The Family of Pascual Duarte May 24, 2009
Posted by cantueso in Spanish, literature.trackback
He started out as a poet, but saw rather early that the larger audience was not for poetry. At the age of 26 he wrote The Family of Pascual Duarte, one of the best novels of the 20th century. It is also very short, so you can read it twice.
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Pascual is a man in his fifties, a simple guy given to reflection and a quiet life. From time to time he becomes violently angry and so fatally yields to a need to murder. That way he kills his mother and also his wife’s lover. In prison he writes down his story and gets executed.
This is the famous opening paragraph, but as yet only in Spanish:
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Cela picked up an intelligent peasant’s ways of talking about life, love, and happiness, but watched the urbanites’ growing influence on speech and manners with a mix of veiled amusement and open disgust.
As he got older, that disgust took over and he became insufferable while also producing more and more pointless prose greatly acclaimed by the book markets. He may even have used ghost writers. That was when they gave him the Nobel prize.
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Sad, no?
There is also a book of poetry by him called “Stepping onto the doubtful light of the day”, but nothing is known about it. In Spain he is disliked by some for his insulting ways, by others as a former Franco man, and also by the crowd of literati who got frustrated trying to read his later books.
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Quotes:
Cela himself about Pascual Duarte:
“…had lived with a horizon of olive groves hundreds of years old, his soul marked by curses thousands of years old, his skin burnt by an unforgiving sun as old as the world itself.”
So for once you see Cela without mask and without cynisms.
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“… in summer, when the storks came, they knew which tower was theirs. The little stork that had a limp but held out for two more winters, belonged to the nest on the church tower where it fell off when it was still frail and got frightened by the hawk……”
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“I had a hunting dog, – Sparky — half rotten, half wild, and we
got very well along. In the morning I often went with her to the Pond, a mile and a half from my town…”
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Cela was from Galicia, a region in the north of Spain, where rain is frequent and everything is very different from Extremadura, where Pascual Duarte lived.
The church in his home town.
There are castles and their ruins everywhere in Spain, but in Galicia they are surrounded by green fields and blue mist. The photo is from http://www.sitio-distinto.com/EspHistoria.html
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There are tombs called Dolmen that are 5000 years old that can be found all over Europe even as far as Russia.
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I read it in English and I must say The Family of Pascual Duarte isn’t an uplifting story, nothing you would want to read on a rainy day, just another bestseller or human interest story of the most macabre kind.
Well, maybe there is more to it than meets the eye. Look up http://www.ralphmag.org/CX/briefs.html :
“It may remind you a bit of Gone With the Wind — although this is far better writing than Mitchell ever thought of: writing that is spare, plain, arid, like the country and the people it is to describe.
“Too, it brings to mind Anna Karenina, Native Son, Madam Bovary: the creepy inevitability of people who are bound to fail, to fail miserably.”
You seem to forget that Duarte was a murderer, and he killed his own mother, which by the way is not even explained properly. Is the reader expected to assume that he killed his mother for the same reason as he killed his dog, that is, no reason at all, just a momentary flare?
It has always been my favourite novel, and I read it every year. I am also trying to learn some Spanish in the hope of reading it in Spanish as well.
I can’t understand the reason for those multiple introductions, those letters of presentation that made me very nearly give up before I even got to the beginning of the novel. Why did he do that?
I thought he might have been afraid of the censors, but in that case, the story of the manuscript found at some remote little village apothecary’s would not be much of a cover.
Yes, it is too transparent to bilk the censors.
It was probably meant to decoy the larger public to let them believe that this was authorized for publication as a document of sociological interest.
This would have helped the censors to defend it in case the higher bosses had any doubts.