The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Understanding Camilo José Cela by Lucile C. Charlebois
David William Foster

Lucile C. Charlebois. Understanding Camilo José Cela. Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1998. 187 pp. $29.95.

It has been fifty years since Cela published La familia de Pascual Duarte (1942; English translation published in 1964 as The Family of Pascual Duarte). Yet this remains an important literary event in twentieth-century Spanish literature. It is not so much that Pascual Duarte defied various segments of the Franquista ideology at a time when there were few other notable efforts in fiction. Rather, Cela legitimated a form of gritty realism that has remained a hallmark of Spanish writing ever since, as it has moved through various periods of cultural production in the intervening years. The absolute elimination of any form of sentimentalism and the ability to see even the most apparently random form of individual behavior as deeply rooted in implacable social structures served Cela well for the inauguration of a literary career that is still central to contemporary Spanish literature.
While it is true that Cela wandered far and wide from the social realism of Pascual Duarte, he never lost his commitment to the imperative for implacable narrativity. Charlebois’s study, part of a series devoted to “Understanding Modern European and Latin American Literature,” surveys Cela’s ten most important novels, and she quite rightly focuses on the implacableness of his narrative scrutiny of the human enterprise. What remains quite singular about Cela, however, is the enormous variety and versatility of the strategies he found for the representation of the human social condition, which explains to a large extent why he has ended up producing more sustainedly intriguing fiction than anyone else of his generation, as well as how he managed never to become like Pío Baroja, in the sense of a body of writing in which all of the novels end up sounding the same.
Charlebois provides an excellent “humanistic” reading of Cela’s novels. Her comments are accurate and intelligent, and her study admirably fulfills the goal of providing an understanding of Cela’s writings. [David William Foster]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Understanding Camilo José Cela by Lucile C. Charlebois David William Foster Lucile C. Charlebois. Understanding Camilo José Cela. Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1998. 187 pp. $29.95. It has been fifty years since Cela published La familia de Pascual Duarte (1942; English translation published in 1964 as The Family of Pascual Duarte). Yet this remains an important literary event in twentieth-century Spanish literature. It is not so much that Pascual Duarte defied various segments of the Franquista ideology at a time when there were few other notable efforts in fiction. Rather, Cela legitimated a form of gritty realism that has remained a hallmark of Spanish writing ever since, as it has moved through various periods of cultural production in the intervening years. The absolute elimination of any form of sentimentalism and the ability to see even the most apparently random form of individual behavior as deeply rooted in implacable social structures served Cela well for the inauguration of a literary career that is still central to contemporary Spanish literature. While it is true that Cela wandered far and wide from the social realism of Pascual Duarte, he never lost his commitment to the imperative for implacable narrativity. Charlebois’s study, part of a series devoted to “Understanding Modern European and Latin American Literature,” surveys Cela’s ten most important novels, and she quite rightly focuses on the implacableness of his narrative scrutiny of the human enterprise. What remains quite singular about Cela, however, is the enormous variety and versatility of the strategies he found for the representation of the human social condition, which explains to a large extent why he has ended up producing more sustainedly intriguing fiction than anyone else of his generation, as well as how he managed never to become like Pío Baroja, in the sense of a body of writing in which all of the novels end up sounding the same. Charlebois provides an excellent “humanistic” reading of Cela’s novels. Her comments are accurate and intelligent, and her study admirably fulfills the goal of providing an understanding of Cela’s writings. [David William Foster]

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