Spanish · Intermediate
Read El ángel de la sombra in Spanishwith every sentence explained
English title: The Angel of Shadow
Leopoldo Lugones · 1926
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About the book
El ángel de la sombra by Leopoldo Lugones was first published in 1926. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked intermediate and filed under fantasy and romance. It runs to about 43,500 words.
A suicide at a graveside, two red tulips in his hand. A stranger who says he has seen an angel.
At an elegant Buenos Aires dinner, the talk turns to a celebrated artist who shot himself beside the grave of a girl no one knew he loved. A pale foreign diplomat with impenetrable black eyes remarks that dying of love is never vulgar. Later, in his hotel room, he confides to the narrator — the poet Lugones himself — a story he lived as a young man.
Carlos Suárez Vallejo, a poor young writer, is welcomed into the literary salon of the distinguished Almeidas. There he meets their daughter Luisa: serene, beautiful and strange, a girl who at eight refused her real name, Eulalia, calmly insisting she was Luisa. Between them grows a love that seems to belong to another order of being.
Published in 1926, The Angel of Shadow is Leopoldo Lugones's only novel: a haunting, fatal love story set in Buenos Aires high society, steeped in the occult.
- Author
- Leopoldo Lugones
- First published
- 1926
- Language
- Spanish
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Fantasy, Romance
- Length
- About 43,500 words
How it opens
Entre los asuntos de sobremesa que podíamos tocar sin desentono a los postres de una comida elegante: la política, el salón de otoño y la inmortalidad del alma, habíamos preferido el último, bajo la impresión, muy viva en ese momento, de un suicidio sentimental.
Muchas personas deben recordar todavía aquel episodio que truncó una de nuestras más gloriosas carreras artísticas: el caso del malogrado D.F., que al pie del nicho donde habían sepultado por la mañana una muchacha con la cual no se le conocía relaciones, se mató al anochecer de un balazo en el parietal.
Reading El ángel de la sombra 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.
