Spanish · Advanced
Read La Regenta in Spanishwith every sentence explained
Leopoldo Alas «Clarín» · 1885
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
La Regenta by Leopoldo Alas «Clarín» was first published in 1885. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 306,300 words.
A city that watches everything. A woman who longs for something more.
Vetusta is a sleepy, gossiping cathedral city in northern Spain, where everyone knows everyone's business. Its most admired lady is Ana Ozores, the young wife of the retired judge Víctor Quintanar, a kind man far more interested in hunting and old plays than in her. Ana is beautiful, devout and quietly suffocating.
Two powerful men set their sights on her. Don Fermín de Pas, the ambitious canon who becomes her confessor, wants to rule her soul. Álvaro Mesía, the town's elegant seducer, wants everything else. While Vetusta whispers and waits, Ana struggles between faith, desire and boredom.
Leopoldo Alas, "Clarín", published La Regenta in 1884–85, and it is widely considered the greatest Spanish novel of the nineteenth century, often compared to Madame Bovary. Rich, ironic and deeply human, it was adapted as a celebrated TV series in 1995.
- Author
- Leopoldo Alas «Clarín»
- First published
- 1885
- Language
- Spanish
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Romance
- Length
- About 306,300 words
How it opens
Creo que fue Wieland quien dijo que los pensamientos de los hombres valen más que sus acciones, y las buenas novelas más que el género humano. Podrá esto no ser verdad; pero es hermoso y consolador. Ciertamente, parece que nos ennoblecemos trasladándonos de este mundo al otro, de la realidad en que somos tan malos a la ficción en que valemos más que aquí, y véase por qué, cuando un cristiano el hábito de pasar fácilmente a mejor vida, inventando personas y tejiendo sucesos a imagen de los de por acá, le cuesta no poco trabajo volver a este mundo.
Reading La Regenta 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 advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate Spanish book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
