THE SPENDTHRIFTS

New York, NY: Farrar Straus & Young, 1952. First Edition, First Thus . Hardcover. Good/No Jacket. Charles Mozley (Illustrator). Text/Near New. Green linen boards/Good; tired but sound w/rubs, small surface losses to edges & surface. DJ/None. Fiction. Work of prolific Spanish realist novelist Benito Perez Galdos (1843 - 1920). First published 1884 under the title La de Bringas; this is 1952 edition, translated to English Gamel Woolsley. Novel, set in 1868, the year of Spain's Glorious Revolution, takes place in the Royal Palace of Madrid stars members of the court's bureaucracy. Galdos uses the officials, marked by ruinous, extravagant lifestyles as symbols of the decay that had progressed throughout the entire administration. Gerald Brenan, in the Introduction, writes: "The rottenness of the whole regime becomes apparent and when, at the close of the sweltering summer, the Army, the Navy and the entire country rise with one accord and the queen flees to France, the curtain falls on this phantasmagoric society, so brilliant when viewed from outside but built on poverty and debt and emptiness. Thus The Spendthrifts is both an allegory of the ruling classes of Spain and a sermon on the classic Spanish theme, made familiar to us in Don Quixote, of illusion and reality.