Camilo José Cela Book order

Complete and uncensored in English for the very first time, a fragmented, daringly irreverent depiction of decadence and decay in Franco's Spain written by the 1989 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The translator Anthony Kerrigan compared Camilo José Cela, the 1989 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, to Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Curzio Malaparte—all “ferocious writers, truculent, badly spoken, even foulmouthed.” However provocative and disturbing, Cela’s novels are also flat-out dazzling, their sentences as rigorous as they are riotous, lodging like knives in the reader’s mind. Cela called himself a proponent of “uglyism,” of “nothingism.” But he has the knack, to quote another critic, Américo Castro, of deploying those “nothings and lacks” to construct beauty. The Hive is set over the course of a few days in the Madrid of 1943, not long after the end of the Spanish Civil War, when the regime of General Francisco Franco was at its most oppressive. The book includes more than three hundred characters whose comings and goings it tracks to hypnotic effect. Scabrous, scandalous, and profane, The Hive is a virtuosic group portrait of a wounded and sick society.

Mazurka for Two Dead Men, the culmination of Camilo José Cela's literary art, opens in 1936 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War: Lionheart Gamuzo is savagely murdered. In 1939, as the war ends, his brother avenges his death. For both deaths, the blind accordion player Gaudencio plays the same mazurka. Set in backward rural Galicia, Cela's excellent novel portrays a reign of fools, and works like contrapuntal music, its themes calling and responding, alternately brutal, melancholy, funny, lyrical, and coarse.

Exploring the rich tapestry of Galicia, Spain, the narrative weaves together folklore, traditions, and superstitions, creating a vivid portrait of the region's culture. It delves into the interplay between nature's beauty and cruelty, featuring themes of maritime disasters and the supernatural, including priests, witches, and ghosts. The prose is infused with autobiographical elements and offers a unique perspective on religion and identity, as seen through imaginative musings on the Holy Ghost's possible forms.

The narrator, twenty years old, faces the dangers, hardships, and uncertainty of the Spanish Civil War

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.