With the figure of Miguel Delibes placeholder image Something very unique happens to me. A kind of fatal reading and a kind of very timely rereading. I mean... I read one of his considered the greatest novel «Five hours with Mario»At the Institute, under the label of compulsory reading. And I certainly finished up to the crown of Mario and his mourners ...
I understand that I can be called frivolous for crossing out this novel as irrelevant, but things happen as they do and at that time I was reading readings of a very different nature.
But ... (in life there are always buts capable of transforming everything) a long time later I dared with The Heretic and the luck of my reading taste changed the label marked for this great author.
It is not that one novel and another are outrageous, it was more about my circumstances, the free choice of a reading, the literary residue that one already accumulates over the years ..., or precisely that, of the years lived. I don't know, a thousand things.
The point is that in the second place I think that I was encouraged by Los Santos Inocentes and already later with many other works by this same author. Until finally discovering that back in 1920 when Delibes was born, maybe a Perez Galdos who died that same year, he reincarnated in it to continue giving us that vision of literary Spain, the most certain of all.
So, from my unorthodox point of view, here you can find a reading guide on Delibes. You just need to find yourself at the best time to delve into the simple and exceptional world of Delibes.
Top 3 recommended novels by Miguel Delibes
The heretic
Thanks to this novel I returned to the Delibes reading religion, so for me it occupies the peak of the pyramid of his best novels. Sometimes I think that when a writer starts telling you something that you don't seem to give a damn about, and yet goes and beats you to the story, he's done something damn right. Getting involved with Cipriano Salcedo's experiences in his native Valladolid is as simple as turning the first page.
The good Cipriano provides an alienated perspective in the middle of a 16th century where ending up as an orphan breastfed by a wet nurse did not bode well for a promising future. How Cipriano managed to get ahead when all sentimental ties were being cut mercilessly is part of the story, enough to outline a character who, in his adulthood, presents himself to us as a fascinating guy, full of vital wisdom. that overwhelms anyone who crosses its path.
Except that Cipriano, considered for himself a lost cause in human terms, without roots or family memories, usually takes difficult, if not lost, causes as a basis to advance his destiny, even if this means facing the Inquisition itself.
Cipriano is a character who flies over the prevailing false morality and who understands that the passion for living in all its edges is the only belief that can remain as an argument before any final judgment.
The disputed vote of Senor Cayo
How to explain politics and democracy as something really inconsequential in modern times. In this book I discover a kind of metaphor.
Mr. Cayo may be any of us, inhabiting the remote town of our existence, where politics and its decisions delivered to the satisfaction of superior interests are absolutely irrelevant.
And the young people who come to town to scratch the vote of the two inhabitants of the town are convinced of their political cause, of their democratic faction, until they collide with the wisdom of the good man of Cayo who, in his happening from sunrise to sunset and his existence in that space still balanced between nature and humanity refutes each and every one of its postulates, perhaps not so much with the intention of discovering the truth ...
Because Caius knows that the truth is each person's own, and his is made up of his days away from noise, his memories and his chores.
A contrast between that people's politics and a hyper-realistic representative of that town, a dichotomy between urban and rural consciousness, a kind of moral about how much we may be wrong ...
The Holy Innocents
For me this novel shows the vestiges of the last imperial Spain as real as it was decadent. The old past glories lasted, thanks to the deception of the Regime, until those last days outlined by Delibes.
A sort of deception carried out by the wealthy few on the illiterate and impoverished mass that even in the 60s trusted God and their owners with blind faith.
Through the steppes and meadows of Extremadura we meet Paco and Régula, together with their children Nieves, Quirce, Rosario and Charito, a family masterfully outlined by Delibes as old ghosts with outdated ideals and minds governed by fear.
The harsh earth, the harsh voice of the master, the harsh life and a sense of deterioration that almost permeates you as you read. A total novel to explain what we were until very recently.
