“Discovering Spanish Fantasy Stories: A Collection of Short Stories by Benito Pérez Galdos”

Find every Tuesday a chronicle, an interview or a portrait linked to a science fiction text that is making the news. Today, a collection of fantastic short stories that allow us to discover another facet of the great Spanish realistic writer of the 19th century.

It’s a mobile city. All night long, the streets and the houses move there and you will not find the next day in the same place the buildings that you had seen the day before. This superb idea, Benito Pérez Galdos (1843-1920) put it in place in 1889 in a short story, “Celin”. A collection soberly titled Spanish fantasy stories and published by Okno, a small specialist house, offers it to us with eight other texts written between 1865 and 1889. Texts from afar: it was in Italy that the publisher first discovered these short stories, which appeared in Spain in newspapers. We discover there a fantastic which, in the tradition of Hoffman or Cazotte, plays with the plausible to go and disturb a daily life that is too dreary. A ghost, an angel, the journey of a feather, the revisiting of a Christmas tale are only there to question reality and hold up a mirror where our features are not quite blurred enough not to be recognizable. .

We are all the more delighted (and surprised…) that Pérez Galdos is best known for being a solid realistic writer. In Spain, he is even considered the equal of Balzac or Zola. Fortunata and Jacinta is considered by many to be one of the greatest novels ever written in the Spanish language and the “National Episodes”, a historical cycle of 46 novels in total