The Family of Pascual Duarte (1942)

by Camilo José Cela

When peace descends on a sinner’s soul it’s like rain falling on fallow fields, slaking a desert’s thirst, making the wasteland bloom. (pg. 100)

The Family of Pascual Duarte (1942) is the breakout first novel from Camilo José Cela, published out of a garage when he was a youthful 26. It’s a fitting debut for an author who would go on to win a Nobel Prize and a reputation as a feather-ruffler in Franco’s Spain: Pascual Duarte, a repeat murderer whose victims include his own mother, shares the story that saw him to death row. Rather than the deeds themselves, though, the horrifying bits are how successfully Duarte elicits sympathy from the reader and how starkly he demonstrates the narrowness of the divide between the wicked and the rest.

The novel is arranged as a found manuscript bookended by notes and correspondences from the transcriber and protagonist. The first-person arrangement, embedded in an unhinged mind, allows every element of the work to further illuminate Duarte’s inner world. From a sentence’s structure to its contents, details included and details omitted, irrelevant flourishes and conspicuous absences — everything contributes to the portrait of the condemned man.

Should a reader trust the ostensibly sincere confessions of a man looking back on his crimes from a prison cell? Unlike Nabokov and Humbert Humbert, the authors (corporeal and fictional) of Duarte are not trying to beguile the reader. Cela was explicit in his disregard for literary subterfuge: “I don’t think a writer can permit himself subterfuges, or tricks, or camouflage, or masks. [1]” In Duarte, the question of whether or not to believe the narrator is immaterial; what matters is that you see his perspective, and acknowledge his humanity.

There are times when the best course is to sink out of sight like the dead, disappear in one fell swoop as if swallowed up by the earth, to vanish into thin air like a puff of smoke. But it is never quite possible to do any of these things. (pg. 150)

Another salient theme in Duarte is the nature of victimhood. Can poverty and misfortune ever excuse behavior that, in a vacuum, is inexcusable? Do some people really “have it coming?” Duarte is an ignorant man, trained by a mean world to communicate with violence. This is best illustrated by his own words:

Later I learned that Don Manuel had said that I was just like a rose in a dungheap, and God knows I was seized with a fury to throttle him on the instant. Then the urge blew over and, since I am naturally quick to change even when violent, in the end I forgot it. Besides, after thinking it over carefully, I was never very sure of having understood the remark. (pg. 42)

Does his ignorance earn Pascual any leeway, if not in the eyes of the law, then in the eyes of the reader?

Stylistically, Cela’s novel is a joy to read. Its prose flows freely and with a characteristically Spanish rhythm. Anthony Kerrigan’s translation [2] was produced with Cela’s assistance and earned the author’s approval: “that’s how a good translation is done.” Short and with a quick tempo, from the moment I began Duarte, I dreaded its end that always felt too near.

The Family of Pascual Duarte is an excellent novel that provides a brief but penetrating trip to a different vantage point. In visiting a vile perspective it highlights the connecting thread between saints and sinners and all members of a fallen species incapable of being wholly good or wholly evil.

Your servant, who gathered Duarte’s last words of repentance as joyfully as the farmer might garner a golden crop, could not help but be strongly moved by the written words of a man most people would consider a hyena (as I myself thought him when I was first summoned to his cell), though when the depths of his soul were probed it was easy to discover that he was more like a poor tame lamb, terrified and cornered by life. (pg. 162-163)

[1] Interview with The Paris Review (1996)
[2] The Family of Pascual Duarte (1942), published by Dalkey Archive Press