Summary
Narcis Oller: Ludilo
Madness, the novel we present here, is based on a real event from the life of Narcis Oller. The main character of the novel, Daniel Serallonga, is a rich rural landowner, an idealist by nature, who suffers from a slow but unstoppable process of mental alienation. The narrator, one of Serallonga's friends, presents the story to us through two opposing points of view of two other friends: Giberga, a medical student, with a pragmatic cold positivist view and Armengolo, a man with more humane and romantic views. During the novel, we encounter conflicting opinions about the origin and significance of mental illnesses: the deterministic one, which insists on biological inheritance, and the other, cultural, which points to the influence of the environment as the culprit. More than anything else, this novel is a successful contribution by Narcis Oller to the great themes of world literature, the nature and limits of madness and the ways in which an exceptional individual fights against the petty-bourgeois spirit and narrow-minded people who are surrounded.
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