SOURCE: "Cela and Spanish 'Tremendismo,'" in Western Humanities Review, Vol. XX, No. 4, Autumn, 1966, pp. 301-06.

In the following essay, Donahue describes how Cela's The Family of Pascual Duarte ushered in the Spanish literary movement "tremendismo."

In 1942 when twenty-six-year-old Camilo José Cela published a first novel in Madrid, The Family of Pascual Duarte, Spanish literature, strait-jacketed by the Civil War and its aftermath, began to take shape again.

Before Pascual Duarte, the literary shades had been tightly drawn in Spain. Readers were turning to the past—to Benito Pérez Galdós' social realism of the nineteenth century, and to the works of the "Generation of 1898," keyed to an attempt to inventory Spain's values and defects, and to present impressionistically the country's inner essence. What new works did appear, between the end of the Civil War (1939) and 1942, were tentative, groping attempts at expression under the guns of a...