Nacha Regules

by Manuel Gálvez

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208 pages, Unknown Binding

First published August 11, 2015

About the author

Manuel Gálvez fue un narrador, poeta, ensayista, historiador y biógrafo argentino.

Reviews

[Guille Olivieri · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dos cosas positivas tiene este libro:
1. El autor es entrerriano.
2. Sirve de ejemplo de un contexto pobre, miserable y doloroso de nuestro país.
Todo lo demás... bastante malo.
Se nota que Gálvez fue un hombre muy letrado, ya que su escritura es impecable. Aunque esto no quita que haya elegido una muy mala forma de narrar esta historia: la prosa poética. Nacha merecía ser narrada desde otra visión, una más objetiva, que se centre en la pobreza, y que no que venga un hombre a "salvarla" y se haga el protagonista, el héroe. Es más la historia de Monsalvat que de Nacha. Los primeros capítulos están buenos, luego se pone cada vez peor. El final realmente es muy confuso. Tiene muchas idas y vueltas que no se resuelven y personajes insignificantes para la trama.

[Cyntia Mendez · Rating 1 out of 5]

Los primeros capítulos empiezan bien y son interesantes. Después, querés dejar de leer. Es un ida y vuelta constante entre dos personajes insoportables, vuelteros y tan pesados. Lo leí para la facultad. Si no hubiera estado obligada ni lo hubiera terminado.

[Jonathan Bogart · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first actual dud in the reading list I set for myself earlier this year, trying to work my way through the major novels of the 1910s.

Manuel Gálvez was perhaps the most distinguished Argentine man of letters in the generation before Borges, and his reputation has correspondingly suffered since Borges made Argentine literature synonymous with modernist experimentation and cosmopolitan thought. Gálvez was an essentially nineteenth-century novelist stuck in the early twentieth century: his novels, meant to range through the length and breadth of Argentine society, were supposedly patterned on those of Balzac, Galdós, or Zola but (at least on this showing) he has none of the dispassion and suspended judgment necessary to see life whole. His bourgeois morality and Eurocentric racism mean that he traffics in nothing but stereotypes from one end of the novel (an exciting and dangerous tango cabaret) to the other (a blind prophet decrying World War I).

If Nacha Regules is his Nana, he has to turn her into a paragon of noble suffering in order to make his readers okay with feeling sympathy for a prostitute; all the sex workers we meet throughout the novel are either good girls wronged (and white) or villains of depravity (and brown). Which is awful enough; but the cloying sentimentality of the plot, even while he makes gestures towards actually seeing things as they are (the hero, Monsalvat, correctly diagnoses social inequality as a structural issue, not about individual morality), was what really made me hate it.

There are bits and pieces that can be rescued; an adaptation that made Monsalvat into a person instead of a flame of righteousness and saw sex workers as people instead of stereotypes might actually be a decent work of art. But as it stands, it's a failure.

I read both the 1919 Spanish original and the 1921 English translation concurrently, a chapter at a time (they're both in the public domain so it was simple), which was a decent sort of training wheels for reading more proper literature directly in Spanish. It was amusing to note that even though Gálvez is prudishly reticent about the actual labor of sex work, the English (I should say U.S.) translation was bowdlerized even further, with all reference to potential outcomes of sex like pregnancy or venereal disease -- or even obvious facts like two people sharing a bed -- expurgated. I've been reading a lot of period translations, and now I'm wondering what else I've missed.

[floreana · Rating 3 out of 5]

me gustó mucho más de lo que esperaba!!! una novela mega frustrante en la que se nota a la legua que manuel gálvez escribió para dejar constancia de su posición moral + sus ideales + etc (lo staneo por eso eh todo piola yo lo banco). me sumergí TANTO y de manera tan fácil en este mundo que sigo medio en la nebulosa de este laberinto en buenos aires y de las constantes penas y desgracias de los personajes.

[ayma · Rating 2 out of 5]

muy vuelteros los dos

[Variaciones Enrojo]

Tomo de Gálvez de la Biblioteca Capítulo.