Light and airy in style, filled with memorable scenes and characters, an engaging narrator, and plenty of information about daily life in backroads Spain 50 years ago. I see why this author deserved a Nobel prize. However, skip the introduction, a heavy handed piece of academic existentialist skulduggery that almost persuaded me not to read the book.

I needed a short, easy book to read while on my vacation with my sister. She happened to have this book along and lent it to me. I found myself travelling through the countryside of Spain with Camilo Cela and loving it. He included just enough information to let us share his experience without drowning us in too much detail. I'll never have his exact memories but I felt like I could recognize the places and feelings if I ever get to go there. I recommend this as an enjoyable, easy read.

Buying this tiny book, I didn t know what an amazing piece of jewelry I was taking home.

Opening it at random "The venturous and jester angel" (my own translation) unfolded five pages long before my eyes like the live coverage of a decisive moment of any sports event (not necessarily soccer) - having the plot nothing directly related to sports.

But somehow Cela made me believe I was hearing to a real voice through the radio or better, watching the game myself.

The story has nothing to do with soccer - and in the end I knew it had everything to do with it.

If poetry is recited, I cannot imagine why these short-short stories couldn t be read and recorded by a voice of some well known and suited for the purpose sports commentator as if he or she were watching live the final match.

Genius Genius Genius.

I didn t read every story yet. But just one would have been enough to give the 5 STARS.
(And I handle the 5 STARS rating in an extremly sparely manner).

Es una novela triste, pero realista. Nos llena de sentimientos contradictorios, pues el protagonista nos indigna y al mismo tiempo nos hace sentir compasion por el.
Recomiendo que al leer el libro, se pregunten si ustedes lo condenarian o lo perdonarian.
Cela es un maestro de la prosa.

Un interesante acercamiento a los eternos opuestos. Es el bien algo absoluto? y el mal?. Es Pascual Duarte el verdugo o es la víctima?
Es un libro para ser leído al menos dos veces, la primera para disfrutarlo y la segunda o subsecuentes para ser analizado. Así que, si tu intención es el disfrute, aquí tienes algo para disfrutar. Si te interesa el análisis literario, psicológico o sociológico, también lo encuentras en esta obra de Don Camilo.

A traves de un personaje perseguido por su propio destino, Cela hace un recuento de la miseria de la España del tercer mundo creado por la sangrienta guerra civil española. Este personaje, a pesar de tener poca educación, cuenta su vida desde la carcel en la que estuvo después de cometer crimenes por accidente. Es una historia bien relatada, entretenida, triste, y realista. Es digna de leer.

"The Hive" is the story of a coffee shop in Spain, frequented by a wide assortment of every-day Spanish citizens. It is an interesting narrative of colorful characters. There are a few tense moments when one realizes the fact that this is the Spain of Franco's rule, and a character runs afoul of the authorities once or twice, but by and large, this is a normal novel with an interesting story to tell. It is enjoyable to read and nice to follow the various characters, but Cela will remind the astute reader in a very subtle fashion, but an unequivocal one, that this is Franco's Spain, an isolated universe of political peril, giving this novel a second tier, a dark cloud which overhangs the proceedings. Readers who enjoy the multivarious tales of small town inhabitants and their common taverns, or readers who enjoy stories of early twentieth-century Spain will enjoy this story particularly.

"La Colmena" pasará a la historia como la obra hispana contemporánea más estudiada en las Universidades Americanas. Entre los diversos estudios destaca una tesis doctoral de la Universidad de California firmada por una tal "Loreena M." que intenta analizar el número de personajes que intervienen en la novela llegando a la conclusión de que son 232 aunque plantea la duda sobre un personaje llamado "Manolo" que aparece en dos ocasiones y que la autora de la tesis no puede asociar. Esta anécdota demuestra el interés suscitado por esta obra publicada a mediados de la década de los 50 y que sirve de puente entre el realismo de Posguerra y las nuevas tendencias de los años 60. La técnica narrativa, denominada por los críticos como calidoscopio, se basa en una estructura coral de los personajes que describen un entorno concreto, el Madrid de la posguerra, haciendo un exhaustivo repaso a la sociedad de la época con sus grandezas y miserias en un periodo temporal muy determinado: cinco días.
Como antesala de esta obra hay que mencionar "Café de Artistas", un relato que Cela escribió a finales de los años cuarenta aunque se público bastante después que "La Colmena". En definitiva una obra compleja que invita a ser releída una y otra vez descubriendo a cada pagina un nuevo matiz con el que completar ese espectro narrativo que surge de la descomposición de la realidad, cuando pasa a través de un prisma óptico llamado Camilo José Cela.

