Camilo José Cela (1916–2002)

This book made me work. That's not a bad thing, but along the way it almost drove me crazy. I couldn't make sense of it. Was there a clue in the title? I looked up the structure of a mazurka to see if there was a link between that and the prose rhythm. There wasn't.

Then one day, about one hundred and seventy-five pages in, I discovered the secret. Up 'til then, I had been reading it in ten to twenty page segments, and that day I read about seventy. It clicked. This is a book which requires show more immersion. There is a rhythm and music to it which can't be appreciated in brief bursts.

Set in a rural village in Galicia during the Spanish Civil War, the novel tells a story of clan loyalty and revenge that could have happened in any era, but is one which the war magnifies and repeats again and again. The mazurka in question is one which the blind accordion player from the brothel will only play twice: once for the oldest of the nine Gamuzo brothers, Lionheart, when he was murdered in 1936; and once more when his death was avenged three years later. However, the novel starts with another murder, that of Lazaro Codesal, whose death had caused the rain to fall continuously ever since, obliterating the line of the mountain range beyond it, and keeping the villagers in their own world. Here we have the two great themes of the novel: revenge and superstition.

Imagine an old bard telling a story. There is repetition. There are digressions, complications, and red herrings. Cela's novel is like that, only there is not just one narrator there are many. There are no chapter breaks and it is up to the reader to know when the changes in narrator occur. Added to these voices is that of the recorder, who sometimes interjects his own thoughts, and sometimes stops his recording altogether to converse with a narrator. Time is like a tide in this novel, ebbing and flowing back and forth.

As each assertion is introduced, it seems like a simple fact. It grows with a slight embellishment each time it is repeated, connecting to other facts, other characters, setting up rivalries, explaining family histories. It's like elderly aunties competing with each other to air the dirty laundry in the baldest of language, leaving nothing out. These are peasants, close to the land, their animals and each other. Often they fail to make the usual distinctions. Always there is that underlying bloodlust, that drive to avenge the murder. As the arrangements are made, the pace quickens, a certain tension is introduced.

In this novel of layers though, there is yet another death that must be avenged. Cidrán Segade was killed half an hour after his comrade Lionheart. His wife Adega's wish was to live long enough to see the murderer dead and buried. She wouldn't utter his name, she just wanted to see him dead and his remains sullied. Sullied they were when the time came after revenge had been extracted. Even then, Adega could not speak his name, calling him always "the dead man that killed my old man", one of the refrains of the novel.

Throughout, Cela pokes fun at those in authority. He gets his last dig in with a coroner's report on the dead man. While there is truth in it, it is so far off the mark as to be ludicrous. The villagers have won. show less

Like Ulysses and Berlin Alexanderplatz, this is one of those modernist books that tries to find a way for the novel to engage with the complexity of the twentieth century city, in this case Madrid in the winter of 1942. Instead of invading the consciousness of a single protagonist or showing us the shifting relationships of a small group of characters, Cela takes 160 "main characters" and shows us brief scenes from their lives over the space of a few days, rapidly cutting back and forth show more between different characters and also shifting backwards and forwards in time unpredictably. Some of the characters have scenes that cross-over several different storylines, others just seem to pass through without any important interactions, just providing an ironic contrast to what has gone before.

Cela doesn't want to hide anything under a veil of respectability here, which obviously accounts for the difficulty he had getting the book past the Spanish censor (it eventually had to be published in Buenos Aires). Middle-class businessmen and their wives cross paths with whores, con-men, child-abusers, voyeurs, cops, impecunious poets, and worse. There is the murder of an old woman, treated with as much attention as the ejection of a non-paying customer from Doña Rosa's café; there is a lover concealed in a laundry-hamper; several people are clearly dying of TB; there are gypsies and shanty-town dwellers and all the poverty and squalor and unemployment of the Posguerra. So there's a lot of misery, but there's also a surprising amount of dry humour around. If people are in trouble, Cela is interested in how they got there: a couple of times he breaks off to tell us what has happened to all someone's children and grandchildren for no obvious reason except that he wants us to know how that kind of family develops.

Fascinating and complicated: this is one of those books where you end up letting it all wash over you the first time through, intending to come back and read it more carefully, paying full attention to who is who. But perhaps the washing-over is the point: there's a scene where Cela talks about the way we look at our fellow-passengers in the tram and imagine their stories, and that seems to be a good illustration of what this book is trying to reproduce. show less

Despite Cela's reputation for literary experimentation and scandalous content, this little book seems to be relatively innocent and straightforward, its only obvious eccentricity being the use of the third person instead of the first person narrative that is usual in travel books: Cela refers to himself throughout as "el viajero" (the traveller). This gives the book a sort of quirky archness, which is irritating at first but soon comes to seem natural. It probably allows him to distance show more himself a bit further from the story and add a layer of irony. Perhaps it is also meant to remind the reader that a travel book has to be read as a literary construction, not an unfiltered account of a journey.

