The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes

At a stone bull by the bridge in Salamanca, a blind beggar tells the boy leading him to press an ear to the stone and listen. When the boy leans close, the beggar cracks his head against the granite and laughs: a blind man's boy, he says, must know one point more than the devil. That is Lázaro de Tormes's whole education, and he learns it well, boring a straw-sized hole into his master's wine jug by night, prising a miser priest's bread chest with a counterfeit key. Every master after teaches him something crueller, none more than the squire who starves inside a nobleman's pride while the boy Lázaro ends up feeding him from his own begged crusts. By the end Lázaro has a house, a wife the archpriest visits when he likes, and the sense not to ask why. He calls it the height of his good fortune. No book before had made a boy's empty stomach the whole of its plot, or trusted hunger to teach a reader so much about what a person learns to forgive.