Labors, Loves and Labyrinths

...De Pereda writes with honesty, from the inside out, as few writers seem able to do these days...

...These were all virtues, surely, but often inconvenient ones...

...To a boy's eyes, Grandfather was noble, magnanimous and sensitive—and hadn't a bean...

...From Spain this nucleus came and settled "across the river"' near the boats bringing their livelihood—in conspicuous part, cigars...

...Windmills in Brooklyn is not, despite its background, a nostalgic book: It is not archly or unselectively reminiscent...

...And it is above all a modest lesson in learning to live...

...The gentle humor which underlies the passage enhances its evocation, gives balance and poise to its hymn of thanksgiving...

...they would take lots to dispose of at whatever unfixed profit their own self-confidence alone could set...

...A virtual king of teverianos was Agapito, scoundrel in many respects, imaginative in commerce, daring and bold-faced, a compassionate man in his way...

...One aspect of life, at least, could go right in the great world where a tight little community was trying in such desperate and often makeshift ways to hold its own...

...To teach him these high things of the heart, the boy has teachers other than Grandmother and Grandfather: He has the Widow...

...He could be pitied by people unworthy to wipe the dust from his shoes...

...What kind of world was this where the philosopher stood trembling as the scoundrel pulled off the coup that spelled a week's material respite...

...Reviewed by Frances Keene Editor, "Short Stones of Luigi Pirandello" Forty years ago, Brooklyn had a Spanish community far different from the sprawling Spanish-speaking community of today...

...It is an engrossing picture of a vital way of life that has disappeared...

...The enveloping female softness and strength of this splendid creature come living from the page...

...As the boy narrator watches Grandfather tilt at the windmills, he learns many things about the nature of success, the constancy that keeps a dream above most realities, he learns the virtue of yielding gracefully while clinging like a veritable Galileo to one's inner beliefs, he learns the high price of perfection in any art or craft, and he finds that the redeeming center of any universe is the capacity to love, with its corollary, the capacity to suffer...

...She is every European boy's grail as the first experience of love: the woman who, with patience and passion, will guide his poor flesh to pride and manhood...

...Grandfather could be scolded for his lack of success...

...For the men relied, with varying degrees of success, on the m?tier of teveriano, or itinerant purveyor...

...What surface effects there are have come first from that inward eye...

...He could become the con man, though so temporarily, of an Agapito...

...And a boy could be helped to find his identity by means other than the achievement of conspicuous success...

...This was the world in which Prudencio de Pereda grew up and which he has here distilled for us in limpid, at times lyric, prose, with the clarity and simple rhythms for which this author is known...

...If Agapito was king, what was Grandfather...