by Camilo José Cela

Camilo José Cela Trulock was born in 1916 in the seacoast village of Iria Flavia in Galicia, which sits in the northwestern corner of Spain. His father’s job as a customs official required frequent moves by the family, making coastal Galicia and Madrid the poles of the young Cela’s life. Further disrupting Cela’s pre-university education was his misconduct at different schools and his first bout with tuberculosis in 1931. Cela’s university career in Madrid as a student of medicine came to an abrupt halt because of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), in which he suffered a shrapnel wound while serving with the Nationalist forces. By 1940 Cela was hard at work on The Family of Pascual Duarte, his writing interrupted by a recurrence of tuberculosis in 1941. Undaunted, Cela not only finished this first novel but...