LA FAMILIA DE PASCUAL DUARTE
Camilo José Cela
Appleton-Century-Crofts, N.Y.: 1961
pp. 175.
MAZURCA PARA DOS MUERTOS
Camilo José Cela
Seix Barral, Barcelona, 1983
pp. 266.
Spanish writer Camilo José Cela's first novel, The Family of Pascual Duarte, which was singled out by the Swedish Academy in awarding its 1989 Nobel Prize for Literature is dedicated to "my enemies who have helped my career so much." Judging by this recent accolade, he has every reason to be grateful to them.
Readers familiar with Cela would likely be nonplussed by the downright hostile tone of several articles that appeared in the national press commenting on the award. It wasn't so much his literary work as his perceived behavior that was the basis of these criticisms. One suspects that the writers have neither read Cela nor spoken with Spanish literary critics.
Cela, they would have us believe, is a café celebrity, a notorious womanizer whose behavior, according to one critic, "rivals the self regard and outrageousness of Salvador Dali" (yet no examples are citied). Furthermore, another critic tells us, "he's lived in a very commodious relationship with the Franco regime."
But this profile of the man is seriously misleading: For thirty-five years Cela has lived on the island of Mallorcaz, far distant form Madird's café society. Regarding the charge that Cela has enjoyed a "commodious relationship with the Franco regime" - which may be at the crux of the criticism in certain quarters in this country - what are the facts? Cela was indeed a Nationalist during the Spanish Civil War. Like Franco he was born and raised in Galicia, a conservative, traditional Catholic region in northern Spain. Like any "gallego" he has had a love affair with his native land all his life. In fact, reminiscing about his early years in La Coruna he once wished he could have "married La Coruna, lived with La Coruna, and had many children - and many books - with La Coruna." He also writes both in Spanish and in Gallego.
When the war broke out in 1936, Galicia backed the Nationalist, Catholic forces under Franco. "Accordingly," D.W. McPhetters writes in his long essay "Camilo José Cela": "Cela reflected certain ideological currents popular among many young people in Spain which led to his involvement with the National Socialist Movement…. This Movement hoped to revive Spanish traditional values."
Cela, then in his twenties, enlisted in the Nationalist armed forces. Wounded in action in 1938, he returned to Galicia, thus ending his connection with the Falangists and Franco.
The Family of Pascual Duarte was the first major novel to appear in post-civil war Spain. In their preface to the American edition of 1961, H.L. Boudrau and J.W. Kronik write that the novel "continues to be one of the most impressive works of the contemporary period, and its author has remained the center of much attention
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