This book reflects the crude reality of rural Spain in Franco's time. It is full of human power and rich in social insight. Cela writes with great detail, but still maintains simplicity.
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"