Galdós’s novel of a devout, bigoted town, B2

Doña Perfecta Doña Perfecta

Name: Doña Perfecta
Author: Benito Pérez Galdós

Benito Pérez Galdós

Benito Pérez Galdós’s complete novel of 1876, not an adaptation, in the text of a Boston school edition from which the editor’s introduction, notes and vocabulary are left out. In the catalog it is B2: about 64,100 words and 15 words per sentence on average. 33 chapters about the engineer Pepe Rey and his devout aunt in the town of Orbajosa; chapter III, the backstory, is the hardest, and the quarrels of the middle chapters run largely on dialogue.

B2
64 082 words
11-18 hours

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Will this text hold?

B1

Earlier

At B1 chapter III, with its long sentences of background, and the sharp portraits of the town in chapters II, V and IX will be slow going, and old forms like marchóse and movíase need unpacking; read the quarrel chapters with word translation turned on.

B2

This text

You can manage it at B2: the arguments between Pepe, his aunt and the town come in lively dialogue with short lines, and the descriptive and explanatory chapters can be read slowly, translating single words.

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C1

With room to spare

At C1 the novel reads freely; only the ironic descriptions of Orbajosa and its notables, with their grand words and old spellings like fué and obscuras, slow you down.

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The average sentence has 15 words: level with Marianela (15) and Jungle Tales (15), longer than Mist (13), and well short of The Three-Cornered Hat (18) and Captain Poison (20). 9.8 percent of the words have 9 letters or more, more than in Marianela (8.7) and close to the 9.9 percent at which the catalog starts to count a complete text as C1; the moderate sentence length is what keeps it at B2. The difficulty is uneven: chapter III, the backstory of Pepe Rey, averages 25 words per sentence and chapters V and IX about 21, while the quarrel scenes of chapters VIII, X, XIV and XVII run at 11 to 14 words and the closing chapters XXX and XXXI at about 10 to 11. Old forms like marchóse and movíase, and old accents like vió and fué, add some work. Hence B2. This is the catalog’s assessment, not a certificate.

64 082: words
15: words in an average sentence
11-18: hours of reading

Ginn and Company. Project Gutenberg

What it is about, without the ending

Pepe Rey, a young engineer from Madrid, arrives at night in the provincial town of Orbajosa to stay with his aunt, Doña Perfecta, and to marry his cousin Rosario, as their families once agreed. The town is pious, proud and suspicious of everything that comes from outside, and the household is ruled by religion and by the opinion of the local priests and notables. At first he is received with open arms, but a dispute over land, his plain speech and his modern ideas turn his aunt and the town against him, and the quarrel grows chapter by chapter, with Rosario caught between them. How far it goes and who wins is not revealed here.

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Doña Perfecta

I. Villahorrenda!... cinco minutos!...

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XI. La discordia crece

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Project Gutenberg

Pronouns after the verb

Marchóse and movíase put the pronoun after the verb (marchó + se, movía + se), the bookish order of 1876 that today lives mostly in writing: read them as se marchó and se movía. Vió and concluído also carry accents that modern spelling has dropped (vio, concluido). The first sentence hangs on one verb, marchóse, so find it first and the rest falls into place.

Praise that mocks

Galdós describes the gentlemen of the Casino in grand words (varones insignes, lo más granado, las augustas salas), but the details undercut them: they ask only for a crust of bread and the sun, and they take every visitor for an enemy of their town. Read the pompous adjectives as a sign that the narrator is joking. Creíanle is again a pronoun after the verb: le creían.

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Chapters

Translation while you read

The book stays free on every plan. Reader, €1 a month, removes the daily limit on words and sentences.

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In chapter I one sentence runs “el cual movíase al compás de la marcha, proyectando geométricas series de ondulaciones luminosas”: the old word order (movíase for se movía) and the participle at the end make it easy to lose the thread, and translating the whole sentence in Reader shows how the pieces fit together.

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Before you read

Is this the original or a learner adaptation?

It is the original, not a learner’s abridgement: Benito Pérez Galdós’s complete novel of 1876, all 33 chapters up to the two-sentence closing chapter XXXIII. The text comes from Project Gutenberg and follows a Boston school edition published by Ginn and Company, which printed the novel in full; its introduction, notes and vocabulary are left out, so only Galdós’s own text remains.

Is there an audiobook?

Doña Perfecta 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 rare or bookish words such as cuchufletas or preeminencias.

Can I translate a whole sentence?

Yes, with the Reader plan. In this novel it helps most in the long explanatory chapter III, which averages 25 words per sentence, and in sentences like “el cual movíase al compás de la marcha, proyectando geométricas series de ondulaciones luminosas” in chapter I. Without the plan, single words are translated up to the daily limit.

How many hours does it take?

The whole novel takes about 11-18 hours: the pace of someone reading with translation of new words, slower than a native speaker’s. Chapters are very uneven, from about 700 to 3,800 words, with a few short ones (the letters of chapters XXVIII and XXIX and the closing XXXIII), so one or two chapters make an evening.

Where does the text get easier?

The difficulty is uneven rather than steadily rising. Chapters III, V and IX are the densest, at about 25, 21 and 21 words per sentence; the quarrel scenes of chapters VIII, X, XIV and XVII run at 11 to 14 words, and chapters XXX and XXXI are the easiest, at about 10 to 11.

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 33 chapters also opens from the contents on this page, for example chapter III, where the story turns to Pepe Rey’s past.

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