Second only to the inestimable Don Quixote in the pantheon of Spanish Literature, Cela's Family of Pascual Duarte was published in the same year as The Stranger (Albert Camus) and, treating the same themes, is its superior. Cela was for many years denied the recognition he deserved due to his membership in the Falangist party and his service on Franco's side in the Spanish Civil War, but finally, in 1989, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Pascual Duarte is a brutal Spanish peasant, shaped by poverty, ignorance and hatred. The book recounts his mounting depravity as he goes from killing his dog to knifing a romantic rival to final horrific matricide. Duarte falls prey to the type of alienation and world weariness described by the Existentialists. He describes himself prior to killing his mother:
The day I decided I would have to use my knife on
her, I was so weary of it all, so convinced in
my bones that bloodletting was the only cure, that
the thought of her dying didn't even quicken my
pulse. It was something fated, it had to be
and would be.
And even as he writes this account of his life as he sits in prison, awaiting death, he acknowledges:
...there are moments when the telling of my own story
gives me the most honest of honest
pleasures, perhaps because I feel so far removed
from what I am telling that I seem to be repeating
a story from hearsay about some unknown person.
But Cela, unlike Camus, seems to trace Duarte's pathologies to his environment, to the circumstances of his life, rather than trying to make a universal statement about the human condition. Duarte is a distinct type, but one that has been all too familiar in the Century. His alienation, amorality and brutality are summed up in a chilling assertion of his own inhumanity:
...I'm not made to philosophize, I don't have the
heart for it. My heart is more like a machine for
making blood to be spilt in a knife fight....
Nor does Cela offer much philosophical elaboration, neither to explain Duarte nor to offer a cure for the world's Duartes. Instead, what is really noticeable here is the absence of any institutions to inculcate values or venues in which to express individual aspirations. Missing are the Church, an open economy and participatory democratic structures, the triune basis of modern Western civil society. In this sense, the novel sounds a cautionary note about the sorts of men that arise in this kind of moral vacuum.
The novel is raw and powerful and compulsively readable. It's
outrageous that it is not currently in print in English translation, but
it is available through used booksellers and many libraries may stock copies
from when he won the Nobel. Either way, it is well worth your effort
to track it down.
(Reviewed:02-Jan-00)
Grade: (A-)
