B1;C12
“”How can one describe a man? I can give you an inventory:” Ha!
“Oh, blameless people are always the most exasperating.”
“she even acted her own character, and so well, that she did not know it to be precisely her own.” = Rosamond is fake.
Rosamond and Fred really do feel like brother and sister.
All this talk about money and who gets what and acting the right way. So petty we all are.
B1;C11
“All choice of words is slang. It marks a class.”
“Disagreeable is a word that describes your feelings and not my actions.”: everything is how you chose to see it.
Rosamond is a little snob but her family seem much more fun. She’s telling everyone what they “should” be doing but nobody takes her too seriously and her brother barbs right back at her. I would not like Rosamond at all in real life.
“But no matter the prize, Fortunata would not have been capable of pronouncing ‘ignominy'”
The first time he speaks his heart he puts the girl to sleep. He’s a lot like Jacinta in all this reforming a bad sort, neither are bad at heart, but terribly misguided and blind to simple reality.
Papitos (the young housekeeper girl) is a lot like what Fortunata must have been like, though at least Papitos has someone actually trying to “reform” her .
She still loves Juanito. But she’s also honest with Maximiliano in saying (quite earnestly) that she does. Of course he will feel jealousy.
“She thought that Europe was a town and England was a county inhabited by creditors”
He uses ‘amar’ instead of ‘querer’ to express his love, but it’s a word only used by students doing grammar drills, not by regular people who just want to say ‘I love you’. He’s naive, and he’s going to be ruined by this.
The use of his piggy bank is a nice scene. He’s not doing anything wrong, yet he feels like a criminal. He’s breaking his old life (but is he really going to change?), for Fortunata, but we know this can’t work. We want him to stay the same, not break his bank. He’s also more likely to marry the 12 year old housekeeper.
Other than the egg scene early on, this is the first we really see Fortunata. But I feel like we already know her, what kind of person she is from what she’s been through.
“Sometimes he thought he spied her in the distance; then the shape disappeared, like a drop into water. Human silhouettes that vanished almost magically around corners and into doorways in the chiaroscuro of a shifting crowd startled him and nearly made him lose his mind.”
I’m sure it’s unintentional, but her never being able to plumb the depth of his secret with any amount of lead does have a violent note to it.
Sometimes I think this translation is not the best. Most of the time it’s excellent but then there are some phrases that feel too modern, though it does help make the characters more relatable and not feel so old fashioned. Still, a new translation would be nice.