Miaow

This wonderful novel by Tristana author Perez Galdos (1843–1920) peers into 1880s Madrid through the prism of the middle-class Villaamils family. There is patriarch Ramón, an unemployed civil servant desperately seeking one final appointment so he can retire soon after on a decent pension; his spendthrift wife, Pura; her sister, Milagros; and his daughter, Abelarda. Pura, Milagros, and Abelarda regularly frequent the theater, where they have derisively been dubbed the Miaows by fellow patrons for their catlike appearance. Their humiliation is contrasted with depictions of Ramón’s “sweet and humble” young grandson, Luis, who charmingly and comically dreams of conversing with God about the fate of his family. Luis’s mother died when he was a toddler, and upon the reappearance of his absentee father, Víctor, Ramón’s son-in-law, who embodies the calculating, dishonest order of corrupt civil servants whom honest, hardworking Ramón abhors, the family fortunes become even more unpredictable. Perez Galdos reflects the characters’ theatrical predilections in arch parenthetical asides, as in Pura’s dressing down of her husband: “You’ll never be anything, and if they do give you a job, they’ll pay you a pittance, and we’ll still be in the same mess. (Growing more heated),” and he flits with remarkable ease from the hilarious to the heartbreaking. This is a tragicomic triumph. (June)