2010/28

Camilo José Cela: De Familie van Pascual Duarte (151p.)

Camilo José Cela was born in the small village of Iria Flavia, in Galicia (Spain), and since he won the 1989 Nobel Prize for Literature, we’re speaking here of the great Galician writer. (My cousin Pieter (headman of the Casa de los Ladrones) is living with a gallega.) Cela spent most of his life in Madrid (where he died), and on the island Mallorca.

De Familie van Pascual Duarte (The Family of Pascual Duarte in English) was his debut, of which the second edition had to be published from Buenos Aires, as the book, with its scenes of peasant violence set in rural Extremadura (the Spanish answer to existentialism or tremendismo), did much to rub with the tastes of Catholic Spain in the 40s. It was published in 1942.