Product Description
Translated from the Spanish by Patricia Haugaard, a novel set in a backward village in Galicia at the end of the Spanish Civil War, in which a man seeks revenge for the abduction and murder of his brother. From the author of THE HIVE. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Stronger Finish Doesn't Offset Incoherant Beginning
I rated this movie as a "3" because I would have rated the first two thirds of the books as a "2" and the last third of the book as a "4".I can believe that many a reader gave up on this book because of the repetitious, meandering, and confusing first two thirds of the story.I kept wondering why I didn't just put the book down and leave it because I was getting next to nothing out of it.There were a lot of different characters and brief accounts of a moment in their lives.Many of these were rather earthly events but we kept revisiting them albeit with an occassional expanded (or is it expended) insight.There was no coherance and, for my part, there wasn't even a clue who was narrating at any given time.Some events were recounted at least a dozen times with the only advantage being that we were starting to become more familiar with the names of the different characters.Although I came to appreciate why the author chose this technique, I think it put too much responsibility on the reader to sort things out.I believe Cela could have done a better job of bringing his ideas to life.

Finally, at the two thirds point in the book, we get a narration that we can follow and the various characters and events are woven into a story.The writing becomes impressive and I found myself underlining phrases such as, "Faith is the corkscrew of conscience" and "When life dies, death is born".Cela gives us a perspective of the effects of the Spanish Civil War and that was the reason I chose to read the book in the first place.Cela paints a picture of the dispair born of man's outrage against his fellow man.Man is both the protaganist and the victim and it is joy the is the biggest casualty.

The effects of the fraternal civil war has taken the joy out of life.That is, I believe, what Cela meant with his meandering beginning.The many recollections were of people who represented the past when life enjoyable.We are reminded of their demise as though it were abookmark for the beginning of dispair.The theme expands to explain the title; the death of Lionheart was mourned as the primary bookmark of the beginning and the revengeful murder of his assassin bookmarks the end.Each was celebrated with the same mazurka that was played for no one else.The end of hostilities does not invite the return of the joy of life.Too much damage was done, too many memories were etched in stone.Life for the contempories of the Spanish Civil War would never again be the same.

Dont waste your time
Cela has done much better than this unbearably long, at times pointless and repetitive collection of peculiar characters and circumstances. It reads more as a collection of random, vaguely related pictures, smells and sounds (which are occasionally effective) than a coherent story. Granted, the author never intended for linear plotlines and well developed characters, thus creating caricatures with memorably exaggerated eccentricities. The end result, however, is too long by about a couple of hundred pages and an exhausting, frustrating read.
The book revolves around murder and revenge in Spanish Galicia circa the Civil War. Cela uses these themes as an excuse to serve a mosaic of idiosyncratic characters, loosely connected to the story line and on occasion affected by it one way or another. On a more subtle level, fate is what drives revenge and the characters are mere puppets bound by their powerlessness, be that through their physical, behavioral, mental or emotional states.
The novel is raw in its sense of humor and its portraits but its chaotic, often repetitive narration inhibits its full potential.

A revenge drama sucked dry of anything dramatic
The rambling, experimental style of this book is good for about 50 pages.Unfortunately, the book is six times longer.The story's simple revenge plot really only provides a convenient place for it to begin and end; what it really relies on is its dozens of preposterous characters, each of which is the embodiment of a sardonic, brutally funny joke, a brief anecdote that leaves you laughing under you're breath because you're ashamed to do it out loud, and if there's anyone else in the room you feel compelled to read them the line, but halfway through you tail off, realizing that out of context, it really isn't all that funny and just makes you sound demented.

The problem is, the book mostly consists of the repetition of these anecdotes, in different orders and slightly different contexts, a few new ones introduced and a few removed each time around.But once you've been through this freak show once, you've been through it a dozen times (and Cela will make you go through it a dozen times by the time the book is over).

The style robs you of your ability to feel anything for the book's tragic elements and by the third time around, you've lost the ability to laugh at its comic elements.What is terribly funny at first quickly becomes old, then tiring, and by the time the plot of the book is finally recapitulated one last time, this time in more or less chronological order, at the end, you're more than ready for it to be over.

