Manso the Friend

Pérez Galdós, Benito, 1843-1920Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 4.1
Word count
529K words
Chapters
53

Tags

Foreign Language Books Foreign Literature Social ObservationSpanish SocietyPortrait GalleryTeacher-Student RelationshipPsychological InsightGrowing UpIdeals and RealitySatirical Style

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.El amigo Manso by Benito Pérez GaldósAuthor: Pérez Galdós, Benito, 1843-1920,Language: Spanish, Class: PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Release Date: Sep 16, 2017

Editor's review

El amigo Manso is a major work by the Spanish realist novelist Benito Pérez Galdós. Through the perspective of its protagonist Manso, a rationalist teacher, it portrays the social manners and human types of nineteenth-century Madrid and the conflicts of ideals. Galdós excels at portraying characters with fine psychological detail and an ironic touch; the novel is rich in narrative layers, offering both observations of social mores and reflections on the gap between personal conviction and reality. As a free Project Gutenberg ebook, the Spanish original is easily accessible, making it suitable for Spanish-major reading practice, as supplementary material for courses on Spanish literature, or for independent study by readers interested in nineteenth-century European realist fiction. When reading, it is advisable to pay attention to the narrator's distinctive perspective and its relation to the author's attitude, which helps in understanding the work's ironic intent.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Learn about nineteenth-century Spanish society first, then enter the text, to better grasp the targets of its irony
  2. Note the limits of the narrator Manso's perspective and reflect as you read on the biases in his self-perception
  3. Read it alongside other novels by Galdós to observe his techniques of characterization
  4. Use an annotated Spanish edition or a literary guide to ease the difficulty of long sentences and period vocabulary

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53

FAQ

What level of Spanish is needed for this book? An intermediate or higher reading ability in Spanish is recommended, sufficient to handle longer complex sentences and nineteenth-century literary vocabulary. Spanish majors may read it under a teacher's guidance; self-learners should first try a sample passage to assess the lexical and syntactic difficulty before deciding whether to read it through.
What are the features of the Project Gutenberg edition? This edition is a free ebook released by Project Gutenberg in Spanish, easy to download and read across devices. It provides the public-domain original text and usually contains no modern scholarly notes or introduction; readers who need background material must consult other sources.
What deserves the most attention while reading? Focus on the gap between the narrator Manso's perspective and his self-assessment, and on how the novel presents social mores through everyday interpersonal interactions. Grasping these two points helps in understanding the work's layers of irony and its realist aims.

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About the author

Pérez Galdós, Benito, 1843-1920 Author

Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) is a major representative of Spanish realist fiction, with 39 of his works held in this collection. Public information is limited, so biographical details are kept brief, but the character of his work is clear: he generally sets his stories against everyday life in Spanish cities and villages, portraying society through themes such as marriage, family, poverty and shifts in class. Representative works including Fortunata y Jacinta, Misericordia, Marianela, Tormento and La de Bringas reflect this direction. His style combines realism with irony, with careful psychological portrayal and vivid dialogue; historical works such as Trafalgar show his ability to handle broad settings. His writing has had a lasting influence on later Spanish fiction.