A few years ago, after re-reading Gabriel Miró’s novel Niño y Grande (1922), I made a comment about this novel on a social network. Inma, a former student of mine, remarked to me that for her the last sentence of the novel was “one of the most vivid reflections on life I have ever read.” I agree with him too. Gabriel Miró should also be read this way.
101 years ago, the penultimate work of this Alicante author was published, framed within the framework of the ‘Generation of 14’; It never achieved popular success, both because it takes place between ’98 and ’27, two great literary moments, and perhaps because of its elitist understanding of art and culture, as well as the denial of sentimentality, not sentimentality, in its pages.
Therein lies the key to how we approach Miron’s novels, and this is confirmed by the comment at the beginning of this review. I am aware that my reading of Miró has always been motivated by a certain educational and professional obligation, because his themes, the development of his plot and the structure of his characters failed to capture me in his pages. I wasn’t his real reader. But as time goes on and I know what I’ll find (we always need to confirm our expectations), I really enjoy reading them and the aesthetic that encompasses them. This was my experience of re-reading Niño y grande, a short novel not reaching 140 pages, fully underlined and annotated by me, from the 1988 Castalia Classics collection that I bought from the bookstore. July 1990, to prepare for the following year’s readings on Electivity. (Now available to read online at the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library).
Antonio (Antón) Hernando is the protagonist and first-person narrator who not only narrates but also interprets and gives his opinion. This is an initiation novel arranged chronologically from the hero’s childhood to his youth: “My father was of Hernando de La Mancha, a descendant of rich and God-fearing farmers” (p. 69). It is divided into three parts, with a total of 25 chapters. It is structured according to two defining characteristics of the novel: fragmentation and reduction. Temporal connection is established through partial truths about social classes, education, and love. The early chapters describe his early childhood and his strict Jesuit education at the Santo Domingo de Orihuela school, with clear biographical implications and his sexual awakening. The third part focuses on his personal future, guided by his love for Elena, the sister of a schoolmate, until the end, marked by three dots. When talking about love, the title of the novel should be understood from here: “Child ideal and great love” (p. 158).
Aestheticism is constructed as one of Miró’s strongest literary values. He achieves this with a wide and unusual vocabulary, using the short phrase at the beginning of the chapter (“I never knew whether Elena loved me”, p.190; “Our house overlooked the sea”, p.151); and with each description of the novel. This aestheticism is combined with another characteristic characteristic of Miron, such as the use of irony to characterize characters, develop actions, or express thoughts: “They named me Antonio, but it seems that Humanity had gathered a council when I came into the world to call myself Anton. .”(p.69); “He thought so much about death that he paid for his funeral in eleven parishes while he was alive. And one night the beautiful river overflowed and took away the trees […] “The little blue house where my grandmother was in her womb and the eleven churches gave her an unknown burial without the divine intercession” (p. 71).
So why should you read this novel? Because, in addition to the fact that its author is a provincial (always on the side of the work), it is a good introduction to the pleasure of reading Miron’s novels, excellent examples of a certain literary work characterized by fragmentation, ellipsis, aestheticism, irony and literary imagery; and because it is confirmed that one can be happy despite life.