Spanish · Intermediate
Read Abel Sánchez in Spanishwith every sentence explained
Miguel de Unamuno · 1917
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Abel Sánchez by Miguel de Unamuno was first published in 1917. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 28,900 words.
Two best friends. One of them is everything the other wishes he could be.
Joaquín Monegro and Abel Sánchez have been inseparable since before they can remember. But from childhood, it is always Abel who is liked without trying: easy, charming, admired. Joaquín, serious and intense, works twice as hard and is loved half as much, and slowly a quiet bitterness takes root in him.
Joaquín becomes a doctor, Abel a painter. Then Joaquín falls in love with his proud cousin Helena, and makes the mistake of introducing her to his friend. From that moment, envy becomes the passion of his life, a fire he cannot put out and cannot stop feeding.
Miguel de Unamuno's Abel Sánchez (1917) retells the story of Cain and Abel in modern Spain, partly through Joaquín's own secret confession. Short, intense and psychologically razor-sharp, it is one of the most powerful portraits of envy ever written.
- Author
- Miguel de Unamuno
- First published
- 1917
- Language
- Spanish
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Historical Fiction
- Length
- About 28,900 words
How it opens
No recordaban Abel Sánchez y Joaquín Monegro desde cuándo se conocían. Eran conocidos desde antes de la niñez, desde la primera infancia, pues ya sus sendas nodrizas se juntaban y los juntaban cuando aun ellos no sabían hablar. Aprendió cada uno de ellos a conocerse conociendo al otro. Y así vivieron y se hicieron juntos amigos desde nacimiento casi, más bien hermanos de crianza.
Reading Abel Sánchez in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in Spanish. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked intermediate: comfortable once everyday Spanish feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
