Cristo Versus Arizona

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.