Family of Pascual Duarte

by Camilo Jose Cela, Anthony Kerrigan (Translator)

Overview

Confined to a prison cell, thrice-murderer Pascual Duarte recounts his journey from a violent childhood to a life of pain and misfortune; juxtaposing tableaus of country poverty against scenes of bare brutality, Nobel laureate Camilo José Cela crafts a powerful meditation on cruelty and anomie. 

The Family of Pascual Duarte follows his upbringing in the poor Spanish province of Extremadura to his eventual imprisonment—and impending death sentence. Death permeates Duarte’s world: his father’s grotesque death to rabies, his young brother’s drowning in an oil vat, and the loss of his children. But it is his wife’s sudden death that condemns him to the darkest path when, losing all faith and driven by blind revenge, he kills her souteneur. Now an alien to the world around him, Pascual Duarte resigns himself to his bloodied fate—yet never gives up his search for peace.

Camilo José Cela has been recognized as one of the pioneers of Spanish literary realism, and his masterwork The Family of Pascual Duarte proves the power of his prose. The novel, which birthed the transgressive and groundbreaking tremendismo movement, roils with emotion and unflinching inhumanity, painting the Spanish countryside in bloodshed, eroticism, and an unshakeable feeling of grief. Blending the political with the personal with the philosophic, the result is an unparalleled exploration of the fraught relationship between man and society, and the past’s inescapable hold on the present.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628975307
Publisher:	Dalkey Archive Press
Publication date:	11/14/2023
Series:	Dalkey Archive Essentials
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	166
File size:	701 KB

About the Author

Camilo José Cela (1916-2002) was a Spanish novelist, poet, essayist, and raconteur associated with the Generation '36 movement, which was a group of Spanish artists working during the Spanish Civil War. In 1943, he became a censor in Francoist Spain, during which his best-known works were produced and were often scrutinized by fellow censors. Cela was awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize in Literature "for a rich and intensive prose, which with restrained compassion forms a challenging vision of man's vulnerability." In 1994 he was awarded the Premio Planeta, and in 1996 was ennobled King Juan Carlos I, who gave Cela the hereditary title of Marquess of Iria Flavia in the nobility of Spain. Some of Cela's notable works include The Hive, Boxwood, Those Passing Clouds, The Galician and Christ Versus Arizona.

Read an Excerpt

Senor don Joaquin Barrera Lopez Merida, Badajoz Province Extremadura My dear sir: will excuse me for sending you the long narrative I enclose with this letter, which is also long, considering its purpose, but I send it to you simply be­cause among all the friends of Don Jestis Gonzalez de la Riva (may God have forgiven him as surely as Don Jesus forgave me) you are the only one whose address I now remember. And I want to be freed of its company, which oppresses me every time I think I could ever have writ­ten it. My sending it will also keep me from throw­ing it into the fire in a moment of despondency — of which God gives me many these days — an act which would only prevent others from learning what I learned too late.

Table of Contents

Pascual Duarte grew up in a brutal world of poverty, hatred, and depravity, which turned his life into and unrelenting nightmare. This novel consists of Duarte's public confessions, written from his prison cell where he awaits execution for the series of murders he's committed. In depicting the horrors of his life - including details about his despicable mother, his unfaithful wife, and his savage crimes - Duarte writes with a childlike sense of the world, portraying himself as a man deformed by the cruel hand of fatal that led him down a bloody path.

Editorial Reviews

Nobel laureate Cela's 1942 novel unfurls with Duarte telling his miserable life story from his prison cell, where he waits execution for a series of murders. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

"After Don Quixote, probably the most widely read novel in Spanish."--The New York Times

Dalkey Archive Press

From the Publisher

A most memorable book . . . The Family of Pascual Duarte sets its author in place as a contemporary of Celine and Malaparte and a follower of the Spanish picaresque tradition.”

The New York Times Book Review

Most books have to wait to become classics; but everything about The Family of Pascual Duarte—its conception, its starkness, its restraint, the enormity of its theme—made it from the very beginning a classic.”

Alastair Reid

Cela prefers the weird, the apparently meaningless and amorphous. The world of his novels has been likened to that of Hieronymus Bosch and
Brueghel; he sees man as a prisoner in a forbidding universe where chaos and imperfection always defeat the idealist.

Paul West