Castalia House published Cádiz on August 4, the first English translation of the eighth entry in Benito Pérez Galdós’s Episodios Nacionales. Translator Vox Day brings this installment to English readers, set in 1810, as French forces besiege the port city of Cádiz, the last ground in Spain that Napoleon had not yet taken.
The protagonist Gabriel Araceli arrives in the besieged city and finds himself pulled into drawing-room politics while working to free a secret daughter held inside a strict Catholic household. Holding that household together is a matriarch who governs her family with the authority of a convent superior. Alongside the political and domestic intrigues: an enigmatic English lord and a militia commander who cannot manage his own troops.
Galdós wrote the Episodios Nacionales between 1872 and 1912. The full cycle runs 46 volumes, tracing Spanish history from the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 through the upheavals of the 1870s. Each book stands on its own. Scholars have compared the cycle to Balzac’s Comédie Humaine for the scope of its national portrait, and it is not a flattering comparison for Balzac. For Spanish cultural history, nothing in fiction covers the same ground with the same depth.
The first volume in the series is now available in physical format. I am personally pushing Vox Day to bring the rest out in hardcover. I want all of these on my shelf, and once you start reading you will understand why.
Cádiz is on Kindle and in Kindle Unlimited. The audiobook is also available.
If you have been sleeping on the Episodios Nacionales, which volume are you starting with? And for those already in the series: is Galdós the most under-translated major novelist in the Western canon?
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