Word: mazurkas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Celebrity Series artists are generous this year--Ohlsson gave four well-chosen encores, beginning with a sansculottes Revolutionary etude, and continuing with a glib. graceful Mazurka (Op. 30 No. 4), an ostentatiously fast and harrowing C-sharp Etude (Op. 10 No. 4), and a morsel of Scriabine farfallonery, the Etude Op. 49 No. 3. In effect these encores were four excellent piano lessons...
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...
...From this madness gradually emerge the stories of a few local families and their amorous and violent intertwining histories. The main storyline, if it can be called that, concerns the killing of Lion-heart Gamuzo, and the later death of his murderer. The narrator is obsessed with the particular mazurka that Gaudencio Beira, the blind accordion player at the local brothel, performs only upon these two occasions. Gaudencio's widowed sister, Adega, contributes her recollections and opinions on matters of life, death, magic and incidental gossip. "Some deaths brings sorrow but there are also those that bring great...
...Mazurka is also concerned with the instability of 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...
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...