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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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103089
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10308900.074
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1990-09-18
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NOBEL PRIZES, Page 86A Risky LifeThe Academy picks Spanish novelist Camilo Jose Cela
When the Swedish Academy last week announced its choice for
the 1989 Nobel Prize for Literature, the reaction across the globe
might be summarized as Que Cela, Cela? Was the award to Spanish
author Camilo Jose Cela, 73, another example of the Academy's
penchant for giving unheard-of writers undreamt-of recognition?
Yes, in the sense that Cela has not had much impact outside his
native land for a quarter-century. But on reflection, the better
answer is no, for Cela, though now little read, has amassed a body
of powerful, disturbing work -- and lived a risky, iconoclastic
life -- that fully merits the world's attention.
Gregory Rabassa, the eminent translator and authority on
Spanish literature, says Cela "kept the Spanish novel alive during
those awful years." That period, of course, encompasses the Spanish
Civil War and the wrenching adjustments afterward to the Franco
dictatorship. Cela, raised in Madrid by his Spanish father and
English mother, was a university student in 1936 when the war
erupted. He joined what readers of Hemingway or Orwell will
recognize as the wrong side, taking up arms with Franco against the
Republic. He continued his education in conflict, hearing the
oxymoronic battle cry of some of his fellow soldiers: Viva la
muerte!
Being among the victors did not bring Cela many spoils. In 1942
his novel The Family of Pascual Duarte caused a sensation.
Ostensibly the memoir of a triple murderer awaiting execution, the
novel portrayed a Spanish countryside awash in madness, vengeance
and bloodshed. The work was harshly attacked. Mordantly, Cela
dedicated the book "to my enemies, who have been of such help to
me in my career." In 1951 came The Hive, which was banned outright
by the Franco government. This terse, episodic novel retailed the
incidental miseries of some 160 inhabitants of a squalid Madrid.
Cela's flippant disdain for authority -- of whatever sort --
earned him the respect of exiled Spaniards who might otherwise have
excoriated him for his allegiance in the civil war. In later years
his fierce independence won increasing regard. He was among those,
after Franco's death, who were asked to write a new Spanish
constitution. Beyond that, his best novels, with their violent,
poetic hyper-realities, affirmed a tradition that stretches from
Cervantes to Gabriel Garcia Marquez.