I. Capítulo 1
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A novel of the Albufera lake for C1
Reeds and Mud Cañas y barro
Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, 1916
Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s complete novel of 1902, not an adaptation. In the catalog it is C1: about 74,900 words and 20 words per sentence on average. Ten long chapters about the fishermen of El Palmar, a village on the Albufera lake near Valencia, where three generations of one family quarrel over the water, the land and the tavern.
- C1
- 74 907 words
- 12-21 hours
Will this text hold?
B2
Earlier
At B2 the lake vocabulary (chubasquero, capazos, alpargatas) and long descriptive sentences will slow you down on every page, and the old spelling á for a takes getting used to.
B2C1
This text
You can read it at C1: the 20-word sentences run in long descriptive paragraphs, and the fishermen’s words are guessable from context or one tap away.
Check this passageC2
With room to spare
At C2 the novel reads freely; only the regional words of the Albufera still send you to a translation now and then.
Start readingThe average sentence has 20 words, and about one word in ten (10.5%) has 9 letters or more. That is the profile of the catalog’s C1 texts: La barraca, by the same author and from the same Valencian region, has 21 words per sentence and 10.2% long words, Un viaje de novios has 20 and 10.2%, La dama de las camelias 17 and 10.3%. Niebla, a B2 novel, has 13 words and 6.9%. The difficulty is fairly even: chapters 1-8 run from 18 to 22 words per sentence, and the last two are lighter, at about 16. The load comes from the vocabulary of the lake and the fishermen (barracas, chubasquero, capazos, alpargatas) and from the old spelling of the edition, such as á for a. Hence C1. This is the catalog’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 74 907
- words
- 20
- words in an average sentence
- 12-21
- hours of reading
- 1916
- Prometeo
Prometeo, 1916. Project Gutenberg
What it is about, without the ending
In El Palmar, a fishing village built of reeds and mud on the Albufera lake, old tío Paloma lives in the oldest barraca with his son Tòni and Tòni’s wife, la Borda. Tòni and la Borda spend every day carrying baskets of earth to fill in the marsh and win a rice field from the lake, while the old man grows tired of work and the grandson, Tonet, would rather idle in the tavern of the sickly Cañamèl and his young wife Neleta. Debts, rivalries and a dangerous attachment pull the family apart, and the lake does not give way easily. How it ends for them is not revealed here.
Compare two places
Cañas y barro
V. Capítulo 5
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Choose an underlined word.
The old á
In this edition the preposition a is still written á (llegar á los espacios, á las barracas), and o sometimes appears as ó. Read them as plain a and o. The setting is Valencian: El Palmar is the village, the Albufera the lake it stands on, and the barca-correo is the mail boat, the village’s only link with Valencia.
Entrábase and the title tío
Entrábase con gran confianza is entraba with the pronoun se moved to the end, an old bookish order: the verb comes first and the reflexive follows. Tío before a name (tío Paco, tío Paloma) does not mean uncle: it is how villagers address an older man, a title of respect.
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
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In chapter 5, in a sentence like “un buen amigo, que, si guardaba buena conducta y era laborioso, iría lejos, muy lejos”, the conditions are tucked between commas: translating the whole sentence in Reader shows how they hang together.
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Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
It is the original, not a learner’s abridgement: Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s complete novel of 1902, all 10 chapters. The reader follows the edition of Prometeo (Valencia), with a 1916 copyright, taken from Project Gutenberg. The spelling is that of the time, so á stands for a.
Is there an audiobook?
Reeds and Mud 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 the vocabulary of the lake and the fishermen, such as chubasquero or capazos.
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes, with the Reader plan. It helps most in the long sentences with conditions tucked between commas, such as “un buen amigo, que, si guardaba buena conducta y era laborioso, iría lejos, muy lejos”. Without the plan, single words are translated up to the daily limit.
How many hours does it take?
The whole novel takes about 12-21 hours: the pace of someone reading with translation of new words, slower than a native speaker’s. Chapters are long, from about 3,700 words (chapter 10) to about 14,000 (chapter 3), so plan on a chapter over two or three evenings.
Where does the text get easier?
The difficulty is fairly even. Chapters 1-8 run at 18-22 words per sentence with a long word every ninth or tenth word; the last two, chapters 9 and 10, are lighter, at about 16 words. The vocabulary of the lake is dense from the first page, so the real relief comes only toward the end.
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 come back to the novel every evening where you left off. Any of the 10 chapters also opens from the contents on this page, for example chapter 3.