The book describes a tour Cela made of the Alcarria region, to the north-east of Madrid, in 1946, seven years after the end of the civil war. He sets out from Guadalajara and makes his way, mostly on foot, in a big arc, travelling from village to village and staying in the local inns (posadas, paraderos and fondas). Although he comes across a great deal of poverty, neglect, hardship and ignorance, the tone of the book is determinedly upbeat. The traveller wants to tell us about the beauties of the countryside and villages of the region, and about the amazing diversity of the ways people respond to the challenges of living there. The great charm of the book really lies in the traveller's frequently very offbeat dialogues with the characters he meets (shepherds, a slightly deranged tramp, a super-sharp commercial traveller, a monumentally ignorant local antiquary, various innkeepers, ...).

Whether the narrator entirely agrees with the traveller's optimistic view of things is something we have to make our own minds up about. He does tell us directly in his introduction that there are bad things he has suppressed from the text (the village where they mistook him for a wanted criminal and put him in jail overnight), and he drops a few hints about his exasperation with people who are so concerned with lamenting the passing of the golden age that they don't bother to take simple steps to improve their own environments (e.g. by looking after historic buildings). show less

I'll start out with this on Page 222 of Christ versus Arizona the Spanish nobel literary laureate quite literally kills me off in the following lines: 'Professor Licencia Margarita was romantically involved with Luke Short, the one who shot the ranch-hand Larry Riley in the back and then ordered his corpse hanged, the way to make sure hanged men don't kick is to hang them dead, look at Riley up there--what composure!,'--. A bit unusual for me to see my name for the first time in print--and show more in a novel by one of my favorite authors, one who's works I've even re-read on a few occasions--and he kills me off! What price loyalty!?!! At least I'm allowed to maintain my composure.

Anyway to the review of this newly translated into English 261 page work of fiction--it comes as one long stream of conscious paragraph, broken up by commas and not periods. Not unusual for those who have read San Camilo 1936 (IMO his masterpiece), Mazurka for two dead men or Boxwood. That does not mean there is no flow, there's plenty of that at least IMHO. Cela every once in a while puts in signature points, such as: 'the Litany of our Lady is the breastplate that preserves us from sin, I say regina angelorum regina patriarcharum and you say ora pro nobiis twice'--which serve as almost musical counterpoints throughout the body of his work throughout his life. By repeating some things over and over again, sometimes only subtly adding or subtracting a detail here and there, by juxtaposing situations and characters he creates a kaleidoscopic effect while at times increasing the tension as well. What we begin to see then our faces and names gradually emerging into focus as the work moves along towards its ultimate end which for all intents and purposes could just as well be its beginning.

Narrated through the voice of an elderly man--Wendell Liverpool Espana (or Aspen or just plain Span) now living in a rest home(?), the geography of the book is set in Tombstone, Arizona and the region surrounding it--the most famous story relating to the shootout at the O.K. Corral. The backdrop to all this is a community of Hispanics and some anglos, prostitues, homosexuals, wife beaters and cheaters, child molesters and animal sadists, gunmen, ranchers, priests (some living in sin) and revolutionaries. These multitudinous voices and characters often describing murders, and hangings/lynchings, and all sorts of petty and not so petty crime and carnal escapades of their neighbors, friends and enemies--can be seen almost to use our senior citizen as some kind of host they've managed to possess.

To be honest I'm glad that Cela actually made short work of my character and left my private life alone. Anyone familiar with the writer should know that he possessed a very ribald, sometimes quirky sense of humor and there is no holds barred. He took delight in slaying sacred cows and holding up the entrails for his readers to view from all angles and at their leisure.

As for the shootout it's described this way: 'the first ones to fire were Wyatt who got Frank in the stomach and Billy whose shot missed, Holliday's bullet struck Billy in the chest but he was still able to continue fighting, Tom made a move for the rifle that his brother Frank had on the saddle of his horse and Holliday gave him two loads of buckshot in the ribs, buckshot is illegal because lead being soft flattens out and tears through flesh, Ike got Wyatt in one arm and he didn't shoot but instead said, fight or clear out!, Ike took off running and Holliday hunted him down, with one slug Billy hit Virgil in the leg, Frank hit Holliday with a bullet also in his leg, furthermore it drilled a hole in his holster, now Colonel Charles W. Maverick keeps it as a souvenir in his home in Phoenix, Billy fired at Morgan Earp and the slug went through his shoulder, Holliday and Wyatt and Morgan Earp all fired at once at Frank McLaury and brought him down like a bird, Virgil Earp caught Billy Clanton in the chest and knocked him off his feet, this was the end of the fierce shootout at the O.K. Corral, all of half a minute long, half a minute for death to do its sinister cancan, these gunfight stories are always made up or at least they always seem that way because nobody can really know what happened when, much less remember it, the story of the shootout at the O.K. Corral is usually told the way it was told by Wyatt Earp, the Lion of Tomiston, who was the last to die and so couldn't be contradicted, and it seems to me that he sometimes added a few details whenever he told it,'

In any case I've always found Cela's writing to be fluid and at least somewhat experimental--in part the ribald nature of his writing reminds of some of Spain's greatest writers such as Cervantes or Quevedo. As far as I know this is his only work to be set on North American soil and it's my humble opinion that it breathes an alternate life into one of the great myths of the American west--and I enjoyed reading it very much even if he had to kill me to do it. show less