[Deathwatch] Camilo Jose Cela, Novelist, 85

[Deathwatch Central]

Thursday January 17 6:50 AM ET 

Novelist Camilo Jose Cela Dies at 85
By MAR ROMAN, Associated Press Writer 

MADRID, Spain (AP) - Camilo Jose Cela, a flamboyant novelist from Spain
who won the 1989 Nobel Prize in literature with his crude,
straightforward writing style, died Thursday. He was 85. 

Cela died from chronic heart disease, Hospital Cemtro in Madrid said. 

With his first novel, ``The Family of Pascual Duarte,'' Cela became the
leader of an uncommonly straightforward style of writing called
``tremendismo'' that clashed with the lyricism of previous Spanish
writers. 

Spanish novelist and essayist Francisco Umbral said Cela's death
represented the ``disappearance of the last great Spanish writer,
creator of fables, of language, of words, with a prodigious capacity of
expression.'' 

A bon vivant known in Spain for his flamboyant lifestyle, Cela's
writing tended to show a darker side of life. He drew from his
experiences in the Spanish Civil War for many of his stories, which
were often violent and gruesome. 

He was recruited as a private to fight on the side of the rebel forces
led by the future dictator Gen. Francisco Franco, but was released
after receiving serious wounds. He later published an anti-fascist
magazine that became a forum for opposition to the 36-year Franco
dictatorship. 

His breakthrough 1942 novel, ``The Family of Pascual Duarte,'' was
first published in Argentina because it was deemed too violent and
crude for Spain at the time. 

It tells the story in the language of a rural, uneducated man who
commits a series of brutal murders without really knowing why and ends
up being executed. It often is credited with creating a sort of
literary vanguard in the years immediately following the 1936-39 Civil
War, both in Spain and Latin America. 

Another well-known work, ``The Hive,'' published in 1951, takes place
in the cold, depressing postwar years and depicts starving writers who
would sit for hours during the winter in Madrid's literary cafes. 

When Cela was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1989, the
Swedish Academy cited him for ``rich and intensive prose, which with
restrained compassion forms a challenging vision of man's
vulnerability.'' 

It said ``The Family of Pascual Duarte'' was the most popular work of
fiction in Spanish since Miguel Cervantes' masterpiece ``Don Quixote''
was published nearly 400 years ago. 

Cela greeted the honor with aplomb, saying it could just as easily have
gone to many other Spanish writers. ``Life is like a game of tennis,''
he told reporters, ``and this time I won.'' 

He also spoke of what the prize might mean for his legacy, and how he'd
like to be remembered. Using the crude language common to his fiction,
Cela said he would like this epitaph: ``Here lies someone who tried to
screw his fellow man as little as possible.'' 

The son of a Spanish father and English mother, Cela was born in 1916
in comfortable surroundings in the town of Iria de Flavia in the
northwestern region of Galicia. 

Over his lifetime, Cela produced well over 70 works, including essays,
poems and travel books, and 10 novels. But at home, he was better known
for his love of food, travel and women. He enjoyed touring his country
in a Rolls-Royce and sometimes reminisced about fellow writer Ernest
Hemingway. 

``We went to a lot of bullfights together. He was a great author and a
great friend,'' Cela said in Stockholm in 1989. 

Cela was the fifth Spaniard to win the Nobel Prize in literature, but
the first novelist. Previous winners from Spain included two poets and
two playwrights. 

In 1977, two years after the death of Franco, Vicente Aleixandre, an
obscure poet from Spain's prewar literary generation, received the
Nobel Prize for literature. Fellow poet Juan Ramon Jimenez received the
award in 1956. 

Spain's first literary Nobel laureate was playwright Jose Echegaray,
who won in 1904. Playwright Jacinto Benavente won the award in 1922. 

At his death, Cela was involved in an unresolved court battle with an
obscure Spanish writer, Carmen Formoso Lapido, who accused him of
plagiarism. She said a novel she wrote in the early 1990s served as the
basis for Cela's book, ``La Cruz de San Andres,'' which won Spain's
prestigious Planeta Award in 1994. 

Cela is survived by a son and his wife, Marina Castano, a woman half
his age. 

Burial was scheduled for Friday in his hometown in Galicia.