La madre de F

 I finished La madre de Frankenstein. The novel is long and tedious, and I only could finish it because I dared myself to. The narrative material with which Grandes is working is inherently interesting. It is not as though she chose a dull subject. My problem is that the novel doesn't do much with it in narrative terms. Since the book is based on real events, it runs the risk of not being as interesting as a nonfiction account of these same events might have been. For the murder of the child, we only get the self-serving justifications of the insane mother, no real reckoning in ethical terms. 

The comparison with Galdós that she is inviting by calling these books "episodios de una guerra interminable" is misleading, because Galdós's episodios are quick to read and vigorously written. Grandes is just interminable. The didactic set pieces are unbearable, but too intermittent to add up to very much. 

Everything in the novel is explicit, right there on the surface. There is no narrative mystery, suspense, or tension, no doubt about what we are supposed to think about the characters at any moment, or about the political situation in Spain. The central character, Germán, can do no wrong. All of his motives seem pure, even in his sexual adventures, and he is not convincing in the least. María is better developed as a character than he is, but there is almost too much packed into her, in contrast with the other characters. 

Once again, the problem is not a lack of narrative inventiveness. What happens in the novel is memorable, but it simply is not well narrated in structural terms.  There are a lot things that the reader (this reader at least) simply does not care about, like the side-plot of the Jewish woman Rebecca (Germán's wife) and her Nazi soldier lover.  

It could be that I am not a patient reader of fiction. This is true, but I do love Galdós. I think there has to be something hidden from the reader, what Henry James calls the figure in the carpet. Doña Perfecta only works in narrative terms because Pepe Rey is a bit of a prick.