PRAISE FOR The Family of Pascual Duarte

“Cela prefers the weird, the apparently meaningless and the amorphous. The world of his novels has been likened to that of Hieronymus Bosch and Brueghel; he sees man as a prisoner in a forbidding universe where chaos and imperfection always defeat the idealist.”—Paul West

“A most memorable book. The Family of Pascual Duarte sets its author in place as a contemporary of Céline and Malaparte and a follower of the Spanish picaresque tradition.” —Mildred Adams, New York Times

“A lover of crude realism Cela is reminiscent of the Celine of Journey to the End of the Night.”—New York Herald Tribune

“Cela’s mastery of Spanish prose and his compassionate understanding of the human character when pushed to appalling extremes of degradation make this one of the simplest, most sorrowful, and unsentimental assertions of the tragic in contemporary fiction.”—Christian Science Monitor

PRAISE FOR The Hive

“The Hive is rather abruptly and sketchily represented, it is forceful and it is bald.”—Saul Bellow

“A work concerned with the picture of Madrid as a whole, it is reminiscent of Dos Passos. Yet, in this way, the author has managed an attack on Franco Spain and its poverty without one political word.”—Library Journal

PRAISE FOR Mazurka for Two Dead Men

“The excellence of Mazurka for Two Dead Men should at least serve as a reminder that among the many Spanish-speaking countries, Spain is still a source of powerful literature.” —New York Times