More ambitious and far-reaching than his Mazurka 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. (May 28)
