My new Spanish reader

Mala Hierba fro the early 20th, a Spanish novel. Well known and still has fans around the world, I am on chapter three, the beginning.  I comes in the original Spanish and a very good translation in English. And the author is compact, one needs only about 100 verb forms to get through it, and the special terms for the environment are not too many.
So this is a great read as there is much less time going back to the dictionary. I abandoned Treasure Island half way through as I remembered the book in English and it got boring.

Some of the classic Spanish literature contains a lot of suffixes added to a verb form so we get the antidisestableshmentarianism kind of stuff, When the read sees te word she has to deconstruct all the suffixes to get at the root. That is work, instead the compact authors usethe basic form and add the in separate phrases, the whole thing redas like a poem rather than a technical work. Old Man in the Sea has a beat to it. By using small words Hemingway an position the helper phrase to maximum effect.

Mala Hierba is written like that. So the reader develops a 'beat' as the confused group of characters struggle. The grammatical beat matches their trips to the cafe, their frequent discussions, and careless life. In the same way, the 'beat' of Old Man and the See matches the slow pull of the skiff out to sea.
Both these short novel have a 'refrain', a recurring theme the author returns to on a regular basis. They read like long poetic epics, in the oral tradition.