88- Identity: the
building blocks of
2. Literature
and philosophy
3. Art and
architecture
4. Performing
arts
5. Cinema
and fashion
6. Media and
communications
7. Food and drink 8. Living culture:
the details of
Mixed messages:
Camilo José Cela
Cela, the son of an
Englishwoman, wrote
poetry, travelogues and,
most successfully, novels
during his long life and
was duly rewarded in
1989 with the Nobel
Prize for Literature. As a
member of the Cortes
he was even involved
in drafting the new
constitution in 1978. Yet
his reputation remains
hazy. Having fought on
Franco’s side in the Civil
War he was one of the
few promising writers that
remained in Spain under
the ensuing dictatorship.
Not long after Cela died in
2002, old records surfaced
indicating that he’d
operated as an informant
for Franco’s interior
ministry, tipping them off
about writers with leftist
sympathies who might be
won over to the cause.
And yet, without actually
passing judgement, his
novels spoke of the misery
of Franco’s Spain, to the
extent that some, like
La Colmena, had to be
published abroad.
Whatever his sympathies,
as a character Cela was
notoriously controversial.
Having slated the
Cervantes prize as
“politicised” and “shit”,
he accepted the award in
- In 1989 he left his
wife for a woman 40 years
his junior.
Five great Spanish authors writing under Franco
Camilo José Cela.The most successful novelist writing
within Spain during the Franco years forged
Tremendismo, a new, brutally sober realism in
which dire social conditions usually led to violence.
His first novel,La familia de Pascual Duarte(1942),
tells the story of an Extremaduran peasant, an
essentially kind man apparently driven to multiple
murder by a combination of social deprivation, bad luck
and congenital flaws.The book’s withering view of post-
war society didn’t go down well on its release in Spain,
but has become the most widely translated Spanish
work behindDon Quixote.La Colmena(1951), set in a
sordid Madrid, best shows off Cela’s talent for capturing
the ugly, despair-laden realities of life; the work was
banned in Spain as immoral.Carmen Laforet. Like Cela, Laforet wrote in the
Tremendismostyle.The moving story ofNada(1944)
received instant appreciation, the rendering of an
adolescent girl’s move to Barcelona bringing a rare,
keenly observed female viewpoint to Spanish literature.Miguel Delibes. With his first novel,La sombra del
ciprés es alargada(1947), Delibes won the Premio
Nadal; with his third,El Camino(1950), he cemented an
enviable reputation. His work damned Franco by proxy,
often using children to highlight Spain’s misfortune.
El Camino, for example, follows the life of a young boy
in a declining Castilian village. He also wrote travel
guides, short stories and both fiction and non-fiction
on his lifelong passion, hunting.