A masterpiece -- and a superb translation.

an interesting book about people and their efforts to survive in Madrid during the second world war. The heart of the story is Dona Rosa's cafe, where all different kinds of people meet, laugh, argue, cry and generally having a hard time. It is interesting to read about all the different destinies in this difficult world, but the problem was that there were too many people, I lost track after a while. An advice to other readers is to write down the names of all characters and a short personal description. After a while, you will realize that they all are connected in one way or another.

With his characteristic ironic humor Mr. Cela centers "La Colmena" in the most dramatic period of Spain's 20th century history: the postwar. The characters are exquisitely molded into poor wretches, intransigent manipulators, neurotic business owners, garrulous salesmen, diffident bourgeois and aloof poets. The synergy is powerful because of its contrasts: each a survivor of the war and condemned to lead an egregious life. However, Cela's main theme is not just survival or improvisation, but imagination. The cafe dwellers are mostly penniless intellectuals hoping to trade a labored sonnet for a cup of coffee; or forlorn creatures longing for lost (and never-known) ones. An admiral of modern Spanish literature, Cela is a nobel prize laureate.

Those who try to write the names of the characters down or even try to center the novel in any particular place completely miss the point of this novel. This is a novel about a community, a wolrd, where names and places are irrelevant. The only relevant thing is the city, Madrid, and the struggle of the people we read about in this novel. A wonderful masterpiece, a fast-paced cinema-like novel that beautifully portrays the suffering during the years of Franco's regime

probably the most unredeeming book I've ever read...just awful, a waste of time, even though it's short

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.

GRADE: A-

This book was riveting. The plot is dark, and the main character nothing to be admired. But there is a struggle between his irredeemable, murderous ways, and an occasionally bulging (at best) conscience, and (at worst) paranoia that gives him a hint or whiff of something better than he is. The writing style is very vivid. Cela has a great command of expression, yet you can almost imagine this story being told to you orally on the front porch of a house in the evening. I highly recommend it.

Camilo Jose Cela is, to say the least, the greatest contemporary spanish language perfectionist to use the language at its worst and its best at the same time, even at the same paragraph (!). MAZURCA PARA DOS MUERTOS is a vivid example of that ilogic sentence, so you have to survive its 300,000 words of chaotic verbalia to proove it.

Let's see. If you are a member of the Real Academia de la Lengua (that is the honorific comitee that stablished spanish-spoken rules and tools), Jose Cela, one of its most famous accolites, is a genious rebel whose capabilities are good enough to write a novel in a perfect-grammar but chooses to misspelled everything just for fun. Then, if you are a regular civil reader on a spanish spoken country (like me), he is the funniest Nobel Prize winner around.

The novel goes around the Spanish Civil War on a fascinating but hard line that needs some big focusing effort on the first 50 pages. After the first blast goes by, those voices are here, inside, right into your head. And the bloody-thirsty war suddenly becomes speedy, catchy, even erotic.

On a brilliant touch (one of the funniest in the novel, too), Cela recalls the "nine signs of the mother******". Two examples: the flute style voice and the shortness of extremities. Feel familiar? Well, to find out the other seven you have to check out the mirror this good lecture. Jose Cela is on a trail these days accused of rewriting someone's prior novel. After the Jurors deliberate they may want to sue him for MAZURCA PARA DOS MUERTOS, a sublime journey that rewrites Spain's violent and contradictory soul.

With all due respect to one of 20th century's most prominent writers, "Cristo versus Arizona" is a shattering failure. Cela tries to demonstrate and emphasize his virtues as a sarcasm scholar, but instead immortalizes the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in much the same way Sergio Leoni terrorized Clint Eastwood's early film career.

The author rambles on crossroad villains, murderous prostitutes and countless alien characters in a hodgepodge of virtual repetitive nonsense. His caricaturesque obsession with violence and voluminosity of odd sexuality is of incurable puberty proportions; likely the postscript of a young man frustrated with a generation constantly castigated and chastened by tenebrous forces.

You haven't read a better blow-your-mind novel like this. Period. CRISTO VERSUS ARIZONA is a properly titled story that roars between solitude, religion, violence and erotica all in one fully charged place.

