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...

A New York Times Best Book of the YearNobel 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.

Banned for many years by the Franco regime, Cela's masterpiece presents a panoramic view of the degradation and suffering of the lower-middle class in post-Civil War Spain. Readers are introduced to over a hundred characters through a series of interlocking vignettes, transforming this book from a social document into a towering work of inventive fiction. Filled with violence, hunger, and compassion, The Hive captures the ambitions and constraints of life under a dictatorship.