His Only Son

<p>The unlikely hero of <em>His Only Son</em>, Bonifacio Reyes, is a romantic and a flautist by vocation&mdash;and a failed clerk and kept husband by necessity&mdash;who dreams of a novelesque life. Tied to his shrill and sickly wife by her purse strings, he enters timidly into a love affair with Serafina, a seductive second-rate opera singer, encouraged by her manager who mistakes Bonifacio for a potential patron. Meanwhile, Bonifacio's wife experiences a parallel awakening and in the midst of a long-barren marriage, surprises them both with a son&mdash;but is it Bonifacio's? In the accompanying novella, <em>Do&ntilde;a Berta</em>, the heroine of the title, an aged, poor, but well-born woman, forfeits her beloved estate in search of a portrait that may be all that remains of the secret love of her life.</p> <p>While largely unknown outside of Spain, Leopoldo Alas was one of the most celebrated writers of criticism in nineteenth-century Spain and employed his satirical talents to powerful and humorous effect in fiction. <em>His Only Son</em> was Alas's second and final novel, full of characteristic humor, naturalistic detail, descriptive beauty, and moral complexity. His frail and pitiful characters&mdash;irrational, emotional actors drawn inexorably toward their foolish fates&mdash;are yet multidimensional individuals, often conscious of their own weaknesses and stymied by their very yearnings to be more than the parts they find themselves playing.</p>