Mazurka for Two Dead Men - Softcover

Cela never forgets that the mazurka is a dance. He writes with gusto about that fundamental two-step of human existence: sex and death.

The definitive novel of how the Spanish Civil War was actually experienced by ordinary people.

His most mesmerizing fiction, about life during the first four decades of the twentieth century, a life so brutal that the Spanish Civil War, when it occurs, seems a mere continuation of the ordinary. A fiendishly haunting story.

Cela is the Goya of Franco's Spain.--Paul West

If there is any Spanish novelist who deserves the Nobel Prize on the merit of narrative experimentation alone, it is without a doubt Camilo José Cela.--Miguel Ugarte

There is a secret slot for Cela at his best, as one of the great prose stylists, plural, of Spain--a man dangerously like us.--Roberto Bolaño

Mazurka for Two Dead Men, the culmination of Camilo José Cela‘s literary art, opens in 1936 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War: Lionheart Gamuzo is savagely murdered. In 1939, as the war ends, his brother avenges his death. For both deaths, the blind accordion player Gaudencio plays the same mazurka. Set in backward rural Galicia, Cela’s excellent novel portrays a reign of fools, and works like contrapuntal music, its themes calling and responding, alternately brutal, melancholy, funny, lyrical, and coarse.