Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936)

Originally published in 1914, this is Unamuno's best-known work of fiction. It's very much a novel written by a philosophy professor, where the characters are constantly breaking off the action to discuss the fundamental problems of human existence, but it's presented in a very playful and entertaining way. The ostensible storyline is a rather silly romantic comedy full of rival suitors, servants, scheming aunts and misunderstandings: it could a P.G. Wodehouse story, but it also has an show more Enlightenment flavour that would go well with Beaumarchais, Diderot, or Sterne (in fact, it would have been perfect for the plot of a Mozart/Da Ponte opera). However, the Bertie Wooster/Almaviva protagonist, Augusto, is not a romantic buffoon, but a tragic existentialist hero after the manner of Meursault, who is ultimately destroyed by his inability to find convincing evidence of his own existence. There is also a metatextual element, with not one but two putative authors jumping in and out of the story and arguing about whether it is a novel or something quite different, a nivola. It sounds like a mess, but Unamuno has both the charm and the intellectual strength of purpose to get away with it, and I think it would be quite readable even for someone who doesn't really care for philosophy. show less

A man comes to visit his sister, whose husband has gone crazy. He keeps telling people he's not himself--he's the Other. He refuses to respond to his own name, Cosme, and keeps on insisting that he's not who he was, that he's this Other that everybody is tired of hearing about. So the brother talks to him, and he gets pulled into the Other's existential crisis to some extent, and then the Other takes him downstairs and shows him his own dead body...except it's not him, it's the other one, show more that is, his twin. But who is the murderer and who is the victim (or, as the characters like to put it in this play, who is Cain and who is Abel?) Is he this one (Cosme) or the other one (his brother Damián)?

Pretty soon both wives are interrogating the Other, trying to figure out if he's theirs or the other's. Laura, the woman whom both brothers loved and who chose to marry Cosme, asserts that the Other is hers and she wants him to acknowledge that he is Cosme. She's pregnant and since the child needs a father, the murderous Cain-brother must be her husband. Her character is more soft and gentle than the other woman, Damiana, who presents the Other with a very similar argument as to why he is hers and he should just admit that he's Damian. These two women repeat the struggle between the two brothers, one the conqueror of Laura and the other the vanquished Damian who left town and found his Damiana. Then the mother's suddenly lamenting the whole situation and talking about how God too has an other and the Other clarifies that God's other is Destiny, and his wife is Fate...and the women keep arguing over which one the Other is, and it starts to become unclear whether the one they want is theirs...or the other, the one they have not possessed. Of course, there's really only one way out for the Other, and he takes it in the end.

I read this play as I was re-reading Niebla because I wanted to experience another of Unamuno's philosophical games. In some ways I enjoyed this more than Niebla because the interactions between characters were entertaining (I especially enjoyed Laura and Damiana's back-and-forths) and I felt the emotions of the characters were more authentic and easier to access. I haven't related too well to Augusto Pérez the two times I've read Niebla, and both times I've been quite happy to see him meet his end after discussing his existence with the author. His existential crisis is fascinating and my brain loves the book, especially the way the characters are made to be re-created by each reader who reads it; unfortunately, my heart is not moved by Augusto's person, or perhaps I'm not capable of creating my own Augusto that I can come to love and appreciate. The Other, the man around whom this play revolves, is less developed than Augusto and maybe I just don't have enough time to grow tired of his who/what/why am I dilemma. It was nice to read this book side-by-side with another of Unamuno's works, because I started to get a better feel for the world as seen by don Miguel. I really appreciate the way he delves into questions of human and novelistic existence, even if he occasionally bores me. show less

I have read some heavy handed pseudo-philosophy novels recently [The Elegance of the Hedgehog] immediately springs to mind and so it was a joy to read Unamuno’s Mist, which refuses to take itself too seriously although it deals with issues such as the insecurity of modern man and existential existence. Published in 1914 and translated from the Spanish by Marciano Guerre as recently as 2013 it starts by telling the simple story of Augusto Perez: a well to do young man who has recently lost show more his mother. He is out for his morning constitutional and for no particular reason finds himself following a young woman back to her house. He makes enquiries through the concierge and finds out that the young woman (Eugenia) is a piano teacher, he soon fancies himself as a suitor and makes more polite enquiries. Augusto lives alone with his two servants and a foundling dog and is vaguely seeking some direction to his life. He has monologues mainly addressed to his dog, has conversations with his servants and a couple of friends on the subject of women (whom he has only recently discovered) and finds himself chatting up his laundry maid Rosario. Eugenia rejects his suite as she is in love with the lazy out of work Mauricio, but when she learns about Rosario she feels slighted and sets out to win back Augusto.

