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Friday, April 24, 2020

Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) by Anonymous

The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes – New York Review Books
New York Review of Books edition of The Life of Lazarillo De Tormes
Book Review
Lazarillo de Tormes (1554)
by Anonymous

 Replaces: Roxana by Daniel Defoe

  Lazarillo de Tormes is another example of the broad expansion of the range of the 1001 Books list between the original publication in 2006 and the 300 book update of 2008.   This is an early Spanish novella- about one hundred pages in length, that follows the pattern of the Golden Ass, where the Ass descends through a progression of terrible masters.

   Lazarillo de Tormes was notorious when it was published- it could only be published outside Spain because of the then outrageous "anti-clerical" content (one of Lararillo's masters is a priest, and a mean one.)  Lazarillo is also commonly cited as an origin of the picaresque novel.  According to the Dover edition introduction:

   The word pícaro (no truly satisfactory etymology has ever been proposed) seems to have first appeared in writing in 1525, denoting a kitchen boy. By 1545 it had acquired its lasting meaning as someone of evil habits, a rogue or scoundrel. (The word appears nowhere in Lazarillo de Tormes.) From about 1600 on, stories of pícaros and pícaras became a more or less well-defined genre of Spanish fiction, not to say one of its most characteristic glories. As the genre is usually defined, a rogue narrates in the first person a string of unsavory adventures among criminals as he wanders unstably from place to place. The earliest and best picaresque novels, it is said, still dwell on the antihero’s psychology, while the later ones tend to become mere adventure novels, but of low life.
The picaresque impulse had spent itself in Spain by 1700, but it was given new life elsewhere in the 18th century. The French writer Alain-René Lesage (1668–1747) adapted El diablo cojuelo as Le diable boiteux (1707) and created an exciting new pícaro, on Spanish models, in Gil Blas de Santillane (Part One, 1715; Part Two, 1735). In England, Tobias Smollett (1721–1771) carried on the tradition with such novels as Roderick Random (1748) and Peregrine Pickle (1751), as did Henry Fielding (1707–1754) with Tom Jones (1749). In the United States, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884) has been called the nearest equivalent to Lazarillo de Tormes.  

   All of the English language books on that list are charter members of the 18th century canon, as is Mark Twain's 19th century contributions. 

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