Cela's "Mazurka" is a tantalizing read!
Camilo Jose Cela's works aren't generally for the masses--often Nobel Prize winners fall into this category!--but don't let his "literary success" frighten you.In "Mazurka for Two Dead Men," Cela's powerful style (read in translation, of course) is moving, argumentative, sophisticated, sometimes subtle--sometimes not:in short, an adventurein literary appreciation at the same time being worthy of one's time.

Set in 1936 at the onset of the Spanish Civil War, "Lionheart" Gamuzo is abducted and killed, thus setting off(to borrow from the Greeks) a blood-will-have-blood revenge story.Tony, his brother, knows that revenge is his.Cela is high in symbolism as in these events the blind accordian player Gaudencio continually plays the same mazurka--the book echos just about every musical symbol possible, with its themes, moods, movements, rhythms, melodies, and so forth.Symbolism, too, is not lost on the Spanish society Cela captures and the political, social, and religious overtones are not easily missed.Still, "Mazurka" is a worthy continuation of Cela's writing abilities.Granted, this one's not his best, but still is in keeping with Cela's l989 Nobel Prize winning style.While, quite likely, "something may be lost in translation," still reading Cela, for me, is a pleasurable adventure. (Blllyjhobbs@tyler.net)

Probably the Worst Book Ever Written!
Maybe something gets lost in the translation.Fans of modernism may rejoice, but the average reader may not like Cela's distinctive style.The book succeeds only in disgusting its readers.I read this in anInternational Novel course and can honestly say, it was the least favoritebook among the majority of students.The guys seemed to like it, but thatcould be because of the explicit sex or the perverse sense of humor.Manyfemale readers felt that Cela was being extremely negative towards thefemale characters in the book. (The major female characters include aprostitute and a mentally unstable woman).Don't waste your time on thisone. ... Read more

Product Description
The critically acclaimed novel by the Spanish Nobel laureate offers a portrait of Madrid and its colorful inhabitants as they struggle to survive in the era between the two World Wars. Reprint. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

La Biblia de la posguerra
With his characteristic ironic humor Mr. Cela centers "La Colmena" in the most dramatic period of Spain's 20th century history: the postwar. The characters are exquisitely molded into poor wretches, intransigent manipulators, neurotic business owners, garrulous salesmen, diffident bourgeois and aloof poets. The synergy is powerful because of its contrasts: each a survivor of the war and condemned to lead an egregious life. However, Cela's main theme is not just survival or improvisation, but imagination. The cafe dwellers are mostly penniless intellectuals hoping to trade a labored sonnet for a cup of coffee; or forlorn creatures longing for lost (and never-known) ones. An admiral of modern Spanish literature, Cela is a nobel prize laureate.

Great book!
Those who try to write the names of the characters down or even try to center the novel in any particular place completely miss the point of this novel. This is a novel about a community, a wolrd, where names and placesare irrelevant. The only relevant thing is the city, Madrid, and thestruggle of the people we read about in this novel. A wonderfulmasterpiece, a fast-paced cinema-like novel that beautifully portrays thesuffering during the years of Franco's regime

A book full of destinies
an interesting book about people and theirefforts to survive in Madridduring the second world war. The heart of the story is Dona Rosa's cafe,where all different kinds of people meet, laugh, argue, cry and generallyhaving a hard time. It is interesting to read about all the differentdestinies in this difficult world, but the problem was that there were toomany people, I lost track after a while. An advice to other readers is towrite down the names of all characters and a short personal description.After a while, you will realize that they all are connected in one way oranother. ... Read more

Product Description
Banned for many years by the Franco regime, Cela's masterpiece presents a panoramic view of the degredation and suffering of the lower-middle class in post-Civil War Spain. Readers are introduced to over a hundred characters through a series of starkly rendered interlocking vignettes, transforming this book from a social document into a towering work of inventive fiction. Filled with violence, hunger, and compassion, The Hive captures the ambitions and constraints of life under a dictatorship. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Superb
For me Cela is one of the best Spaniard authors ever. This novel is a master piece. The only advice I can give you is: read it!

