Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great book, 10 Aug 2005
This is one of the best books I've read in years. It's a slim volume, just over 200 pages, but Cela fills it with scene after scene, character after character. His eye for character, detail, dialogue make his cast stay fresh in the mind (and no mean feat with the Spanish double barrelled system of surnames) as they recur and reconnect throughout the book.But the hero and heroine of the novel is Madrid itself. Cold, clammy and always keeping its residents on the edge of hunger, it seems to bear just fleeting resemblance to the city of today. No heat, no exuberance. But I guess that's the point - this is what he saw life as like in Franco's regime.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A city of wintry decay....., 17 Feb 2009
An atmospheric novel that tickled my nose and innards with its winter city streets,gloom and tension. I am not familiar with Madrid as a visitor but it seemed so darkly a part of my world, this large central metropolis of a country so recently torn apart by violence,fraternal violence. Then ghost of a the stocky dictator Franco hovers in every scene but so very,very at the edge of the stage.
Whilst Sartre told a similar tale in "The Reprieve", Cela makes this a somewhat bleaker tribute to the lost citizens of the spanish capital,with the nation settling into uneasy peace,as the world war rages to the north. The city life that we all know is here,the masses of people,the trolleycars,the underground,the cafe's,the pensions,the garrets etc. There is no implicit message in the text, in my opinion, Cela coats every scene with an uneasy knowledge that something is wrong but this never breaks into a moment, it simmers and then fades.
The last 15 pages summon images of the city awakening, the vast suburbs,the spanish names,beautiful and also hinting of decay, a dusty country,lost and losing so much since 1898, faded glory.... One of the main characters has maybe been marked by the police for arrest but we are not sure,nothing is spelt out. All along the weather matches the moods, it is night for 75% of this novel, a wonderful fragment of genius,a very rare view into a country that was almost broken by the iron heel, a casual,sometimes random,meandering and lazy heel.......there is so little spanish literature between 1940-1975..to me...Francos's hidden legacy.
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by Camilo Jose Cela
by Carmen Laforet
by Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio
by Javier Cercas
by Camilo Jose Cela
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