Customer Reviews

Journey To The Alcarria

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Light and airy in style, filled with memorable scenes and characters, an engaging narrator, and plenty of information about daily life in backroads Spain 50 years ago. I see why this author deserved a Nobel prize. However, skip the introduction, a heavy handed piece of academic existentialist skulduggery that almost persuaded me not to read the book.

I needed a short, easy book to read while on my vacation with my sister. She happened to have this book along and lent it to me. I found myself travelling through the countryside of Spain with Camilo Cela and loving it. He included just enough information to let us share his experience without drowning us in too much detail. I'll never have his exact memories but I felt like I could recognize the places and feelings if I ever get to go there. I recommend this as an enjoyable, easy read.

The Alcarria is a mountainous region northeast of Madrid. In 1946, Cela (who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1989) toured the Alcarria, mostly by foot. JOURNEY TO THE ALCARRIA is his account of that tour. It has the virtue of being short (139 pages). The Alcarria turns out to be rustic and simple, as is Cela's account (giving rise to a variant on the chicken-and-egg conundrum). According to the somewhat academic introduction to this edition, by Cela's standards a travel-writer "must react with genuine and simple surprise to what he sees, and jot it down without inventive alteration." Well, Cela followed that formula to a T. There is a sort of rustic charm to the book, but in truth it quickly becomes boring. I don't understand why it is celebrated (to refer to the introduction once again, JOURNEY TO THE ALCARRIA is the "crowning point" of Cela's travel sketches). Nor do I understand, if indeed JOURNEY TO THE ALCARRIA is near the apex of his literary output, why Cela merited a Novel Prize.

El Viaje a la Alcarria or Journey to the Alcarria is one of the best books I ever read. Sometimes the reader gets tired of the third person perspective, but it is an interesting book to read after all. You find details about the life in the country side of Spain and you discover how the writter felt in those places after living in Madrid. A must read from the classic literature.

Here We found a good book, but there are a lot of books by C. Jose Cela better than this one. This one brings the reader to a different Spain, and offers the opportunity of getting deeper in arural world. Anyway, surely his best book it's called La Colmena, not yet published in English, in which He describes the dark moments of the 50's in Spain, from a cultural and a post civil war point of view. I would recommend Journey to the Alcarria, but there are better ones.