The fellowship of the cafe
In "The Hive", a most appropriate title, Cela recreates the everyday life of Madrid in the 1940's, centered around a small cafe and the life of its employees and clients. This place is the real protagonist of the novel, as we are witnesses to the small tragedies, triumphs, fights and passions of the people who live around it. It is verily a hive, an endless show of life with all its grandiosity, sordidness, pettiness and small acts of love and redemption. For those who know the modern-day Madrid, a cosmopolitan, prosperous place, it should be reminded that this book portrays the city right after the bitter Spanish Civil War, during the first days of Franco's dictatorship. Under Franco, Spain was a poor, provincial, backwards place where the most primitve form of Roman Catholicism was the religion of state, where the Catholic Church reigned supreme and where political repression was everywhere. Life wasn't easy in Spain in those days, and though this is not by any means a political novel, it is useful to remember this as we look at the lives of the many characters in this moving and excellent story.

A day in the life of Franco's Spain.
"The Hive" is the story of a coffee shop in Spain, frequented by a wide assortment of every-day Spanish citizens. It is an interesting narrative of colorful characters. There are a few tense moments when one realizes the fact that this is the Spain of Franco's rule, and a character runs afoul of the authorities once or twice, but by and large, this is a normal novel with an interesting story to tell. It is enjoyable to read and nice to follow the various characters, but Cela will remind the astute reader in a very subtle fashion, but an unequivocal one, that this is Franco's Spain, an isolated universe of political peril, giving this novel a second tier, a dark cloud which overhangs the proceedings. Readers who enjoy the multivarious tales of small town inhabitants and their common taverns, or readers who enjoy stories of early twentieth-century Spain will enjoy this story particularly.

obra maestra de un maestro
"La Colmena" pasará a la historia como la obra hispana contemporánea más estudiada en las Universidades Americanas. Entre los diversos estudios destaca una tesis doctoral de la Universidad de California firmada por una tal "Loreena M." que intenta analizar el número de personajes que intervienen en la novela llegando a la conclusión de que son 232 aunque plantea la duda sobre un personaje llamado "Manolo" que aparece en dos ocasiones y que la autora de la tesis no puede asociar. Esta anécdota demuestra el interés suscitado por esta obra publicada a mediados de la década de los 50 y que sirve de puente entre el realismo de Posguerra y las nuevas tendencias de los años 60. La técnica narrativa, denominada por los críticos como calidoscopio, se basa en una estructura coral de los personajes que describen un entorno concreto, el Madrid de la posguerra, haciendo un exhaustivo repaso a la sociedad de la época con sus grandezas y miserias en un periodo temporal muy determinado: cinco días.
Como antesala de esta obra hay que mencionar "Café de Artistas", un relato que Cela escribió a finales de los años cuarenta aunque se público bastante después que "La Colmena". En definitiva una obra compleja que invita a ser releída una y otra vez descubriendo a cada pagina un nuevo matiz con el que completar ese espectro narrativo que surge de la descomposición de la realidad, cuando pasa a través de un prisma óptico llamado Camilo José Cela.

Life
A masterpiece -- and a superb translation. ... Read more

Product Description
Cela was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 1989, and this novel is considered by many to be his masterpiece. It is the story of an ignorant Castillian peasant and multiple murderer, and it tells of the savage impulses behind his crimes and his redeeming characteristics. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

The Family of Pascual Duarte Review
Book was a good read. It was far different from anything ever read but was required for me. Was a strange but interesting book about a very hard life of a common turned crazed man.

Not the Masterwork I Was Expecting
This book, published in 1942, was Cela's first novel. The bulk of it comprised the memoirs of a man in his 50s who was in prison and about to be executed for his last crime, the killing of his village's local landowner during the turmoil of the Spanish Civil War, ca. 1936-7.

The memoirs didn't focus on that crime or the Civil War era, but covered the man's childhood, adolescence and early adulthood, a marriage, a murder, a second marriage and a second murder, all of which had occurred years before, in the 1910s and early 20s.

