Understanding Camilo Jose Cela.

Gerling, David Ross

Lucile C. Charlebois. Columbia. University of South Carolina Press. 1998. xvi + 187 pages. $29.95. ISBN 1-57003-151-7.

Understanding Camilo Jose Cela by Lucile C. Charlebois is part of the series Understanding Modern European and Latin American Literature published by the University of South Carolina Press. The body of the work consists of ten erudite essays, each one devoted to a different novel by the Nobel laureate, beginning with La familia de Pascual Duarte (1940; Eng. Pascual Duarte and His Family) and ending with the untranslated La Cruz de San Andres (St. Andrew's Cross; 1994). Besides the ten essays, the volume contains the following: a clear, concise, and amenable introduction; some thirty pages of very readable notes to the essays; an up-to-date selected bibliography; a two-page conclusion; and a chronology that inexplicably silences Cela's late-in-life divorce of Marfa del Rosario Conde Picavea for a much younger woman.

Besides La familia de Pascual Duarte and La cruz de San Andres, the eight remaining essays examine Pabellon de reposo (1944; Eng. Rest Home), La colmena (1951; Eng. The Hive), Mrs. Caldwell habla con su hijo (1953; Eng. Mrs. Caldwell Speaks to Her Son), San Camilo 1936 (1969), Oficio de Tinieblas 5 (Service of Darkness 5; 1973), Mazurka para dos muertos (1983; Eng. Mazurka for Two Dead Men), Cristo versus Arizona (Christ versus Arizona; 1988), and El asesinato delperdedor (The Murder of the Loser; 1994). Interestingly, the style of each essay reflects the style of the particular novel under consideration. It is as if Charlebois had so assimilated the esthetics of Cela's novels that the essay on Oficio de Tinieblas 5, for example, is much more challenging reading than the one on La familia de Pascual Duarte, By the time I read the essay on El asesinato del perdedor, I was beginning to wonder if the protagonists of this novel, or perhaps Cela himself, had ever heard of Prozac.

Notwithstanding the editor's preface which proclaims that the UMELL series is for undergraduate and graduate students as well as nonacademic readers, the ten essays that constitute Understanding Cela are definitely not for the general reading public. The South Carolina series is not an easy reader a la Twayne's World Authors Series. The ten essays in Charlebois's book sound like reworked chapters from a dissertation or articles extracted from an academic literary journal. While none of this detracts from the value of this book on Spain's most celebrated and most decorated living writer, the editors should realize that no one book can be all things to all readers. Statements such as the following, referring to Mazurka para dos muertos, probably would sound alien even to readers of the New York Times Book Review: "Strung together by a protean, extradiegetic narrator whose voice is intertwined with those of others, the dialogic segments that surface as a result of the oral point of departure manifest themselves in the rhythmic, strategically plotted, yet spontaneously decontextualized, conversations/dialogues that serve as guideposts for the entire discourse." And this is not an isolated example.

Rather than a primer, Understanding Camilo Jose Cela is a well-researched work bubbling with fresh insights for those who already understand both Cela and, especially, the esthetics of the nueva novela.

David Ross Gerling Sam Houston State University