Dan’s Reviews > Fortunata and Jacinta > Status Update

I love the details in the novel. Here it's the cooking of rice and giblets (no artichokes; not in season), lamb, onion, garlic, then as it all cooks she brushes her hair and you can smell the food cooking mixed with her black hair. It's very beautiful.

Ah, what an ending! Does Maximiliano actually go to a monastery or is it really Leganes, the insane asylum? We don't learn which is real! Wonderful and perfect! Is it mad to be a monk? What does this say of religion? Of love? Of sanity? Masterpiece novel, absolute masterpiece!

Ballester can't afford a marble headstone so it has to be Novelda stone, a type of stone used in Spanish (and Madrid) architecture. So her memory is purely Spanish, but not immortal.

Ballester also says he would have (and was already) committed "foolish acts for that sweet woman." And that's what every character here deals with, their passions. Few can control them, so go mad, some die by them, it's a judgment on our lives.

"If we didn't forget, we couldn't live, because in our soul's digestive work there can't be any ingestion unless there is also elimination." says Ballester.

Father Nones entering the room is an ominous vision : he has to stoop through the doorway and he fills the room with black as if he is the evil and delirious Fortunata is actually an angel.

If Maximiliano were a saint Fortunata would "pray to him and spit on him." This sums up her character succinctly.

I like how so many of the characters in the novel are all now sitting on the steps outside Fortunata's apartment waiting for her to return (from her drama with Aurora). They're all lined up, one step above the next. And the baby inside, crying for its mother. Fortunata will have to climb those stairs, like a prison tower, past all who judge her, and take her place with an illigimate son of her only love.

Maximiliano's cold logic is the counter to Fortunata's hot passion. He is logical (and mad), she is illogical (and mad, too in a way). Her passion and devotion to Juanito has caused her to be miserable, and Maximiliano's logic has a dangerous fragility that could crack like a shell any moment.

If Maximiliano is sane then this is the ultimate satire because in being sane he's more sinister than Mauricia at her worst. "He looks like the man who has been your downfall. Evil never perishes - it engenders itself, and the virtuous are annihilated in sterility."