The man was born to poor, squabbling, alcoholic parents, and lived a dreary life. He enjoyed a few periods of happiness -- first love, marriage to a loving wife and their honeymoon, his wife's pregnancy, and later a marriage to a second loving wife. But each time, he felt misfortune was impending. His nerves and contrary nature -- and fate, or what seemed like the author's grim determination to destroy him -- intervened to change things for the worse. Rage at the injustice of circumstances found a target in his next victim.

This book has been compared to The Stranger, by Camus, but for me the two novels were different. In The Stranger, the narrator murdered -- once, randomly -- but eventually accepted personal responsibility for his action, though he remained indifferent to society's condemnation. And he reached a certain level of self-awareness before going to face death squarely.

In Cela's book, the narrator seemed irrational and trapped in a pattern of doomed behavior he couldn't begin to understand, let alone take responsibility for. Eventually, others reported that he felt his fate was God's will, but he couldn't face the end bravely. His outlook couldn't be described as existentialist, if that means choosing one's actions and accepting full responsibility for them. Mainly he seemed like a blind instrument of the author's own naturalism.

To me, in this book Cela succeeded best in communicating the atmosphere of dreariness and doom, the narrator's moody resentment leading to outbursts of violence, and in creating sympathy for the narrator's first wife. If only more of the writing in the book had been like this, toward the end:

"I wanted to put ground between my shadow and myself, between my name and me, between the memory of my name and the rest of me, between my flesh and me myself, that me myself who, without shadow and name and memory and flesh would be almost nothing."

And there were occasional flashes of very dark humor. But with such a violent, unattractive main character, it was hard in the end to identify with his circumstances and behavior. Nor was I engaged by the book's overall style, since as communicated through the narrator's limited perspective it was bleak much of the way through. The narrator's motive for his second murder wasn't convincing, and the description of place in the book, after the beginning, was often schematic.

Because of such things, unlike with Camus' work, I sympathized less and less with the narrator's actions as the novel continued. And unlike with, say, a writer like Malaparte, I wasn't fascinated by haunting images that accompanied the narrative. Or with later writers like Selby and Jim Thompson from the democratic, open-economy U.S., by the horror of the main character's descent.

Reading Cela's novel, I couldn't help wondering whether the writing had a political dimension. The narrator was described as killing a landowner during the Civil War, so was a political position implied that made him not only a criminal but also an opponent of the conservative Franco regime that took power? Yet the narrator was also shown to believe in God and in God's punishment for his sins, so his politics, if any, remained unclear. There seemed to be little else related potentially to the political situation of the time. It was also unclear why the final murder, at the time of the Civil War, took place off stage, so to speak, as if the author didn't need to describe it, or was unable to.

Fate & free will
I first came across Cela in a dual-language book of short stories and I found his description of everyday life in Spain quite entertaining and I loved his sense of humor.

The life of Pascual Duarte is very different from that however, definitely not a light hearted read. Like another reviewer said there is no sense of redemption in it, it is very fatalistic and I guess if you are used to fairytale endings, you could consider it disappointing.

What struck me about this book was the sense of futility that Pascual had when it came to dealing with situations around him. It was as if he had no part to play in his own life, that he was just a victim of fate.

Cela's descriptions of the motivations that drove Pascual draws the reader in and makes him a witness to this man's demise. There are some parts in the book where you know he is going to do the wrong thing but you hope and hope that somehow he will come to his senses and avoid disaster.

Although this is no "Crime and Punishment" it is an interesting study into the psychology of a killer. Unlike Crime and Punishment however, do not expect to come away from this with a sense of having being cleansed.

Recommended to those who can put up with pain and disappointment, probably not for everyone.

Strongly recommended reading
Pascual Duarte grew up in brutal and brutalizing poverty, hatred, depravity, and despair. From his prison cell where he is awaiting execution for a series of murders he has committed, Duarte writes down his confessions and in doing so, depicts the horrors of his life, foremost among which are a despicable mother, an unfaithful wife, and a lifetime of savage crimes. Duarte's account (written with a hauntingly childlike sense of the world) portrays a man twisted by the cruel hand of fate into a source of contributing evil. Strongly recommended reading, The Family Of Pascual Duarte is a unique and flawlessly written novel by the late Camilo Jose Cela (1916-2002) and will admirably serve to introduce a new generation to the work of this deftly talented author of more than fifty books during his lifetime.

