery--set against a vividly drawn panorama of Madrid.
In Spain, Benito Perez Galdos is revered as the heir to Cervantes, a
literary giant read alongside Dickens, Balzac, Flaubert, and Tolstoy.
Fortunata and Jacinta, first published in 1887, is his magnum opus. It
tells the story of the two women in the life of Juanito Santa Cruz,
restless heir to a textile fortune. Fortunata is a girl from the
slums--feisty and generous, sensual and amoral. She bears Juanito two
children. Jacinta, his aristocratic wife, remains childless and
preoccupied with her husband's wanderings. The obsessive rivalry between
these women plays out against the backdrop of Madrid--the rowdy cafes,
the darkened drawing rooms of the bourgeoisie, the stinking tenements of
the Barrios Bajos, the shops, and the markets (not to mention a convent,
an orphanage, and even a lunatic asylum)--at a time of heightened
political and social tension between the Revolution of 1868 and the
Restoration of 1875.