The reader is alerted by the Prologue written by Victor Goti (who is a character in the novel) that all is not as it seems. A post prologue written by Unamuno questions the existence of Señor Goti and takes him to task about questioning the fate of Augusto. Goti has hinted in his prologue that Unamuno delights in playing tricks with metaphysical concepts and has been criticised for producing material that is for jesting and romping. It soon becomes clear that this is exactly what Unamuno is doing with Mist. There is irony and there is satire all encompassed in the story of Augusto’s love life which is a mystery to him and for which he seeks answers, but they all gets lost in the mist/fog of love. That may well be because of the characters that Augusto seeks out: for example the author and philosopher Paparrigopulos who is writing a book on a study of Spanish women maintaining that he only needs to study one. Paparrigopulos is also writing a book on forgotten Spanish authors who have had work published and is about to write a further book of that third class of authors; those who having thought of writing, had never got to the point of doing so.

Never trust yourself to a surgeon who has not amputated a limb of his own

Don’t take a woman to Paris; that is like taking codfish to Scotland

matrimony is an experiment …. a psychological experiment; paternity is also an experiment but … pathological

These are some of the nuggets of wisdom an ever more confused Augusto is given as he tries to make up his mind whether to pursue Eugenia or Rosario, of course he never really has that choice.

Half way into the book, Victor reveals that he is writing a novel which he calls a nivola and tells Augusto what he is doing. He says he is writing a novel just as we live and so he doesn’t know where it is going. He is asked if there is any psychology in it and he sidesteps this by saying that it will consist mainly of dialogue, because people like conversation even when it says nothing. He may be guiding his characters but at the end of the day they may well be guiding him “It often happens that an author ends by being the plaything of his own inventions” Umanuno then interjects himself to say:

“While Augusto and Victor were carrying on this ‘nivolistic' conversation, I the author of this nivola which you my dear readers are holding in your hand and reading, I was smiling enigmatically seeing my nivolistic characters advocating my case and justifying my methods of procedure. And I said to myself “Think how far these poor fellows are from suspecting that they are only trying to justify what I am doing with them! In the same fashion, whenever a man is seeking for reasons wherewith to justify himself, he is, strictly speaking, only seeking to justify God, and I am God of these two poor novelistic devils”

As a piece of Meta-fiction this book is taken right up to the denouement when Augusto travels to Salamanca to meet the author Unamuno to ague about his right to commit suicide. Unamuno will have none of it explaining that Augusto does not really exist. And so from a simple story of Augusto looking for a wife the reader is gently led down a path that becomes more weird, but the signs have been there from the start and the ride along the way if full of fun moments. I was soon entranced by this Novel/nivola’s unique atmosphere and so 4.5 stars. show less

Philosophies with legs, academics abstracted from academia, a fervor of dialogue and an idleness of musing, an anti-novel insistent upon self-discovery and a little man thinking himself into oblivion. Augusto strains to understand-the nature of love, of women, of self-but for all his talk-for he never ceases to talk-he manages only to, in straining for sense, leave himself senseless. At its best it brims with humorous wit, at its worst it drags with dry tedium, but it is always unique, and show more well worth the read. The work leaves me with the impression that if all of language is a construct, and we realize ourselves through language, then we are ourselves fictions. A book thus steeped in such linguistic self-realization really ought to be read in its own context, in its own language, but, having no intention of learning Spanish, this is the best I'll ever manage.

The letter from Eugenia is, by the way, one of the funniest missives in fiction. show less