Galdós, 100 años después, y en el presente: Ensayos actualizadores by Víctor Fuentes

Abstract

Reviewed by: Galdós, 100 años después, y en el presente: Ensayos actualizadores by Víctor Fuentes Joan Hoffman Fuentes, Víctor. Galdós, 100 años después, y en el presente: Ensayos actualizadores. Visor Libros, 2019. Pp. 246. ISBN 978-8-49895-530-9. Víctor Fuentes, professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is a giant in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hispanic literary criticism, having prepared respected critical editions of Misericordia and La Regenta and published on such wide-ranging topics as Benito Pérez Galdós, César Vallejo, Benjamín Jarnés, Luis Buñuel, Max Aub, Isabel Allende, Pedro Almodóvar, Juan Rulfo, Antonio Machado, Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, Carlos Fuentes, Latin American film, César Chávez and the Chicano labor movement, and the literature of exile, among others; this is not a man to rest on his very substantial laurels in retirement. It should come as no surprise, then, that he has published Galdós, 100 años después, y en el presente: Ensayos actualizadores in celebration of the centenary of Pérez Galdós’s death in 2020. This is a collection of twelve articles about the life, times, and works of Galdós, some previously published, some revised, some as yet unpublished, all assembled with “el propósito de contribuir a actualizar la vigencia, riqueza y complejidad cultural y humana que su novelística sigue manteniendo en este conflictivo siglo XXI que vivimos,” as Fuentes points out in his preface (11); he understands Galdós as a figure still to be reckoned with “desde la perspectiva del presente español y mundial” (12). Fuentes’s investigations run the gamut from a tour of Galdós’s Madrid to discussions of his Novelas contemporáneas; his so-called novelas de tesis; his Episodios nacionales; his theatre; his journalism; his republicanism; women, religion, and anticlericalism in his works; Galdós as seen through the lens of the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent exile; Galdós in relation to both Juan Rulfo and Luis Buñuel. Indeed, these articles were written by a man who seemingly has read and re-read every word written by Benito Pérez Galdós as well as the plethora of criticism about those words, a man who is interested in everything. Fuentes here is constantly dialoguing with other critics and making unexpected and surprising associations. For example, he unites Cervantes, Galdós, and Machado in his discussion of El caballero encantado (167–91), and he reminds us that Galdós’s life overlapped with Federico García Lorca’s (193). By creating a continuum from the Spanish Golden Age through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and beyond, Fuentes succeeds in reviving Galdós in these pages, reminding us of his importance to the past but also of his relevance in modern times. Thus, not only is this nineteenth-century author alive in Lorca’s memories, and connected to Machado’s poetry, he is also linked to a twentieth-century Mexican author in Rulfo and an avant-garde filmmaker in Buñuel; further, through Misericordia, Fuentes connects Galdós to Mother Teresa (128) and to Pope Frances through Antonio Machado (135); he reads Gloria in light of “el fanatismo y los odios religiosos y étnicos, tan presentes y devastadores, mundialmente, en nuestros días” (151); and he links “el ideal de una España republicana, democrática, y popular, por la cual el Benito Pérez Galdós republicano militó entre 1907 y 1913” with the work of the great hispanists Ángel del Río and Joaquín Casalduero as they wrote and taught in exile after the civil war (29). It is of no coincidence, then, that Víctor Fuentes dedicates Galdós, 100 años después, y en el presente: Ensayos actualizadores to Ángel del Río and Joaquín Casalduero; they were, after all, his professors in this sustained continuum of writing, reading, and teaching. I, a professor of Spanish literature, and as such a point on that continuum as well, find myself pondering how many students were influenced by Del Río and...