Tormento

Benito Perez Galdos is the most prolific Spanish novelist of the nineteenth century. Tormento is an example of his ‘contemporary novels’, in which the author describes daily life in the Spanish capital Madrid. The story has symptomes of a soap opera: the poor hard-working orphan girl Amparo, aka Tormento, being suppressed by her employer Mrs. Bringas, meets Augustin. They fall in love, but Mrs. Bringas finds out something from Tormento’s past, she gossips around, and the marriage-in-the-making endures hardship.
Perez Galdos escapes the cheap kitsch, the melodrama develops into a masterly conceived piece of criticism towards the conservative bourgeois society of those days in Spain – the novel was published in 1884 –, where the most important thing was to keep up appearances and to be against the necessary modernizations which would enable Spain to play a role of importance in Europe. JM