Customer Reviews

Two Spanish Picaresque Novels (Penguin Classics)

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In the last few years I've read so many novels that professed to be modern Picaresque novels, that I thought that it was time to read the original Picaresco works from which they draw reference.

Lazarillo de Tormes, published anonymously in 1554, is generally acknowledged as the first example of the genre. The picaro of Lazarillo is not a career criminal, but instead a poor boy whose mother cannot feed him after his father dies. She entrusts him to the care of a blind beggar, and in his hands he learns hardship, cynicism and the sting of hunger.

The hallmark of the Picaresco is that the picaro at some point chooses the criminal indolent life and becomes the cynical tough who is able to observe the hypocricies of his daily world from outside the margins of respectability. While both of the books mine this theme, Lazarillo is in some respects more interesting since his "choice" is less clear. He is clearly motivated by poverty and hunger. Even though flawed, the satire is sharper as his pathos is deeper.

It is interesting to see how the genre evolves with The Swindler, written in 1608 by Francisco de Quevedo. The picaro in The Swindler, Pablos, is born bad. His father is a criminal barber and his mother is a witch. Every chance that he has to get money, he loses it or spends it and has to flee to a new situation with a new challenge. As with Lazaro, there is the strong sense that even if Pablo wanted to go straight, fate would be against him. Unlike Lazaro, however, Pablo has a real glee in wrong-doing that becomes nearly as much part of the point as the social satire.

These are short novels, and interesting in their own right. Must-reads for anyone interested in the Picaresque novel. Should-reads for students of Spanish literature.

I wanted to read in the area of Spanish literature, of which I am largely unfamiliar. These two novels, both short works, are wonderfully translated and they are very humorous. These works reminded me greatly of Petronius' Satyricon.

In each of these works, our hero is the down and out malcontent who narrates his life story of thieving, hustling, swindling, and cheating. Along the way, one gets a pretty good picture of the world of the poor, the working poor and the corruption of persons in many stations of life in 16th Century Spain, the clergy in particular, but also the titled, but broke gentlemen and their servants. The heroes of these novels manage to get by in a world that offers them few opportunities to get out of their meager situations and even when those chances arise, their finely honed skills of deception and deceit prove invaluable for both advancement (if one can call it that) and flight if the endeavor fails.

This crisp translation is easy to read, and captures the very personal narrative used by the authors of these works. It is a wonderful edition to a library, particularly as an affordable used book.

Vulgar, exuberant, down right nasty, late-renaissance reactions to genteel chivalric tales, these two novels do the low life long before the romantics, the fin-de-siclists and the film noirists, in fact, 100s of years before.

The book is in good conditions, but the pages are too yellow and have many underlines marks.