SOURCE: A review of El asesinato del perdedor, in World Literature Today, Vol. 70, No. 1, Winter, 1996, pp. 165-66.

In the following review, Escudero complains that Cela's "El asesinato del perdedor is terribly boring and difficult to read from the very first pages."

Camilo José Cela, the author of such famous novels as La familia de Pascual Duarte (1942), La colmena (1951), and San Camilo 1936 (1969), received the 1989 Nobel Prize in Literature in recognition of his valuable literary work. His novels, especially those published before 1975, are characterized by innovative narrative recourses and preferential attention paid to social and existential problems. In later years the writer has abandoned his social orientation to continue both with his formal and thematic experiments, as seen in Mazurca para dos muertos (1983) and Cristo versus Arizona (1988). These later novels, which are harder to comprehend, are not read as much as his earlier ones.

The release of El asesinato del...