3.5? 4? who knows?

3.5*

"¿Quién te podrá dezir lo que esta vieja fazía? E todo era burla e mentira"

Did it sometimes feel like a slog? Yes. Am I glad I stuck with it and finished reading this? Also yes! Even if this work can't decide if it's a comedy or tragedy, it was great to discover a fantastic ode to the power of drink, delivered by "Celestina", that would have been missed, had I given up.
And props to the whole Leer En Espanol series -- a great way to retrieve dusty language skills from classes taken a very long time ago.

me lo leí muy rápido no cuenta (odio a la celestima tbh)

I took this home from the used bookstore where I worked years and years ago and have been lugging it around the world since then. I finally sat down to read it after Steven Moore's description from his Alternative History of the Novel. Whilst I didn't hate it for the reasons that the mostly young people who've posted about it here, having had to read it in college as an example of Spanish Renaissance literature but it not living up to their Harry Potter/Twilight standards, I nonetheless found its Renaissance irony more troubling than exciting, as Juan Goytisolo does in a famous essay both cited by Moore and in the intro to my edition. Sure, I'm all for the triumph of reason over faith that marks the so-called Renaissance of 1492, but this shift in thinking also opens the floodgates of the very same kind of corrosive irony that conservatives in the USA have been cultivating since the Reagan years. You know, the world in which "do-gooders" and "bleeding hearts" are ruining the world, as if Christian values were really the Roman values of clan solidarity ("family values"), wealth ("Prosperity theology"), and cut-throat power at any cost ("capitalism") that the Renaissance re-introduced to a world once softened--and in which slavery was momentarily suspended--via the actual words of the so-called savior. We saw the flipside of such irony triumph, I guess, during the insurrection when a gang of "patriots" swarmed the US Capitol with a plan to hang the vice president, overturn a democratic election, end democracy, and enthrone a fascist dictator.

I'm also not a Christian by any means, but I do find such corrosive irony in a text--and it's also in Machiavelli and other Early Modern writers I enjoy far less than the Medieval masters--all too familiar and disheartening. Rhetorically, Celestina is fascinating in its evisceration first and foremost of platitudes (even as it's tedious to hear them so endlessly repeated), ideals like romantic love and honor, and, in the end, the belief that human life has any value, as everything falls into chaos at the end--I won't call it tragedy because there's zero pathos in a world bereft of ideals or actual value--which is, I guess, always pretty much constructed through belief rather than reason. For, objectively speaking, life really has no intrinsic value--unless it's to grow and die and thus feed other forms of life. But, after all, it's all we've got.

I particularly felt this way, I suppose, because, as I was reading Celestina I was concurrently teaching some Boccaccio tales. Those tales vivacity and pleasant good nature really shine through when compared with this utterly ironic Renaissance brooding. Reading Boccaccio, I feel great affection for humanity rather than shake my head in disgust at it, as I do when reading most Renaissance literature. Thus I've come to believe that it's not that Fascism has occasionally triumphed over humanism, I think rather that fascism is at least partially built into Renaissance humanism and that it will haunt the Occident until we somehow supersede the modern era with something better. Here's hoping we evolve beyond humanism before we destroy the planet.

lo lei en el colegio, me acuerdo que me encantó esta novela

no he entendido una mierda del libro, me he enterado de que se ha muerto todo el mundo y ya esta
no se como mi profesora de lengua espera que la gente entienda este libro xq no parece ni castellano, no se entiende una mierda
frase más dicha del libro: "puta vieja"