niebla miguel de unamuno english translation

Nor do the narrative’s details reveal responsibility to any social or cultural tradition. Augusto’s father died when he was an infant he was raised so dotingly by his widowed mother that her deathbed lament had been: “my son, I’m afraid of what might happen the first time you find a thorn in life’s path.” She has left Augusto wealthy and in the care of two trusted servants so that the exigencies of making a living, or of taking care of himself, can give his life no direction. Further, Unamuno, who considered Don Quixote to be more real than Cervantes, does not care to erect any walls between the real world and the fictional: he - as himself, the writer and philosopher - makes an appearance in Fog.Ĭovering a few traumatic months of its hero’s life, Fog is about the romantic and sensual awakening of Augusto Perez. What realistic fiction tries so hard to achieve - an aura of credibility - seems like the very thing that Unamuno works to dismantle. Unamuno famously plumbed the genre of the novel to air his philosophical and historical misgivings about fiction. This is an obvious ploy to anticipate, and perhaps thwart, criticism of the novel later, in a “postprologue,” Unamuno threatens to finish off Goti for questioning the decisions he had made in Fog.

Goti (after making suitably unctuous sounds about being permitted to write the prologue for a work by a famous author) disagrees vehemently with the author’s account of the events narrated in the novel, events to which (as we discover later) he was intimately privy. The Prologue to Fog (1914) - Miguel de Unamuno’s widely influential, existential novel on the inadequacies of realism, which I’m reading in a new translation by Elena Barcia from Northwestern University Press - is by a writer named Victor Goti who, besides claiming distant kinship to Unamuno, is both a character in the novel and a close friend of Augusto Perez, the protagonist of Fog.

Niebla miguel de unamuno english translation