In the first pages of The Maid’s Daughter, which won Sonsoles Ónega the last Planeta Prize (Madrid, 1977), the reader clearly realizes that he is faced with an entertaining novel aimed at a wide readership; It is entirely fair to put the text through the filter of strict literary criticism. The criteria for evaluating the quality of a hamburger are not the same as the criteria we apply to evaluate a tasting menu of a famous restaurant. But in the end we’ll have to decide whether the burger is any good or not. Here we go.
The Gordian knot of the plot is revealed to us in the very first pages: The master of a rich Indian family impregnates the caretaker of the mansion, who gives birth to a daughter on the same night as his wife. The maid then decides to switch newborns to give her adulterous daughter a better life. After presenting these events that left their mark on the entire narrative flow, the main characters and their history are described, describing both their vital adventures (mostly misadventures) and the historical events that shook the 20th century in Spain and Cuba.
On the one hand, the author draws us strong women, and on the other hand, cowardly and often miserable men. From the adulterer’s mother, who runs the family business in Cuba (and commits suicide after killing a worker for dating her husband), to his wife, who turns out to be a formidable entrepreneur and starts a successful canning company. a whaling company run through his biological daughter, who later became a very smart manager of the family businesses; All women from wealthy backgrounds are talented, understanding and energetic. This is not the case for lower-class women. Although it is an obvious tribute to the honest working women of the Galicia canneries, the female characters who embody a certain evil (beyond the gossipy women of the rich class) are all lower class. The maid who decides to trade the babies, the scheming and malicious Cuban worker who has sexual intercourse with his master, a medium with surprisingly real powers who wishes every possible evil on the protagonist’s family, and even his illegitimate daughter. Even though he grew up with genetic determinism and every comfort, he has a jealous and annoying behavior. Men, on the other hand, are presented as lacking courage and insensitive, as well as being weak against the temptations of the soul.
The novel primarily has all the soap opera components that will please escapist readers. Namely: misfortunes in noble families, loves, deaths, business successes and failures, incest, shipwrecks, arranged marriages, travel, a central character with a certain power and its connection with historical events. However, although the abundance of dialogue guarantees a light and fast reading, the journalist fails to maintain the tension. After a few pages, it ceases to suffer from the problem of exchange, probably due to the dwarfism of the male protagonist and the plot that the novel takes up. It is also surprising that as the text progresses more characters know the secret and even become the talk of the town, but despite the clues and their clear minds, neither mother nor daughter harbor the slightest suspicion. Likewise, the numerous comings and goings that affect the family’s fortune also lead to increased apathy. Loving relationships have no real emotional weight here either, and the only relationships that claim to do so develop predictably and without movement, without depth, from seed to death. The real problem is that Ónega fails to gauge the intensity of events and becomes lazy in meaningless dialogue with no clear purpose, conveying potentially exciting or dramatic moments in a few lines. Even a few moments in which the book might reflect some discomfort, such as a pregnancy resulting from incest (the parents are unaware that they are half-siblings), but which the novelist gets used to too quickly, cannot save the emotional simplicity.
In short, a lot happens in The Servant’s Daughters, sometimes even seeming to improvise surprises as the author goes along, but very little of it matters to the reader. Despite efforts to adjust the prose to time and geography (more Galicia than Cuba), the dialogue comes across as rigid, and the narrator, who exudes a moralistic and conservative fervor, knows it all but sometimes says things like “We’ll do it for no reason.” He also repeats (we don’t know whether as a source or as a slip) statements – somewhat exaggerated – such as “the truth always beats the lie.” As a curiosity, and replicating a pattern seen in the previous Planeta Prize, the characters do many things “within themselves”; In this case, they groan, ruminate, whisper, hum, sing, add and even spell. [sic] “sincere”.
All in all, the burger is a good size and has a lot of toppings but unfortunately it tastes like nothing.