Tristana

Colin Partridge's critical excursus on the novel Tristana and its reception opens with an account of diametrically opposed readings by Galdos' contemporaries, Bazan, the feminist, and the novelist Clarin. Partridge then proceeds to relate the sources of Tristana in Galdos' personal experience, notably his relations with a succession of women. The closing section of Partridge's useful book is a critique of Luis Bunuel's film Tristana (1970), which shows how Bunuel employs cinematic equivalents of Galdos' cinematic narrative devices. Partridge's critique of the Bunuel film parallels, on a smaller scale, his critique of Galdos' novel, and this enables him to feature both the similarities and differences between the two works, and consequently to provide an account of the values of each.