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Miaow

Miaow

by Benito Pérez Galdós, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

$17.95
$17.95
Available as E-Book Spanish Literature
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The July 2025 selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club

Ramón Villaamil has been a loyal civil servant his whole life, but a change in government leaves him out of a job and still two months short of qualifying for his pension. Initially optimistic that he'll be able to find work and pull his family out of financial straits, he spends his days visiting the administration, pestering his ex-colleagues to put in a good word for him, and begging his friends in high places for money. At home, Villaamil's wife, daughter, and sister-in-law—whose feline appearances earn them the nickname the Miaows—are unimpressed by Villaamil's failures, and the only joy left in his life is his young grandson, Luis. When Luis's disgraced father, the handsome and dastardly Víctor Cadalso, reappears in their lives with promises of easing their financial burdens, Villaamil has no choice but to allow him back into their midst, even though he knows there's nothing pure about Víctor's intentions and his return might spell their ruin.

Benito Pérez Galdós's satire of middle-class life bears comparison with the novels of Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac, serving up a scathing critique of the hypocrisy and corruption of nineteenth-century Spanish society and the dehumanizing rituals of work. Margaret Jull Costa's new translation brings out the tragedy, the comedy, and the vitality of Pérez Galdós's prose.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681379470
Pages: 304
Publication Date:

Praise

Benito Pérez Galdós is the best Spanish writer of the nineteenth century.
—Mario Vargas Llosa

Pérez Galdós is the supreme Spanish novelist of the 19th century. His scores of novels are rightly compared with the work of Balzac and Dickens who were his masters, and even with Tolsoy's.... The secret of the gift of Galdos lies, I think, in his timing, his leisurely precision and above all in his ear for dialogue...
—V.S. Pritchett

[Pérez] Galdós was the great novelist of Madrid, chronicling bourgeois, urban manners with a clarity and understanding critics have found comparable to that of Dickens, Balzac and Flaubert.
—Raymund A. Paredes, Los Angeles Times

Pérez Galdós is one of the treasures of 19th-century Spanish fiction.
—William Ferguson, The New York Times

[Pérez Galdós's] prophetic gift for singling out those issues that were bound to transcend and outlast his own milieu was equaled only by his knack for keeping them controversial and alive in his fiction by refusing to take a clear-cut position on them.
—Hispanic Review

[Pérez] Galdós immersed himself in the realities of his day and recorded them accurately.
—Symposium Magazine

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