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English
New York Review Books
15 October 2016
Now in new translations, these two novels by the father of the modern Spanish short story have been unavailable in the United States for decades. Perfect for fans of Spanish and 19th-century literature.

The unlikely hero of His Only Son, Bonifacio Reyes, is a romantic and a flautist by vocation-and a failed clerk and kept husband by necessity-who dreams of a novelesque life. Tied to his shrill and sickly wife by her purse strings, he enters timidly into a love affair with Serafina, a seductive second-rate opera singer, encouraged by her manager who mistakes Bonifacio for a potential patron. Meanwhile, Bonifacio's wife experiences a parallel awakening and in the midst of a long-barren marriage, surprises them both with a son-but is it Bonifacio's? In the accompanying novella, Dona Berta, the heroine of the title, an aged, poor, but well-born woman, forfeits her beloved estate in search of a portrait that may be all that remains of the secret love of her life.

While largely unknown outside of Spain, Leopoldo Alas was one of the most celebrated writers of criticism in nineteenth-century Spain and employed his satirical talents to powerful and humorous effect in fiction. His Only Son was Alas's second and final novel, full of characteristic humor, naturalistic detail, descriptive beauty, and moral complexity. His frail and pitiful characters-irrational, emotional actors drawn inexorably toward their foolish fates-are yet multidimensional individuals, often conscious of their own weaknesses and stymied by their very yearnings to be more than the parts they find themselves playing.
By:   ,
Imprint:   New York Review Books
Country of Publication:   United States
Edition:   Main
Dimensions:   Height: 202mm,  Width: 127mm,  Spine: 16mm
Weight:   344g
ISBN:   9781681370187
ISBN 10:   1681370182
Pages:   344
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Leopoldo Alas (1852-1901) was the son of a government official, born in Zamora, Spain. He attended the University of Oviedo and the University of Madrid, receiving a doctorate in law. A novelist and writer of short stories who adopted the pseudonym Clarin (Bugle), Alas was one of Spain's most influential literary critics. He became a professor of law at the University of Oviedo in 1883 and published his first and best-known novel, La Regenta, in 1884; his second novel, Su onico hijo (His Only Son), was published in 1890. He died in Oviedo at the age of forty-nine. Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for nearly thirty years and has translated works by novelists such as E a de Queir z, Jose Saramago, Javier Marias, and Fernando Pessoa, as well as poets such as Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and Ana Luisa Amaral. She has won various prizes, most recently the 2015 Marsh Award for Children's Fiction in Translation for Bernardo Atxaga's The Adventures of Shola. In 2013 she was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2014 was awarded an Order of the British Empire for services to literature. In 2015 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Leeds.

Reviews for His Only Son

His Only Son is the most intense, the most refined, the most intellectual, and the most sensual novel that nineteenth-century Spanish literature has produced. -Azorin When I read His Only Son and Dona Berta, I was bowled over by the audacity of the plots, by the diverse cast of characters, and by Alas's ability to be entirely engaged by his characters. -Margaret Jull costa, from the introduction A delight to read. -A Common Reader blog A Flaubert-type novel [that] displays the author's power of psychological analysis. -Harvey L. Johnson, The South Central Bulletin


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