For Vargas Llosa, Pérez Galdós was not the modern giant that they tell us

There is an added value in the criticism that one writer makes of another.

I am not referring to the one that is limited to the sparse review of novelties but to the one that unfolds in an interpretation essay.

There are not many great authors who have devoted part of their time to elucidating a foreign literary universe, and among them Mario Vargas Llosa stands out by far.

His studies on García Márquez, Víctor Hugo or Juan Carlos Onetti are excellent within their different approaches, from the more academic

(1971) and the almost programmatic

(1975), on Flaubert, to

(1996) or

(2008) on José María Arguedas and Onetti respectively.

In all these sieges shines the penetrating interpreter who offers the spectacle of a reading locked body to body.

Vargas Llosa works with works that have challenged him for some reason, whether they are novelistic monuments like

or

, or complete chores like those of García Márquez or Onetti.

This is the case of

, where he undertakes the reading of all the work, narrative and theatrical, by Benito Pérez Galdós.

The company is generous and impressive.

For the readers of Galdós, and of Vargas Llosa himself, the book is succulent, because, as was to be expected, in it he speaks both of the Canarian writer and of himself, that is to say, of his conception of literature and, specifically, of the demands of the modern novel.

Intertwined, then, with the scrutiny of the Galdosian trajectory, there is a poetics that is often expressed in prescriptive terms: what is right and what is wrong, the best and the worst.

And as with all regulations, the reader may agree or disagree with it.

It is a mandatory rule composed essentially of warnings and alerts or, in other words, of the deficiencies and failures that diminish the stature of Galdós.

The successes and achievements, many, are also underlined, but the praise is made without fanfare or hyperbole,

with the falls and insufficiencies in sight, from the assumption that Galdós cannot be compared to the great revolutionaries of the 19th century novel such as Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky or, above all, Flaubert, whose technical hyper-awareness constitutes a watershed between the ancient and the modern novel.

For Vargas Llosa, Galdós, even though he was a great writer, stayed on that side.

The Peruvian writer praises two works: Fortuna and Jacinta and Torquemada at the stake

The reasons for its pre-modernity are broken down in the novel-by-novel essay, in chronological order, from

(1870) to the “sympathetic nonsense” of

(1909).

The main of such reasons is not having understood Flaubert's lesson that the first and most decisive character in the story is the narrator, his position and distance from the story being told.

Against Flaubert's principle of abstention, Galdós interferes, judges his creatures and mocks them like a sly puppeteer.

This lack is followed by the prolixity that dilates the descriptions and certain dialogues to the point of being cumbersome, the poor organization of the narrative material, the dispersion of themes that harms the unifying effect of the central action and, finally, the language used, always stalked for the "big words".

These are, for Vargas Llosa, pure rhetoric, hollow verbiage, with a profusion of adjectives, which seek to raise the poetic tone or the intellectual prestige of the phrase and end up ruining it,

(1888).

Some of these defects could have been resolved with a rewrite, but Galdós tended to accept the first version as valid after correcting it at great length, even though he could return to the text years later.

There are many, however, the novels in which these pre-modern features fade or disappear, although the immobilizing, static gaze that Vargas Llosa attributes to Galdós persists in them.

Thus, the Peruvian writer praises two masterpieces:

and

, and very close to them

and

.

He also appreciates the values ​​of

and above all of the experimental diptych

and

, as well as saves, with reservations,

.

This Galdosian canon must be completed with some

, to which a joint chapter is dedicated, such as

or

and some theatrical pieces, such as

, the humorous jewel

(1908), the mythological rarity

(1914) and even the entertaining

(1916).

Against the Flaubertian principle of abstention, Galdós interferes and judges

This unprejudiced tour of all of Galdós (the journalistic work and some essays are left out) can serve as a practical reading guide and fuel the inexhaustible controversy over the modernity and universality of the Canarian writer, whose room was razed to the ground a couple of years ago of years Antonio Muñoz Molina and Javier Cercas.

Vargas Llosa could be reproached, in vain, for his reading being biased or, more meaningfully, for neglecting compositional virtues that are indeed modern, even for some ailment (the use of enclitic pronouns) being out of focus, but his judgments are based on arguments as precise as they are irrefutable, such as the idea that Galdós was weighed down by his militant concern for the problems of the Spain of his time and perhaps by having had to live professionally from his writing.

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