Crowded Cities, Empty Spains and a Desire to Be Free: A Comparative Study of Los Asquerosos (Lorenzo, 2018) and Nazarín (Galdós,1895)

This essay compares Santiago Lorenzo’s 2018 novel Los Asquerosos and Benito Pérez Galdós’s 1895 novel, Nazarín . My interest is in how these two novels share an almost identical narrative structure that is sustained by a set of similar tropes related to the urban/ rural binary. I first show how they present a complex vision of life in the countryside: these authors avoid presenting a facile idealization of the rural while demonstrating the interrelationships between country and city. Next, focusing on differences between the novels, I consider how Spain and its countryside changed in the more than 120 years between the two novels. Finally, I demonstrate how they both represent the rural as the place of a desired, if ultimately unrealized, ideal of personal freedom in the modern world; one full of contradictions and that may not offer a positive, collective vision for the future, even as it opens up a space for imagining new possibilities. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .