Word: cela
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Netanyahu was raised to achieve. His mother Cela studied law, and his father Benzion is a historian whose lifework, a study of the Jews during the Spanish Inquisition, was published to acclaim last year. Called Bibi from childhood, after a cousin, Netanyahu inherited his right-wing politics from his father, a disciple of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism. To members of that movement even David Ben-Gurion was not sufficiently nationalist. Netanyahu can be touchy about his family. Last week his mother lent a Time photographer six pictures of him as a youngster, then called urgently...
...Cela, who won the Nobel Prize in 1989, recreates the world of a rural village around the time of the Spanish Civil War. Mazurka is a bizarre story, told in bits and pieces and filled with a confusing array of characters who are violent and lustful, pathetic and whimsical. The novel appears to be the result or transcription of several interviews with older women and men from the village, who are remembering the scandals and gossip from days past. Their stories are wandering and repetitious, but not without an ironic sense of humor--although at whose expense we cannot...
...difficult reading; the same half-imagined memories are told at various points by various people, each interrupting themselves and each other within the same sentence. This method can at first be irritating and even boring; the many plots are difficult to sort out and keep track of. But Cela's sympathetic and sometimes outrageous humor give these ramblings coherence...
...time and memory in the face of war and death. As one character remarks, "Poe was right: our thoughts are palsied and sere, our memories treacherous, sere and rusted like old knives...it must be in the nature of things." Memory is a bridge but also a trap for Cela's villagers, especially tricky when dealing with murder and revenge as well as the civil war. For in consolidating fact and fiction, truth and myth, memory can create an epic out of everyday incidents. But Cela also questions the relevance and meaning of memory in a world where truth...
...Cela seeks here both to write about the Spanish Civil War and to stress its unwrite-ability. Mazurka for Two Dead Men is an intricate, difficult study of a war which can never be contained or limited to novels or official reports of reputed fact, but lives on as long as people are alive who remember fragments, names and voices, from...