Search

Pepita Jiménez depicts the gradual realization by a young seminarian of the empty vanity of his vocation, while he falls in love on the eve of his ordination. The novel gives a view of rural life in the Andalusian region of Spain. The story touches on themes of physical versus spiritual love and finding one's true path in life.

Content with her tertuha, or gathering of close friends, her devotions, her books, and her daily routine, Dona Luz is unmoved by the prospect of marriage, because of her illegitimacy and her extremely modest financial status." "But then two men enter her life: Father Enrique, the ailing missionary nephew of Don Acisclo who returns from the Philippines to rest, and Don Jaime Pimentel, the dashing young military man whom Don Acisclo has chosen to back as the district representative in an uncoming election. How Dona Luz responds to both men determines the direction her life will take and the manner in which her illegitimacy will be explained."--Jacket.

"The story of Dan Fadrique Lopez de Mendoza, a man of seafaring adventures and a deist in the mould of the eighteenth-century philosophes, and Dona Blanca Roldan de Solis, a woman of unbounded pride and a Catholic driven by religious fanaticism, neither of which traits prevented her from having had an adulterous affair as a young woman in Lima, Peru, with Don Fadrique."--Back cover.

Translated into English, the novel Morsamor is set in 1521. Morsamor is a young Spaniard whose name is the combination of the Latin words for Death and Love. He is accompanied by a lay brother serving him as a squire, and who is skilled with many attributes that facilitate Morsamor's successes. They sail from Lisbon to circumnavigate the world by going east. The bulk of the novel is the story of their many adventures. Later, Morsamor wakes back in the monastery an old man nearing death, wondering if his dreams were real or imagined, and with the desire to cleanse his soul.

Juanita la Larga (1896), the third of Juan Valera's eponymous novels with a female protagonist, unfolds in a small town in nineteenth-century Spain and tells the story of a young girl's romance with a wealthy widower many years her senior.

IN this work of Juan Valera we find that complete synthesis of gravity of matter and gaiety of manner which is the glittering crown of art, and which out of Spanish literature is to be found only in Shakespeare, and even in him in a far less obvious degree. It is only in Spanish literature, with the one exception of Dante, that religion and art are discovered to be not necessarily hostile powers; and it is in Spanish literature only, and without any exception, that gaiety of life is made to appear as being not only compatible with, but the very flower of that root which in the best works of other literatures hides itself in the earth, and only sends its concealed sap through stem and leaf of human duty and desire. The reason of this great and admirable singularity seems mainly to have been the singular aspect of most of the best Spanish minds toward religion. With them, religion has been, as it was meant to be, a human passion; they have regarded dogma as the form of realisable, and, by them, realised experience; and the natural instincts of humanity as the outlines of the lineaments of the Divinity-"very God and very man." Witness the writings of their greatest saints and theologians, in which dogma is, as it was, fused in, and becomes psychology, instead of remaining, as it has done with us, a rock, indeed of refuge to many, but a rock of stumbling and offence to many more, and of these especially such as have been endowed with the artistic temperament.

"Don Faustino Lopez de Mendoza, scion of an illustrious but impoverished family of the highest nobility, believes himself destined for great accomplishments in the literary world, sees himself as a poet of the first rank, and immerses himself in grand, if not grandiose, illusions. While living in a provincial Andalusian town and dreaming of triumphing in Madrid's artistic circles, Faustino embarks on a discovery of love with three women. How he extricates himself from each relationship and meets his sad end constitutes the denouement of this searching novel that depicts the deleterious effects of the Romantic malaise that swept through western Europe in the early part of the nineteenth century."--BOOK JACKET.

Morsamor es la ultima novela escrita por Juan Valera. En la misma se mezclan escenas que bien pudieran salir de un antiguo libro de caballeria, con la aventura moderna, una aventura tanto del cuerpo como del espiritu, donde realidad y leyenda se mezclan como en un sueno despierto y revelador.