Since my first reading of the book back in 1991, I wonder which contemporary filmaker will take the risk and help us to understand this epic tale on the big screen. But, on a second though, it's better being helpless on such assimilation. CRISTO VS ARIZONA remains intact on my brain, on every state of life and mind, cutting deeper and deeper.

As it happens on James Joyce and other great written-word craftmen, Jose Cela mantains his control over 250 pages in one enormous paragraph. I've been in Arizona many times and I consider myself an active Christ believer, but, oh, put those two symbolic clouds face to face... Think that you are in front of a goodwill classmates of Spanish literature. Ask'em a simple thesis: to read CRISTO VERSUS ARIZONA and rewrite it on classic, small-paragraph style. Inmediatly after, send a copy to me!

For those Henry Rollins and Jeff Noon fans: Speaking of modern literature, this is violence at its smartest.

Cela has done much better than this unbearably long, at times pointless and repetitive collection of peculiar characters and circumstances. It reads more as a collection of random, vaguely related pictures, smells and sounds (which are occasionally effective) than a coherent story. Granted, the author never intended for linear plotlines and well developed characters, thus creating caricatures with memorably exaggerated eccentricities. The end result, however, is too long by about a couple of hundred pages and an exhausting, frustrating read.
The book revolves around murder and revenge in Spanish Galicia circa the Civil War. Cela uses these themes as an excuse to serve a mosaic of idiosyncratic characters, loosely connected to the story line and on occasion affected by it one way or another. On a more subtle level, fate is what drives revenge and the characters are mere puppets bound by their powerlessness, be that through their physical, behavioral, mental or emotional states.
The novel is raw in its sense of humor and its portraits but its chaotic, often repetitive narration inhibits its full potential.

The rambling, experimental style of this book is good for about 50 pages. Unfortunately, the book is six times longer. The story's simple revenge plot really only provides a convenient place for it to begin and end; what it really relies on is its dozens of preposterous characters, each of which is the embodiment of a sardonic, brutally funny joke, a brief anecdote that leaves you laughing under you're breath because you're ashamed to do it out loud, and if there's anyone else in the room you feel compelled to read them the line, but halfway through you tail off, realizing that out of context, it really isn't all that funny and just makes you sound demented.

The problem is, the book mostly consists of the repetition of these anecdotes, in different orders and slightly different contexts, a few new ones introduced and a few removed each time around. But once you've been through this freak show once, you've been through it a dozen times (and Cela will make you go through it a dozen times by the time the book is over).

The style robs you of your ability to feel anything for the book's tragic elements and by the third time around, you've lost the ability to laugh at its comic elements. What is terribly funny at first quickly becomes old, then tiring, and by the time the plot of the book is finally recapitulated one last time, this time in more or less chronological order, at the end, you're more than ready for it to be over.

Camilo Jose Cela's works aren't generally for the masses--often Nobel Prize winners fall into this category!--but don't let his "literary success" frighten you. In "Mazurka for Two Dead Men," Cela's powerful style (read in translation, of course) is moving, argumentative, sophisticated, sometimes subtle--sometimes not: in short, an adventure in literary appreciation at the same time being worthy of one's time.

Set in 1936 at the onset of the Spanish Civil War, "Lionheart" Gamuzo is abducted and killed, thus setting off (to borrow from the Greeks) a blood-will-have-blood revenge story. Tony, his brother, knows that revenge is his. Cela is high in symbolism as in these events the blind accordian player Gaudencio continually plays the same mazurka--the book echos just about every musical symbol possible, with its themes, moods, movements, rhythms, melodies, and so forth. Symbolism, too, is not lost on the Spanish society Cela captures and the political, social, and religious overtones are not easily missed. Still, "Mazurka" is a worthy continuation of Cela's writing abilities. Granted, this one's not his best, but still is in keeping with Cela's l989 Nobel Prize winning style. While, quite likely, "something may be lost in translation," still reading Cela, for me, is a pleasurable adventure. (Blllyjhobbs@tyler.net)

Here We found a good book, but there are a lot of books by C. Jose Cela better than this one. This one brings the reader to a different Spain, and offers the opportunity of getting deeper in arural world. Anyway, surely his best book it's called La Colmena, not yet published in English, in which He describes the dark moments of the 50's in Spain, from a cultural and a post civil war point of view. I would recommend Journey to the Alcarria, but there are better ones.