Criados y doncellas

This novel, written in the heyday of Ivy Compton-Burnett, is one of her best and most accessible and humorous creations. In her clairvoyant prologue, the Mexican writer Sergio Pitol affirms: "In none of the twenty novels of the author does ingenuity prevail with more spontaneity than in Criados y maidens". The fundamental theme of all the novels of the writer is family and power. Its quintessential scene is usually a meal -usually breakfast, or afternoon tea- during which, with delicate savagery, a daily ritual of attacks and counterattacks is performed in which the family's power structure is revealed. In Servants and Maidens, Horace Lamb is a tyrant, an oppressor of his wife, his children, his cousin, his servants. The Lamb mansion contains all the material necessary for the conflagration; its inhabitants carry out a subtle, comical and terrifying ceremony of humiliation and manipulation. Throughout the novel the themes of crime, patricide, adultery emerge. At the same time, the world of the kitchen, that of the servants -the imposing butler Bullivant and the cook allied against their subordinates- reflect and caricature the hierarchy system and the hypocrisy of their masters, of the world of the living room. As for children, in no way infantile, they are nevertheless endowed with all the (generally hidden) cruelty of childhood.