A most memorable book . . . The Family of Pascual Duarte sets its author in place as a contemporary of Celine and Malaparte and a follower of the Spanish picaresque tradition.
Cela prefers the weird, the apparently meaningless and 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
Most books have to wait to become classics; but everything about The Family of Pascual Duarte its conception, its starkness, its restraint, the enormity of its theme made it from the very beginning a classic. --Alastair Reid
"After "Don Quixote", probably the most widely read novel in Spanish." -- "The New York Times"
"After "Don Quixote," probably the most widely read novel in Spanish."--"The New York Times"