His Only Son

The unlikely hero of <i>His Only Son</i> Bonifacio Reyes is a romantic and a flautist by vocation&#151;and a failed clerk and kept husband by necessity&#151;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&#146;s wife experiences a parallel awakening and in the midst of a long-barren marriage surprises them both with a son&#151;but is it Bonifacio&#146;s? In the accompanying novella <i>Do&#241;a Berta</i> 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. <br><br>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. <i>His Only Son </i>was Alas&#146;s second and final novel full of characteristic humor naturalistic detail descriptive beauty and moral complexity. His frail and pitiful characters&#151;irrational emotional actors drawn inexorably toward their foolish fates&#151;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.