lazarillo de tormes [anon, tr. michael alpert]

This novel, written in 1554, is composed of seven chapters. Each one describes the narrator’s relationship to a master. The narrator’s story begins when he’s just a boy, forced to flee from his mother’s house. He is taken in and taken advantage of by various masters, including a blind beggar, a mean-spirited priest and a penurious aristocrat. The novel is a tale of survival and the acquisition of cunning. In the final chapter, we learn that he now has a position of town crier, which he says is a ‘Civil Service’ job. It would be interesting to know the original Spanish description. All over Latin America, the goal in life has been for many to become ‘municipal’ - to have a job supplied in some capacity by the state. (In at least one country this can include being an actor.) The novel makes clear why this was and has continued to be such a cherished ambition. The narrator documents a life of direst poverty. His main aim in life is to acquire food. This aim forms him: he has to learn how to be cunning in order to satisfy his hunger, how to steal from his mean-spirited masters. It’s a poverty which also helps to contextualise the colonisation of the Americas. People set out to make a new life to escape this poverty. In the process, looking at it today, it might be said that they only succeeded in exporting this poverty, whilst the powers that be did a decent job of importing as much wealth as possible. As Michael Alpert’s introduction points out, the novel is notable because it employs an anti-hero as its protagonist. Perhaps nowadays this might be described as giving a voice to the underclass. It reflects the way that a fundamental element in the praxis of writing literature has always been to explore the complexity and variety of the writer’s social world. Lazarillo de Tormes is classed as anonymous (there are various theories regarding the author’s identity), but one thing we can say is that the writer was someone who cast a measured eye over the whole range of his society; someone who looked beyond the confines of their silo. 

note: I purchased and presumably first read this novel in January 1983, at which point I would have had no idea about most of the above.