Kathy
probably the most unredeeming book I've ever read...just awful, a waste of time, even though it's short ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Paella Western
With all due respect to one of 20th century's most prominent writers, "Cristo versus Arizona" is a shattering failure. Cela tries to demonstrate and emphasize his virtues as a sarcasm scholar, but instead immortalizes the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in much the same way Sergio Leoni terrorized Clint Eastwood's early film career.

The author rambles on crossroad villains, murderous prostitutes and countless alien characters in a hodgepodge of virtual repetitive nonsense. His caricaturesque obsession with violence and voluminosity of odd sexuality is of incurable puberty proportions; likely the postscript of a young man frustrated with a generation constantly castigated and chastened by tenebrous forces.

The greatest paragraph ever
You haven't read a better blow-your-mind novel like this. Period. CRISTO VERSUS ARIZONA is a properly titled story that roars between solitude, religion, violence and erotica all in one fully charged place.

Since my first reading of the book back in 1991, I wonder which contemporary filmaker will take the risk and help us to understand this epic tale on the big screen. But, on a second though, it's better being helpless on such assimilation. CRISTO VS ARIZONA remains intact on my brain, on every state of life and mind, cutting deeper and deeper.

As it happens on James Joyce and other great written-word craftmen, Jose Cela mantains his control over 250 pages in one enormous paragraph. I've been in Arizona many times and I consider myself an active Christ believer, but, oh, put those two symbolic clouds face to face... Think that you are in front of a goodwill classmates of Spanish literature. Ask'em a simple thesis: to read CRISTO VERSUS ARIZONA and rewrite it on classic, small-paragraph style. Inmediatly after, send a copy to me!

For those Henry Rollins and Jeff Noon fans: Speaking of modern literature, this is violence at its smartest. ... Read more

Product Description
La familia de Pascual Duarte ha ganado con los anos fuerza y dramatismo y su protagonista, que no ha perdido el encanto primigenio, es ya un arquetipo de alcance universal. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (11)

La familia de Pascual Duarte
This edition of the classic novel written in post-Civil War Spain is intended for students who have mastered basic vocabulary. The novel is edited so that the lines of text are numbered. At the end of the novel are discussion questions for each chapter and a few questions that pertain to the work as a whole. The book concludes with a large section of vocabulary.

Este clásico novelo escrito en la poste-Guerra civil España es pensado para estudiantes que han dominado el vocabulario básico. La novela es redactada para que las líneas de texto sean numeradas. La novela es seguida la discusión las preguntas para cada capítulo y unas pocas preguntas que pertenecen al trabajo en total. El libro concluye con una sección grande del vocabulario.

Dark, Disturbing and Powerful
Pascual Duarte, a condemned prisoner, has been busy writing the story of his life. An engaging story, told politely, with frequent apologies for its occasional "bad" words, as it moves from one disastrous occurrence to another. The prisoner grows up in poverty, it's true, but he also makes a series of bad decisions, carried away by obsessive thoughts and unruly emotions. The glass is always half empty for Pascual Duarte, but then he spills what is left. As his life goes rapidly downhill, Pascual remembers only a few, fleeting days of happiness.

The story is told simply, pictorially, with vivid descriptions of places, rooms, streets, the Spanish countryside, people, animals, and one horrific event after another. I won't tell you the plot--no need to--for this is a ahort book and you already know how it ends. Read it. I recommend Pascual Duarte highly. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.

Prose like no one in the world...
While we were in Spain in January 2002, Camilo Jose Cela, a Spanish nobel prize winner in 1989, died at the age of 85.As a tribute, I re-read this, one of his most famous books, written during a time when Spain was reading sweet lovely "lyrical" books (in the 40s).Its honesty and brutality was called "Tremendismo"(tremendous-ism, if you will).

