Word: cela
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...dislodge Serb fighters from the local mountains. Yet Stakic, like other Serbian officials, failed to see the irony of this role reversal, or of the Serbs' use of the Nazi term ethnic cleansing. He insisted the Serbs were only uprooting Muslim "extremists" when they ravaged Kozarac. Look at Cela, he said, a nearby village of 1,200 Muslims and 500 Serbs where both are living in model harmony...
...campy fantasies of filmmaker Pedro Almodovar; the sunswept abstractions of painter Miguel Barcelo; the postmodern extravaganzas of architect Ricardo Bofill; the prankish sexiness of fashion designer Sybilla. Madrid promoted itself as the eye of a creative tornado known as la movida, whirling all night long. Novelist Camilo Jose Cela won the 1989 Nobel Prize for Literature. "In the 1960s, we felt like second-class Europeans," says Juan Sanchez-Cuenca, director of the U.S.-affiliated advertising firm Bozell Espana. "In the 1980s we felt proud to be Spanish...
Gregory Rabassa, the eminent translator and authority on Spanish literature, says Cela "kept the Spanish novel alive during those awful years." That period, of course, encompasses the Spanish Civil War and the wrenching adjustments afterward to the Franco dictatorship. Cela, raised in Madrid by his Spanish father and English mother, was a university student in 1936 when the war erupted. He joined what readers of Hemingway or Orwell will recognize as the wrong side, taking up arms with Franco against the Republic. He continued his education in conflict, hearing the oxymoronic battle cry of some of his fellow soldiers: Viva...
Being among the victors did not bring Cela many spoils. In 1942 his novel The Family of Pascual Duarte caused a sensation. Ostensibly the memoir of a triple murderer awaiting execution, the novel portrayed a Spanish countryside awash in madness, vengeance and bloodshed. The work was harshly attacked. Mordantly, Cela dedicated the book "to my enemies, who have been of such help to me in my career." In 1951 came The Hive, which was banned outright by the Franco government. This terse, episodic novel retailed the incidental miseries of some 160 inhabitants of a squalid Madrid...
...Cela's flippant disdain for authority -- of whatever sort -- earned him the respect of exiled Spaniards who might otherwise have excoriated him for his allegiance in the civil war. In later years his fierce independence won increasing regard. He was among those, after Franco's death, who were asked to write a new Spanish constitution. Beyond that, his best novels, with their violent, poetic hyper-realities, affirmed a tradition that stretches from Cervantes to Gabriel Garcia Marquez...