Boxwood - Softcover

Cela, Camilo José

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811217515 ISBN 13: 9780811217514

Publisher: New Directions, 2008

Synopsis

The extraordinary experimental final novel by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Boxwood might perhaps be best described as a kind of whirlwind: a vortex of marvelous writing about folklore, traditions, superstitions, cooking, nautical disasters on the Coast of Death (ships from afar spilling cargoes of oranges, typewriters, iron ore, oil, spices), elements of nature both cruel and beautiful, whales, priests, witches, ghosts--sprinkled with various autobiographies-- everything exquisite and crass in Cela's native home, Galicia, Spain.
If the Holy Ghost were a bat instead of a dove our religion would not be the one true faith and there would be fewer Catholics, and if he were a magpie or a jackdaw there would be none at all, the devil appears in the guise of a billy goat whose rump you kiss as a mark of homage and respect, the Holy Ghost could have been a swallow, but not a cormorant, the form taken by the Holy Ghost is well thought out, you immediately see the hand of God in it, Father Xerardino, the priest of San Xurxo, supposes the form might also have been a butterfly in all the colors of the spectrum.... (from Boxwood)

About this title

About the Author

Camilo José Cela, winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize for Literature, was born in 1916 in Galicia in a family with aristocratic roots. His father was a Spaniard, his mother of English birth but also with some Italian blood. His medical studies were interrupted due to the civil war, after which he returned to Madrid to study law. In 1942, he published the novel that made his name, La familia de Pascual Duarte. Since then he has devoted himself entirely to literature. He lived on Mallorca for decades, starting in 1954. In 1956 and until 1979, he published the magazine, Papeles de Son Armadans in which, during the Franco era, he could give space to the young opposition. He died in 2001.

From Publishers Weekly

More ambitious and far-reaching than hisMazurka for Two Dead Men, Cela's dizzying portrait of life during the Spanish Civil War is a considerable achievement. Like other novels by this rebellious and adroit Nobel laureate, the book's movement is much like a skewed ballroom dance, in which mini-narratives waltz to a music made up of the squeaks, crashes and mighty crescendos of human history. The book's four sections take up four different stories of Galicia, a community on the Spanish coast: a hunt for Marco Polo sheep, a hunchback's love affair with an earthy and sensitive woman, the misadventures of a flamboyantly adulterous woman and the search for the fabled city of Cibola. Interwoven with these narrative threads are repeated, almost mesmerizing references to ships sunk off the Spanish coast, local myths, amusing and insightful platitudes, and snatches of dialogue (which occasionally offer lighthearted critiques of the book itself). Boasting few paragraphs, sparse periods and few apparent connections between trains of thought, the novel would be frustrating if Cela's fragments were not so true to the humanity of the characters they describe. The images circulating here - a blind man's vision of peacocks strutting on the ocean floor, a road strewn with crosses and gold - acquire dimension with each appearance, ripening in a manner somewhat new for Cela, whose previous works vivified swirling human activity instead of considering its consequences. The novel is a rich pleasure for readers patient enough to appreciate its intrinsic harmony.
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About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0811217515
• ISBN 13: 9780811217514
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 211