The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Boxwood, by Camilo José Cela, translated by Patricia Haugaard
reviewed by Mark Tursi

Camilo José Cela. Boxwood. Trans. Patricia Haugaard. New Directions, 2002. 211 pp. $25.95.

Like the densely branched and intricately sculpted shrub that Camilo José Cela takes for the title of his final novel, Boxwood is a complex adventure that weaves and branches through varying narratives, including traditional wisdom, folklore, history, superstition, seafarers’ stories, and autobiography. Cela himself has called it “a book of adventures passing through the confused sieve of the memory.” The Nobel Prize-winning novelist and father of tremendismo has continued toward a path of greater experimentalism with content, structure, and language. Boxwood represents Cela’s fullest realization of tremendismo, which combines aspects of existential philosophy and “brutal realism” with a surreal atmosphere. This is produced via a flowing narrative whereby tales of ships lost at sea collide and merge with other tales, such as one that describes the cure for cancer as “ashes from the head of a rabid dog steeped for nine days in vinegar.” His method of intertwining stories dismantles conceptions of linear time through artifice and narrative expansion. One of the many recurring scenes of dialogue that interrupt the storytelling sequences calls attention to this murkiness of time and perception: “ ‘Isn’t this a little garbled?’ . . . ‘Like life itself?’ ” The recurring tales and tumbling motifs begin to coalesce, and patterns emerge that are both illuminating and dynamic. The inertia of shipwrecks, superstitions, and anecdotes becomes less blurry, and what arises is a commentary that reveals humanity in its often horrid but hopeful incarnations. He writes: “Don’t you know that vultures hatch their eggs within my heart? Time passes gently and uncertainly, like the trees which grow without anyone realizing, this growth business has more to do with the throb of intuition than with the sense of sight.” Cela’s creative process and methodology are foregrounded, and the text becomes a treasure trove of possibilities and potential discoveries.