http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1162077...

It took me a long time to get around to reading it, and also a long time to read it - it is over 800 pages. But it is rather good.

Fortunata and Jacinta are two women in 1870s Madrid who both love Juanito Santa Cruz, the scion of a dynasty of clothing magnates; Fortunata is working class and bears him a child; Jacinta, his cousin, marries him by a family arrangement which becomes largely a love match. Most of the book is about Fortunata's ups and downs as she bounces from man to man, Santa Cruz always in the background, and Jacinta vaguely and uneasily aware of her rival.

Pérez Galdós is often compared with Dickens, but I think he's more in the line of the great Russian novelists - he is not trying to be even a little bit funny (none of the characters are simple caricatures - even his belching priest displays a deep insight in one important chapter). He is also very much engaged with both high and low politics - Spain in the early 1870s had a lot of regime changes (I had no idea!) and also Santa Cruz's exploitation of Fortunata is surely intended in part as metaphor for the class struggle. She is certainly the most interesting character in the book, but there are plenty of them.

Anyway, it is rather long, but I felt it worth making the effort in the end. ( )

This new translation of Spanish novelist Perez Galdos's 19th century tale depicting society during the Alfonsine restoration of 1875, a masterpiece patterned on Balzac and Dickens, provides a read that is startlingly fresh and immediate. Fortunata, a glorious woman of the people, struggles all her life against the angelic, bourgeois Jacinta; both adore Jacinta's charming, selfish husband, the sybarite Juanito. Perez Galdos (18431920) steeps his story in scenes of working- and middle-class Madrid that are panoramic and intimate: the streets and reeking tenements, shops and stalls that open like mouths, the fashion trades, cafes where idlers thrash out politics, the pharmacy where Fortunata's sickly husband Maxi goes mad with jealousy, the convent in which the passionate Fortunata is locked to repent her promiscuity, the twin beds where Juanito caresses Jacinta with lies. Gentle Jacinta buying a baby she thinks is Fortunata's is just one of the novel's shrewd, unforgettable characterizations that reveal the commercial nexus and often animal thirst for power infecting the populous Perez Galdos world.

2911 Fortunata and Jacinta: Two Stories of Married Women, by Benito Perez Galdos translated by Agnes Moncy Gallon (read 27 Sep 1996) I read this because I understand that the author is considered to be to 19th century Spanish literature what Dickens, Balzac, and Dostoyevsky are to their nations' literature. The book was finished in June 1887, and the translation I read was a 1985 one. It is a big book (818 pages) and the story goes on and on. The book does not present the Church in any flattering way, but most of the people are very conscious of religion and this is pleasant and seldom seen in fiction. The book is awfully long, and I can't say it was unfailingly absorbing. But I'm glad I read it. ( )