Armando Palacio Valdés
1853–1938
Biography
Armando Palacio Valdés was a Spanish novelist and literary critic who belonged to the realist generation of the later nineteenth century. He was born in 1853 in Asturias, in the parish of Entralgo in the municipality of Laviana. As a boy he moved to Oviedo to study, and later he went to Madrid to read law. In the capital he joined a circle of writers that included his friend Leopoldo Alas, known as Clarín, and he took part in the café and club life of the city. In 1924 he was briefly president of the Ateneo de Madrid.
His first novel, El señorito Octavio, appeared in 1881, and his breakthrough came two years later with Marta y María (1883), set in a town modelled on Avilés. Many of his early novels are set in Asturias, while others take him to Andalusia, Valencia and Madrid. His most famous novel, La hermana San Sulpicio (1889), follows a nun who leaves her convent and the doctor who comes to love her. He also wrote essays and criticism, succeeded José María de Pereda in the Royal Spanish Academy after Pereda's death in 1906, and was among the most widely read Spanish novelists abroad of his time, with his books translated into many languages.
Two of his novels are in this library. El idilio de un enfermo (1884) is a short, ironic story set in Asturias, and some critics count it among his most carefully made books for its simple plot and restrained portraits. Tristán o el pesimismo (1906) was the book he himself preferred. Its central figure is a man who fails because of his bleak view of humanity, a theme that had come to Palacio Valdés partly through a youthful translation of a philosophical work on pessimism. Together they show a novelist who could be light and ironic, and also deeply sceptical.
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Books
El idilio de un enfermo
by Armando Palacio Valdés
A young man from Madrid in poor health is sent to recover in a village in the Asturian mountains, where he falls in love with a country girl. The idyll he imagines meets the hard interests of village life. This book contains scenes of violence as its author wrote them.
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.Tristán o el pesimismo
by Armando Palacio Valdés
Tristán, a gifted young man who expects the worst of everyone, marries the woman he loves and sets about doubting his own happiness. Palacio Valdés sets his suspicious hero against friends who meet life with more trust, in a novel of manners about how temperament shapes fate.
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.