Description

Julio Nombela wrote for the presses that fed nineteenth-century Spain its weekly instalments, and he wrote a great deal — novels, journalism, and the memoirs that remain our best account of literary Madrid in the years of Becquer, who was his friend. This novel works the machinery its readers expected: the wronged wife, the family secret, the providential turn. What it does with that machinery is describe a marriage as a form of interment, which the title states without metaphor. Nombela is not a great writer, and the book is better for it — nothing here is shaped to impress posterity. It is the popular imagination of the 1870s, taken at its word.