Armando Palacio Valdés Alone, and Other Stories

This is a book of short stories by Armando Palacio Valdes (1853-1938), a Spanish writer well-known for his novels, which include Sister Saint Sulpice and The Fourth Estate. Although his novels were very popular in the English-speaking world in the nineteenth century, Palacio Valdes's shorter pieces were never published in book form and the present volume is, in fact, the first collection of his stories in English translation. Many readers will only now be acquainted with the charming tales that in the last century marked this writer as one of Spain's finest cuentistas. Like Cervantes, Palacio Valdes is fundamentally a humorist, and "Alone" and Other Stories underscores his delicious comic vein with stories like "The Curate's Colt," "The Life of a Canon," and "Seduction." But his serious side is also represented in the collection with his depiction of adolescent joy and anguish. Palacio Valdes was particularly attuned to children and dedicated the first volume of his autobiography to them. His special rapport with the young is obvious in his tales, which are replete with perceptive observations of their behavior. "Alone," for example, excels by drawing the reader into that magic and oftentimes sentimental world of father/son love, a world characterized by spontaneous intimacies, intense tenderness, and - in this case - shared estrangement from a woman conspicuously absent from a summer idyll. "Primitive Society," a story about a group of boys and one little girl, mirrors the outrage of a child who comes to grips with indignation and injustice, while "Polyphemus" chronicles the wretchedness that drives a child to seek solace in the unflagging affection of a dog. Children, however, are not the only memorable figures in Palacio Valdes's stories. As is the case with his novels, most of his short fiction is peopled with heroines who overshadow the men around them. The cruelly jilted Clotilde of "Clotilde's Romance," the adulterous Maria in "Drama in the Flies," and the young French girl in "Merci, Monsieur," for example, are sharply defined characters. Palacio Valdes writes memorable stories about dogs as well - not only in "Polyphemus," but also in "A Witness for the Prosecution." As in the other stories, he brings to his canine tales both a keen eye for detail and a keen sense of wonder at the motives and bases of human behavior. Armando Palacio Valdes is, when all is said and done, an observer firmly anchored in the realist mode.