Pablo de Segovia, the Spanish Sharper

At the school of the licentiate Cabra, Quevedo starves his pupils so completely that their ribs show through their skin and their eyes retreat into their skulls, and he describes it not with pity but with a comic relish that never once looks away. That relish is the whole book. Pablos is born to a thief for a father and a witch for a mother in Segovia, and spends the rest of his life trying to talk, dress, and swindle his way out of that birth into the ranks of gentlemen. Every trick works for a page and fails by the chapter's end, because in Quevedo's Spain blood shows through velvet the way bone showed through Cabra's starving boys. The prose itself is the con: puns stacked on puns, insults sharpened to a point, sentences that pick your pocket while you're admiring their tailoring. Pablos sails at last for the Indies still believing a new country will finish what cunning could not. It never does. A man who only changes his place, and not his life, changes nothing at all.