Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #115455 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 166 pages

Customer Reviews

Not the Masterwork I Was Expecting
This book, published in 1942, was Cela's first novel. The bulk of it comprised the memoirs of a man in his 50s who was in prison and about to be executed for his last crime, the killing of his village's local landowner during the turmoil of the Spanish Civil War, ca. 1936-7.

The memoirs didn't focus on that crime or the Civil War era, but covered the man's childhood, adolescence and early adulthood, a marriage, a murder, a second marriage and a second murder, all of which had occurred years before, in the 1910s and early 20s.

The man was born to poor, squabbling, alcoholic parents, and lived a dreary life. He enjoyed a few periods of happiness -- first love, marriage to a loving wife and their honeymoon, his wife's pregnancy, and later a marriage to a second loving wife. But each time, he felt misfortune was impending. His nerves and contrary nature -- and fate, or what seemed like the author's grim determination to destroy him -- intervened to change things for the worse. Rage at the injustice of circumstances found a target in his next victim.

This book has been compared to The Stranger, by Camus, but for me the two novels were different. In The Stranger, the narrator murdered -- once, randomly -- but finally accepted personal responsibility for his action, though he remained indifferent to society's condemnation. And he reached a certain level of self-awareness before going to face death squarely.

In Cela's book, the narrator seemed irrational and trapped in a pattern of doomed behavior he couldn't begin to understand, let alone take responsibility for. Eventually, others reported that he felt his fate was God's will, but he couldn't face the end bravely. His outlook couldn't be described as existentialist, if that means choosing one's actions and accepting full responsibility for them. Mainly he seemed like a blind instrument of the author's own naturalism.

To me, in this book Cela succeeded best in communicating the atmosphere of dreariness and doom, the narrator's moody resentment leading to outbursts of violence, and in creating sympathy for the narrator's first wife. If only more of the writing in the book had been like this, toward the end:

"I wanted to put ground between my shadow and myself, between my name and me, between the memory of my name and the rest of me, between my flesh and me myself, that me myself who, without shadow and name and memory and flesh would be almost nothing."

And there were occasional flashes of very dark humor. But with such a violent, unattractive main character, it was hard in the end to identify with his circumstances and behavior. Nor was I engaged by the book's overall style, since as communicated through the narrator's limited perspective it was bleak much of the way through. The narrator's motive for his second murder wasn't convincing, and the description of place in the book, after the beginning, was often schematic.

Because of such things, unlike with Camus' work, I sympathized less and less with the narrator's actions as the novel continued. And unlike with, say, a writer like Malaparte, I wasn't fascinated by haunting images that accompanied the narrative. Or with later writers like Selby and Jim Thompson, by the horror of the main character's descent.

Reading Cela's novel, I couldn't help wondering whether the writing had a political dimension. The narrator was described as killing a landowner during the Civil War, so was a political position implied that made him not only a criminal but also an opponent of the conservative Franco regime that took power? Yet the narrator was also shown to believe in God and in God's punishment for his sins, so his politics, if any, remained unclear. There seemed to be little else related potentially to the political situation of the time. It was also unclear why the final murder, at the time of the Civil War, took place off stage, so to speak, as if the author didn't need to describe it, or was unable to.