SOURCE: "When the Castanets Stop Clicking," in New York Herald Tribune Book Week, January 10, 1965, pp. 3, 12.

In the following excerpt, Hamill complains that Cela's Journey to the Alcarria does not teach the reader anything about Spain or its author.

Ah, Spain. Her very name calls up the images: the swirl of skirts and hard white teeth and dark eyes of the women; the men with lined faces, quick eyes, calloused hands; all of them passing on dirt roads in the raw brown hills, with the tough masculine Sierras climbing away to the South Quaint trains, storks in the chimneys, mule carts and Hemingway. Those Spaniards are not like milk-veined Americans. They know about pride. They know about honor. They are not afraid to face up to death. They have bullfights there—not baseball. Bullfights. Only bullfighters live life all the way up.

In Spain, or at least, in this...