An unwritten rule warns that every writer no matter how famous suffers an eclipse some time after his death His figure fades his books suddenly stop being interesting and being read and his influence on the following generations diminishes or simply disappears In the case of Camilo José Cela the last Nobel Prize winner born in Spain in 1989 the disappearance is particularly long deep and striking From the 1950s until his death in January 2002 the Galician author was one of the most well known admired quoted and award winning writers.
Spanish literature He also especially in his last years one of the most unpleasant abhorrent and reviled literary characters in the Spanish cultural world The publisher Debolsillo of the Penguin Random House group has recently published a good part of his work in new editions revised and frequently grouped in an unpublished way The small publisher Ediciones 98 has also just reissued an old travel collection That is to say twenty years after his death and in a Spain and a world completely different from the one Cela knew the Nobel Prize returns to bookstores Does that mean he has readers again Is Cela coming back
Domingo Ródenas professor of Spanish literature at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and literary critic considers that not enough time has passed yet for Cela to come out of the purgatory in which he languishes despite owning memorable literary works It is not easy for a writer to have several And Cela has them La familia de Pascual Duarte La colmena Mazurca para dos muertos Cristo versus Arizona San Camilo 1936.
Madera de boj without forgetting Oficio de tinieblas 5 The latter is a stark exploration of consciousness of its writers own conscience is a radical book in which by means of an extreme and novel technique he is seen searching for something of truth The volumes cited by Ródenas rise thanks to a most virtuosic prose crossed by violence expressiveness and lyricism But they are not enough according to this specialist to lift the writer out of the hole in which he is still immersed He is no longer there to support his work His work has to stand on its own But the antipathy that his person aroused has contaminated his work and it will cost work to rehabilitate him in the way that Antonio Muñoz Molina helped rescue Max Aub or Andrés.
Trapiello Manuel Chaves Nogales One obstacle is his machismo another the collision of his work with the political correctness that prevails now And not only because of machismo but because of contempt for those who are different for the weak We must also add his impiety towards the characters his merciless vision towards them whom he often treats like dolls That clashes with the current sensitivity In my classes when we read Cela the students and especially the female students get uncomfortable That is why I think it will be difficult to recover it for future generations
Cela before what was his first work Verses that can only be written when one feels Death in ones hands
In 1942 at the age of 26 after some poetic forays Cela broke into Spanish narrative with The Family of Pascual Duarte Nine years later in 1951 he published The Hive And in 1953 Mrs Caldwell talks to her son A dazzling and original start to a literary career that with ups and downs would continue throughout the years.
At the same time he treasures in his biography more than one despicable episode it is known that in 1938 he offered himself as an informer to the national side during the Civil War that he worked as a censor in the postwar period and that he agreed to write in 1953 for 50000 dollars a fortune of the time a novel La catira expressly commissioned by the Venezuelan dictator Pérez Jiménez It was also shown that he plagiarized to win the 50 million pesetas of the Planeta Prize in 1994 In his last years moreover he fatigued a lazy coarse contemptuous histrionic and arrogant character on television and in the newspapers All specialists agree this character has been the writer Celas worst enemy Among those who think so is Adolfo Sotelo one of the greatest experts on the Galician.
Writer Sotelo professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Barcelona UB has just published a manuscript of what would be a future Nobel Prize winner the collection of poems Pisando la dubious luz del día He is also preparing a monumental biography of Cela that will surely come out in 2025 He has already written the part that goes from Celas birth to Francos death Sotelo remembers that this writer is much more complex than he seems He is someone with many more nuances who for example kept 100000 letters his and his recipients throughout his life Someone like that cannot be easily reduced
The Great Writer and The Passionate Poet As Well, He Graduated from University Of Florida in Journalism and Brad have around 12 years of experience in news and media section.