Grandes

I continue to work through La madre de Frankenstein. No book can be all bad, so I found some nice memorable details.  A little girl is given her first fried egg and her grandmother teaches her how to eat it. They have chickens, but the chickens belong to the nuns who run the insane asylum, so the egg is technically stolen, since the grandfather is just the gardener.  

The set pieces of Franqista ideology are tired and predictable. The narrator, Velázquez is too good to be true. When another psychiatrist at the asylum comes out of the closet, to him Dr. V. just reacts in a blasé way, as though the characters lived in 2020. There is no narrative tension if the main character just blandly reflects the 2020 values of the author. Wouldn't someone in 1953 just have a few retrograde tendencies? 

The physical description of the characters are weird. People just do not look at each other in that way in real life; it's more of a parody of 19th century realist description. 

The main character is bland. He doesn't actually want anything, except to drug his patients with the latest psychotropic drug. I'm sure he'll end up being closer to Aurora, because the novel has been telegraphing this for hundreds of pages. 

UPDATE:

Then I read where the narrator gets engaged to a Jewish woman for whom he feels no physical attraction, and is in fact repulsed by the semitic curve of her nose. WTF?