Pedro Antonio de Alarcón (1833–1891)

This book was hilarious!

I am glad to have given this story a chance. While I have enjoyed every book I read by Jane Austen, it is fun to give a chance to other contemporary writers that are far less known. On this occasion, I gave El Capítán Veneno (Captain Poison) a chance and started reading it with zero knowledge what the novella is about. Head's up, I read this story in Spanish. I am not sure if an English translation even exists.

Taking place in mid 1800's Madrid, our rom-com begins show more where a young 20-something woman (hilariously named Angustias which roughly translates to Anxieties in English) watches a terrible battle in the streets between pro monarchy factions and rebels.

Her mother, a recently widowed wife of a monarchist soldier who died in the name of duty named Teresa beckons her daughter to hide from errant bullets. Oh, but if Angustias didn't watch the street, we'd have no story. What happens next sets the stage for the hilarity to ensue. A 40 something man with mismatched civilian and officer attire ends up badly wounded defending their street.

Angustias ignores her mom's pleas, asks the house maid Rosa to drag the poor guy inside to safety and fetches the neighborhood doctor. The man is unconscious from a concussion and bleeding to death. Despite arriving immediately, the doctor isn't certain the soldier will survive the night.

Luckily for the story, the guy survives and... He is very, very, very pissed off he's being babysitted by three strange women. What is worse, the doctor stated he will need to live in Teresa's house for the next two months while his fractured leg wound heals. If he is taken by stretcher to a hospital or back to his own home, he'll end up needing a leg amputation.

Stuck in a house, Capitán Don Jorge de Córdoba is going to make their lives a living hell.

The book is zany, over-the-top and insanely funny. I do feel the romance side of the story could have been developed a bit better, which knocked down 1 star for me. However, this was a very funny quick read that was entertaining from beginning to the end. Given this book is now public domain, I am wondering when an author is willing to make a more modern version of this rom-com story. show less

I appreciated this slightly more than I might have done because it followed Dickens’ The Signalman (see my review HERE) in Manguel’s anthology: both feature sightings that seems to predict, or maybe cause, disaster.

This one is set between Madrid and Segovia, and is nested and third-hand (not uncommon with ghost stories), hence an early reference to Hamlet.

“What do we know, my friends?”
I liked the symmetry and ambiguity of the opening and closing sentences explicitly inviting the show more listener or reader to make up their own minds about what really happened and why.
“I leave it to the judgment of every one of my readers.”

On the downside, although I realise it was published in 1881, the correlation between ugliness and assumed malign intent, the general misogyny, and his visceral fear of sex and the opposite sex, was unpleasant to the extent the twist and reveal did nothing for me.

Short story club

I read this in Black Water: The Anthology of Fantastic Literature, by Alberto Manguel, from which I’m reading one story a week with The Short Story Club, starting 4 September 2023.

You can read this story here. It’s the Schulz translation that matches the one in Manguel’s anthology.

You can join the group here. show less

Well, "The Nail and Other Stories" turned out to be "The Nail and One Other Story Which Is Only Ten Pages Long and Is Much Better Than The Damn Nail". Too bad mr. Pedro Antonio de Alarcón was so infatuated with Poe. He could have written something better if he weren't trying so hard to imitate him. Thankfully, this was merely the first of his literary attempts. He was later to become one of Spain's most important novelists of the 19th century, certainly one of the most distinguished writers show more within the country's realist tradition. His books El Sombrero de Tres Picos (The Three-Cornered Hat) and El Escándalo (The Scandal), written during the 1870s gained him national and international fame. But, alas, this is still the 1850s and The Nail is predictable, unoriginal and, frankly, quite boring. What's funny is that the writer seems to be aware of this: in one of the rare moments where the narrator addresses the reader directly, he reveals the story's "dramatic" conclusion before it even happens by saying something like "you probably imagined, just like I did, that *insert dramatic ending* would happen". Yep, we did imagine it. So is Alarcón under the impression that we just want our suspicions confirmed? That we'll be interested in reading about something that we already knew would happen just because we want to hear it from the narrator himself? Sorry, hombre. Wrong again.

"La Corneta de Llaves" then follows 'El Clavo", and for a moment I'm thinking maybe I was too harsh on the guy. But unfortunately, it's too little, too late. show less

Una historia de amor bien llevada. Con momentos muy ingeniosos aunque un poco pesada en otros.