The Family of Pascual Duarte is about the life of a dirt poor man from Extremadura and is filled with the absolute realities of the primitive, angry, vulgar nature of the poor in Spain during Franco's reign.Much of Cela's work, in fact, was banned by the Franco government and for good reason - as it portrays a Spain that was not of the tourist brochures.This book has been called the most famous Spanish novel since Don Quixote (which was written 400 years before it!) and has been translated more than any other Spanish novel.If you can read Spanish, you must do so since Cela's prose is unlike any other.

Un buen libro
Yo tuve que leer este libro para una clase de literatura espanola y me gusto mucho. Uno puede ver las condiciones de la gente en Espana durante esa epoca a traves de la vida de Pascual.Ademas es un buen libro y lo recomiendo a todos que tienen interes en la literatura y la cultura.

Muy interesante
I had initially written a review in my very inadequate español, but decided I should spare myself the shame and write it in English until I improve, anyway, onto the story.

Pascual Duarte is a man whose life has been marked by a series of unfortunate incidents which he blames on fate/God that leads him to eventually commit matricide as well as a series of other crimes.

The novel is written as the recollections of the man while he is in prison, keeping this diary in which he pours his thoughts about his life and what made him the man he was. I saw in Pascual, a man like any other whose life could have gone a different way had he made better decisions in life.

This isn't a very inspiring story so don't expect to come out of this short book with a sense of having gone through the storm and come out of it a better person - Think "Perfect Storm" -. This is definitely not one of those books you want to be reading on a rainy day.

If you can stomach pain, sorrow and disappointment, then I would recommend this story to you. It is also interesting as a study of the psychology of a killer.

PS: For those people who are trying to learn Spanish, an excellent English translation (to me at least) is by Anthony Kerrigan. ISBN: 0316134317
... Read more

Product Description
In the summer of 1946, seven years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Camilo Jose Cela set out on foot to discover the heart of Spain. He chose the Alcarria because it was a place reknowned for its Spanishness. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

A classic of the Spanish Literature
El Viaje a la Alcarria or Journey to the Alcarria is one of the best books I ever read. Sometimes the reader gets tired of the third person perspective, but it is an interesting book to read after all. You find details about the life in the country side of Spain and you discover how the writter felt in those places after living in Madrid. A must read from the classic literature.

A simple account of rustic Spanish country in the 1940s
The Alcarria is a mountainous region northeast of Madrid.In 1946, Cela (who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1989) toured the Alcarria, mostly by foot.JOURNEY TO THE ALCARRIA is his account of that tour. It has the virtue of being short (139 pages).The Alcarria turns out to be rustic and simple, as is Cela's account (giving rise to a variant on the chicken-and-egg conundrum).According to the somewhat academic introduction to this edition, by Cela's standards a travel-writer "must react with genuine and simple surprise to what he sees, and jot it down without inventive alteration."Well, Cela followed that formula to a T.There is a sort of rustic charm to the book, but in truth it quickly becomes boring.I don't understand why it is celebrated (to refer to the introduction once again, JOURNEY TO THE ALCARRIA is the "crowning point" of Cela's travel sketches).Nor do I understand, if indeed JOURNEY TO THE ALCARRIA is near the apex of his literary output, why Cela merited a Novel Prize.

How a true human being travelled through Spain
Light and airy in style, filled with memorable scenes and characters, an engaging narrator, and plenty of information about daily life in backroads Spain 50 years ago.I see why this author deserved a Nobel prize.However, skip the introduction, a heavy handed piece of academic existentialist skulduggery that almost persuaded me not to read the book.

An easy trip through the countryside
I needed a short, easy book to read while on my vacation with my sister.She happened to have this book along and lent it to me.I found myself travelling through the countryside of Spain with Camilo Cela and loving it.He included just enough information to let us share his experience without drowning us in too much detail.I'll never have his exact memories but I felt like I could recognize the places and feelings if I ever get to go there.I recommend this as an enjoyable, easy read.

