Mazurka for Two Dead Men

by Camilo José Cela, Patricia Haugaard (Translator)

Overview

A New York Times Best Book of the Year

Nobel Prize Laureate  

Mazurka for Two Dead Men, the culmination of Camilo José Cela‘s literary art, opens in 1936 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War: Lionheart Gamuzo is savagely murdered. In 1939, as the war ends, his brother avenges his death. For both deaths, the blind accordion player Gaudencio plays the same mazurka. Set in backward rural Galicia, Cela’s excellent novel portrays a reign of fools, and works like contrapuntal music, its themes calling and responding, alternately brutal, melancholy, funny, lyrical, and coarse.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811228251
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	02/26/2019
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	592,577
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Camilo José Cela, winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize for Literature, was born in 1916 in Galicia in a family with aristocratic roots. His father was a Spaniard, his mother of English birth but also with some Italian blood. His medical studies were interrupted due to the civil war, after which he returned to Madrid to study law. In 1942, he published the novel that made his name, La familia de Pascual Duarte. Since then he has devoted himself entirely to literature. He lived on Mallorca for decades, starting in 1954. In 1956 and until 1979, he published the magazine, Papeles de Son Armadans in which, during the Franco era, he could give space to the young opposition. He died in 2001.

What People are Saying About This

Paul West

Cela is the Goya of Franco's Spain.

Editorial Reviews

"His most mesmerizing fiction, about life during the first four decades of the twentieth century, a life so brutal that the Spanish Civil War, when it occurs, seems a mere continuation of the ordinary.  A fiendishly haunting story."

The New York Times

"If there is any Spanish novelist who deserves the Nobel Prize on the merit of narrative experimentation alone, it is without a doubt Camilo José Cela."

The Nation - Miguel Ugarte

"There is a secret slot for Cela at his best, as one of the great prose stylists, plural, of Spain—a man dangerously like us."

Roberto Bolaño

"The definitive novel of how the Spanish Civil War was actually experienced by ordinary people."

Newsday

"Cela is the Goya of Franco’s Spain."

Paul West

"Cela never forgets that the mazurka is a dance. He writes with gusto about that fundamental two-step of human existence: sex and death."

|Los Angeles Times

The Spanish Civil War intrudes almost casually on the characters' picaresque doings in Cela's amorphous, bawdy novel, first published in Spain in 1983. Set in the mountainous region of Galicia and redolent with the Spanish countryside's wild beauty and its inhabitants' folkways, the work depicts a gallery of sinners, fools and misfits in overlapping yarns that span several generations. The plot involves Lionheart Gamuzo, who was shot in the back in 1936, and his brother Tanis, who in 1940 avenges the death with trained killer dogs. The blind Gaudencio, who works as an accordionist in a whorehouse, plays the same mazurka to commemorate these deaths, framing a sprawling canvas peopled with an enormous Rabelaisian cast, including jazz musician Uncle Cleto, who vomits whenever he's bored; the widow Fina, who is fond of bedding priests; and Roque Gamuzo, who is famed for his colossal member. Winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize for literature, Cela ( The Family of Pascual Duarte ) garrulously conveys the impression that ``mankind is a hairy, gregarious beast, wearisome and devoted to miracles and happenings.'' The musical translation captures his lyricism and colloquial flavor. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Set in Galicia during the Spanish Civil War, this 1984 winner of the Spanish National Prize for Literature revolves around two murders, but the multiple narrative lines make reconstructing the exact chronology of events difficult. This fifth novel by the 1989 Nobel laureate to be translated into English recalls Cela's earlier efforts: the swarm of characters in The Hive (Farrar, 1990), the tremendista repugnance of The Family of Pascaal Duarte (Classic Returns, LJ 3/1/90), and the sexual obsessions of San Camilo, 1936 ( LJ 12/91). Though the novel is unified by the almost symphonic recurrence of epithets and of images like rain, the experimental fragmentation of the structure is devoid of any breaks and palls about 100 pages before the end. In addition, the colloquial speech often resists effective translation. For academic and larger public libraries.-- Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC, Dublin, Ohio

Library Journal

...[A] fiendishly haunting story based on the simple premise that if you kill someone, sooner or later you will pay because the universe must be justified.

New York Times Books of the Century

…if there is any Spanish novelist who deserves the Nobel Prize on the merit of narrative experimentation alone, it is without a doubt Camilo José Cela.
—The Nation

Miguel F. Ugarte