The family of Pascual Duarte

"The Family of Pascual Duarte" (1942) was the first novel by the Spanish writer Camilo José Cela, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1989.

Pascual Duarte, in the first person, presents us with an existence dominated by violence, misery and fatality. The language, stripped of ornaments, reflects the harshness of rural life, where the earth offers little and the struggle for survival is daily.

The product of a hostile environment and a dysfunctional family, Pascual is dragged into a cycle of violence that has marked him since childhood. His decisions, often tinged with resentment and despair, make him a marginal being, repudiated by society.

"The Family of Pascual Duarte" is an epistolary novel (there are no dialogues or narrations between the characters, but letters) and a masterpiece of tremendism, a literary movement mastered by Cela and characterized by the rawness in the presentation of events, the development of the character and the language used. The novel, a milestone of 20th-century Spanish literature, has been translated into many languages and continues to be the subject of study and debate.

Other works by Camilo J. Cela

• Rest Home (1943)
• Journey to the Alcarria (1948)
• The Hive (1951)
• Mazurka for Two Dead Men (1983)