Christ versus Arizona [Paperback]

Camilo José Cela (Author), Martin Sokolinsky (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2007

Christ versus Arizona turns on the events in 1881 that surrounded the duel in the OK Corral, where Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Virgil and Morgan Earp fought the Clantons and McLaurys. Set against the backdrop of an Arizona influenced by the Mexican Revolution and the westward expansion of the United States, the story is a bravura performance by the 1989 Nobel Prize-winning author. A monologue by the naive, unreliable, and uneducated Wendell L. Espana, the book weaves together hundreds of characters and a torrent of inter-connected anecdotes, some true, some fabricated. Wendell's story is a document of the vast array of ills that welcomed the dawning of the 20th Century, ills that continue to shape our world in the new millennium.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Among the most experimental of Cela's works, this audacious and provocative novel tells the story of the 1881 shootout at the OK Corral from the perspective of Wendell Liverpool Espana, the uneducated, bastard son of a prostitute. Structured as a monologue comprising a single 250-page-plus-long sentence, the book weaves together hundreds of characters, both fictional and real (Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, etc.), to create a vivid and frequently grotesque picture of the American Southwest. Scatological and crude sexual references abound, as do graphic depictions of racism, murder and death, sometimes all at once ([I]t must be funny—a Negro hanged by the neck with his cock pretty hard, his tongue sticking out, and a flower in his lapel). Given its harsh imagery and unwieldy narrative structure, the book is not for the faint of heart. Nonetheless, as a significant example of Cela's themes and stylistic inventiveness, scholars and fans will consider it an important addition to the author's English-translated works. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

Cela is a restless spirit. In him is united a marked fondness for experiment with a provocative attitude. At the same time he can be included in an old Spanish tradition of hilarious grotesqueness--which is often the other side of despair. Compassion for man's hopeless suffering is there, but tightly controlled. --1989 Nobel Prize for Literature Press Release

Cela prefers the weird, the apparently meaningless and the amorphous. The world of his novels has been likened to that of Hieronymus Bosch and Brueghel; he sees man as a prisoner in a forbidding universe where chaos and imperfection always defeat the idealist. --Paul West

One of the most gifted and powerful writers in contemporary Europe. --Robert Boyle, Commonweal

Cela is a restless spirit. In him is united a marked fondness for experiment with a provocative attitude. At the same time he can be included in an old Spanish tradition of hilarious grotesqueness--which is often the other side of despair. Compassion for man's hopeless suffering is there, but tightly controlled. --1989 Nobel Prize for Literature Press Release

One of the most gifted and powerful writers in contemporary Europe. --Robert Boyle, Commonweal

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 249 pages
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press (September 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564783413
• ISBN-13: 978-1564783417
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,619,824 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Raft Adrift on the Stream of Consciousness, June 17, 2009

By 

Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Christ versus Arizona (Paperback)

Take the 'sensibilities' of a Cormac McCarthy novel like No Country for Old Men, the gruesome, inescapable, insensate violence, and toss the phrases in a blender... or else compose them with lapidary insistence in the style of Thomas Bernhard or a very depressed Robert Walser off his meds. Make the whole narrative a fugue of perversion and sado-masochism with a counterpoint of religious and sexual ecstasy -- three or four lewd anecdotes of an imaginary Old West replicated in hundreds of fragmentary configurations. That will give you some idea of the structure of this one-sentence, 260-page experimental novel by the Spanish winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize, Camilo José Cela. Throw in scores of grotesque characters whose names are constantly being revised, give the uneducated and half-craze narrator a vocabulary worthy of Henry James, and you'll be even closer to Cela's concept. I can declare with some confidence that most readers will throw this book down in disgust and frustration at least a dozen times before finishing it.... but finish it you will, like it or not. It's hypnotic. It's the worst amanita-induced death-trance you'll ever experience. Take my warning: if you're not prepared to suffer, don't pick this book up!

I've read some of Cela's earlier works in Spanish. He really is an esteemed master of modern Spanish literature, best known for "The Family of Pascual Duarte", which is a lot more approachable. "The Tunnel" has been my favorite, but nothing in it or any of his other books prepared me for the strenuous commitment that "Christ versus Arizona" requires. Cela wrote it in his seventies and published it the year before his Nobel Prize. After he'd conceived it, he actually traveled to Tombstone, Arizona, with his licentious mistress, who has been tagged by critics as the model for the pedophiliac prostitute at the center of the narrative. The famous Gunfight at OK Corral figures in Cela's tale, but 'historical representation' was the farthest thing from the author's mind. If this narrative represents Cela's "stream of consciousness", then that stream was a scuzzy slather of brown scum, dribbling along a ditch in No Country for Anyone.

But, as I said, it's hypnotic. And think what a torrent of rage and outrage it took in Spain to flush away the crimes of Franco and the sins of Opus Dei! But that thought is fraught with ambiguity, since Cela was a Falangist and a supporter of the Franco regime for much of his life, if not to the bitter end. Thus I'm caught asking myself whether Cela was, in the end, a denouncer or a celebrator of depravity.