I. Capítulo 1
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A Valencia family novel about debts, for C1
Rice and Tartana Arroz y tartana
Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, 1978
Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s complete novel from 1894, not an adaptation. In the catalog it is C1: about 90,900 words and 22 words per sentence on average. 12 chapters about doña Manuela, a former market shopkeeper, and her children in Valencia, who live like rich people on money they do not have; chapters I and II are the densest, and chapters V, XI and XII read lightest.
- C1
- 90 857 words
- 15-25 hours
Will this text hold?
B2
Earlier
At B2 the long descriptive sentences of chapters I and II, with their stacked clauses and literary word order (regocijábase, amontonábanse), will slow you down, as will the vocabulary of fabrics, shops and the stock exchange.
B2C1
This text
You can manage it at C1: the dialogue is quick and the narrator’s long sentences fall into clauses once you know the setting, with single words translated as you go.
Check this passageC2
With room to spare
At C2 it reads freely; only some period terms of trade, dress and finance still need a glance.
Start readingThe average sentence has 22 words, and one word in nine has 9 letters or more (11.1%). That puts the novel next to Blasco Ibáñez’s other C1 books in the catalog: La barraca (21 words per sentence, 10.2% long words), Cañas y barro (20 words, 10.5%) and Sangre y arena (17 words, 10.6%). The difficulty is uneven: chapter II, which tells the legend of the Mercado, averages about 30 words per sentence and chapter I about 25, while chapters V, XI and XII drop to 16-20. Lively dialogue helps, but the narrator’s long, stacked sentences and the vocabulary of shops, fabrics, loans and the stock exchange keep it above B2. Hence C1. This is the catalog’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 90 857
- words
- 22
- words in an average sentence
- 15-25
- hours of reading
- 1978
- Plaza & Janés
Plaza & Janés, 1978. Project Gutenberg
What it is about, without the ending
On Christmas Eve in Valencia, doña Manuela, a former shopkeeper of the Mercado and now the widow of Pajares, crosses the market square in her mantilla with the coachman and the maid behind her. She wants the whole city to see a rich and respectable lady. At home her daughters Concha and Amparo are raised for the ballroom, her son Rafael spends freely, and the family keeps a carriage, a chalet in Burjasot and a calendar of dinners and balls, while her eldest son Juanito works and serves the others. Behind the show are unpaid bills, loans and dreams of easy money on the stock exchange. How long the pretence holds, and who pays for it, is not revealed here.
Compare two places
Verb first, pronoun last
Blasco Ibáñez writes regocijábase and amontonábanse where everyday Spanish says se regocijaba and se amontonaban: the pronoun is attached after the verb, as in literary narration of his time. Read it as the usual form with se moved forward. The long sentence about the crowd hangs on one subject, un pueblo, and one verb, regocijábase: find those two first, and the rest is detail.
A description that smiles
The narrator sums up the house in paired phrases: tan bonito como frágil, and trees that “groan” on a layer of rock. Read these descriptions as gentle irony: everything looks grand and is cheaply made, like the show the family puts on. Each semicolon adds one more detail to the same picture, so take the sentence one piece at a time.
Chapters
Translation while you read
The book stays free on every plan. Reader, €1 a month, removes the daily limit on words and sentences.
Reader
€1 a month
In the Christmas Eve market scene the verb comes late and with its pronoun attached (“amontonábanse las nubes de alimentos”): translating the whole sentence in Reader helps you see who does what in a very long description.
ReaderIf this book is not the one
All books at this levelBefore you read
Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
It is the original, not a learner’s abridgement: Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s complete novel, all 12 chapters, which closes with the date “Valencia, 1894”. The reader text comes from the Plaza & Janés edition of 1978, as digitised by Project Gutenberg.
Is there an audiobook?
Arroz y tartana has no audiobook on MovaReader: here the novel is read on screen. The translation appears when you tap a word, and you will need it most for words of cloth and trade such as indianas and percalinas, and for rare words such as tufillo or atracones.
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes, with the Reader plan. In this novel it helps most in chapters I and II, where sentences average about 25 and 30 words, for example in the market scene that ends with “amontonábanse las nubes de alimentos”. Without the plan, single words are translated up to the daily limit.
How many hours does it take?
The whole novel takes about 15-25 hours: the pace of someone reading with translation of new words, slower than a native speaker’s. Chapters are long, from about 3,600 to 12,100 words, so plan one chapter over one or two evenings.
Where does the text get easier?
It is fairly even rather than getting easier. Chapter II is the densest, at about 30 words per sentence, and chapter I follows at about 25; the remaining chapters sit between 16 and 25, with chapters V, XI and XII the lightest, at about 16-20.
Will my place in the book be saved?
Yes. Once you sign in, the reader keeps your last place and the words you opened, so you can return to the novel each evening where you left off. Any of the 12 chapters also opens from the contents on this page.