La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades is a short novel published in 1554 in three almost simultaneous editions, in Burgos, Alcalá de Henares and Antwerp, without the author's name. It is considered the founder of the picaresque novel and one of the masterpieces of Spanish literature.
The plot
The book is written as a long first-person letter to a mysterious "Your Worship" who has asked Lázaro to explain "the case" of his life. Lázaro was born in a mill on the river Tormes, near Salamanca; his father, a miller, was punished for theft, and his mother hands him over as a child to a blind beggar. So begins his education in survival, divided into seven chapters called tratados:
- The blind man, cunning and cruel, teaches him with blows that you must be smarter than everyone else. Lazarillo takes revenge by making him smash his head against a pillar.
- The priest of Maqueda, a terrible miser, almost starves him: Lazarillo steals bread from a locked chest, pretending mice did it.
- The squire in Toledo, a poor, proud gentleman who pretends to have eaten when he has nothing, is the most memorable character: in the end it is Lazarillo, begging, who feeds him.
- A friar, a seller of fake papal bulls, a chaplain and a bailiff follow.
In the end Lázaro obtains a public post as town crier in Toledo and marries an archpriest's servant. Rumour says his wife is the archpriest's mistress, but Lázaro prefers not to know: this is his "case", and he declares himself at the height of good fortune. It is an ironic and very bitter ending.
Themes and censorship
The book satirises social and religious hypocrisy, the obsession with honour and appearances, and the hunger that ran through imperial Spain. In 1559 the Inquisition placed it on the Index of forbidden books; from 1573 an expurgated edition, without the most anticlerical passages, circulated until the nineteenth century.
Who wrote it?
The mystery of the author has never been solved. Candidates include the friar Juan de Ortega, the humanist Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Alfonso de Valdés, close to Erasmus's ideas, and Juan Arce de Otálora. In 2010 the palaeographer Mercedes Agulló attributed the work to Diego Hurtado de Mendoza on the basis of archive documents, but the question remains open.
In Salamanca, near the Roman bridge over the Tormes, a statue recalls Lazarillo and his blind master.