A Good book, but not his best one
Here We found a good book, but there are a lot of books by C. Jose Cela better than this one. This one brings the reader to a different Spain, and offers the opportunity of getting deeper in arural world. Anyway, surelyhis best book it's called La Colmena, not yet published in English, inwhich He describes the dark moments of the 50's in Spain, from a culturaland a post civil war point of view. I would recommend Journey to theAlcarria, but there are better ones. ... Read more

Product Description
Christ versus Arizona turns on the events in 1881 that surrounded the duel in the OK Corral, where Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Virgil and Morgan Earp fought the Clantons and McLaurys. Set against the backdrop of an Arizona influenced by the Mexican Revolution and the westward expansion of the United States, the story is a bravura performance by the 1989 Nobel Prize-winning author. A monologue by the naive, unreliable, and uneducated Wendell L. Espana, the book weaves together hundreds of characters and a torrent of inter-connected anecdotes, some true, some fabricated. Wendell's story is a document of the vast array of ills that welcomed the dawning of the 20th Century, ills that continue to shape our world in the new millennium. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Another Raft Adrift on the Stream of Consciousness
Take the 'sensibilities' of a Cormac McCarthy novel like No Country for Old Men, the gruesome, inescapable, insensate violence, and toss the phrases in a blender... or else compose them with lapidary insistence in the style of Thomas Bernhard or a very depressed Robert Walser off his meds. Make the whole narrative a fugue of perversion and sado-masochism with a counterpoint of religious and sexual ecstasy -- three or four lewd anecdotes of an imaginary Old West replicated in hundreds of fragmentary configurations. That will give you some idea of the structure of this one-sentence, 260-page experimental novel by the Spanish winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize, Camilo José Cela. Throw in scores of grotesque characters whose names are constantly being revised, give the uneducated and half-craze narrator a vocabulary worthy of Henry James, and you'll be even closer to Cela's concept. I can declare with some confidence that most readers will throw this book down in disgust and frustration at least a dozen times before finishing it.... but finish it you will, like it or not. It's hypnotic. It's the worst amanita-induced death-trance you'll ever experience. Take my warning: if you're not prepared to suffer, don't pick this book up!

I've read some of Cela's earlier works in Spanish. He really is an esteemed master of modern Spanish literature, best known for "The Family of Pascual Duarte", which is a lot more approachable. "The Tunnel" has been my favorite, but nothing in it or any ofhis other books prepared me for the strenuous commitment that "Christ versus Arizona" requires. Cela wrote it in his seventies and published it the year before his Nobel Prize. After he'd conceived it, he actually traveled to Tombstone, Arizona, with his licentious mistress, who has been tagged by critics as the model for the pedophiliac prostitute at the center of the narrative. The famous Gunfight at OK Corral figures in Cela's tale, but 'historical representation' was the farthest thing from the author's mind. If this narrative represents Cela's "stream of consciousness", then that stream was a scuzzy slather of brown scum, dribbling along a ditch in No Country for Anyone.

But, as I said, it's hypnotic.And think what a torrent of rage and outrage it took in Spain to flush away the crimes of Franco and the sins of Opus Dei! But that thought is fraught with ambiguity, since Cela was a Falangist and a supporter of the Franco regime for much of his life, if not to the bitter end. Thus I'm caught asking myself whether Cela was, in the end, a denouncer or a celebrator of depravity. ... Read more

Product Description
The extraordinary experimental final novel by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Boxwood might perhaps be best described as a kind of whirlwind: a vortex of marvelous writing about folklore, traditions, superstitions, cooking, nautical disasters on the Coast of Death (ships from afar spilling cargoes of oranges, typewriters, iron ore, oil, spices), elements of nature both cruel and beautiful, whales, priests, witches, ghosts—sprinkled with various autobiographies— everything exquisite and crass in Cela's native home, Galicia, Spain.

"If the Holy Ghost were a bat instead of a dove our religion would not be the one true faith and there would be fewer Catholics, and if he were a magpie or a jackdaw there would be none at all, the devil appears in the guise of a billy goat whose rump you kiss as a mark of homage and respect, the Holy Ghost could have been a swallow, but not a cormorant, the form taken by the Holy Ghost is well thought out, you immediately see the hand of God in it, Father Xerardino, the priest of San Xurxo, supposes the form might also have been a butterfly in all the colors of the spectrum...." (from Boxwood) ... Read more