The social realist cast of the novel in the Gray Age [of Spanish Literature] was set in 1942 by twenty-six-year-old Camilo José Cela who, in his La Familia de Pascual Duarte ("The Family of Pascual Duarte"), produced Spain's first major novel of the postwar period. This novel is the supposed autobiography of a criminal awaiting execution. Crowding its pages are violence, cruelty, murder, even matricide, as the protagonist seems driven to act because of the influence of a harsh environment and his own violent nature. An account of man in his tragic human situation, La Familia de Pascual Duarte employs a vernacular prose and elicits from the reader not sympathy but a compassionate understanding.

This novel recalls the picaresque tradition in Spanish letters; once again an antihero points up obliquely the social sores of a flawed society. There is, too, a typically Spanish fondness for deformation of reality and...