SOURCE: "Confession and Inaction in San Camilo," in Hispanofila, 1974, pp. 47-63.

In the following essay. Bernstein outlines Cela's ideas about Spain and politics as expressed in his San Camilo.

In Cela's long-awaited novel about the Spanish Civil War we find as comprehensive and explicit a statement of his stance on political and social issues as any in his previous work. The novel's unnamed narrator delivers, in more than four hundred pages, a general confession of sins committed and imagined in which we hear a recital of details of the lives of historically prominent madrileños, and of the lives of some whose historical importance is negligible.

What concerns the serious reader of Cela's work is not so much having a clear picture of the sexual activities of a twenty-year-old student which, however shocking they may seem to a Spanish audience are almost literally as child's play when compared...