Recently published in Spain (and so far only in Spanish): Cela, el hombre que quiso ganar - a biography, by the sometime cantankerous, contradictory and controversial Ian Gibson, of the sometime cantankerous, contradictory and controversial scribe and 1989 Nobel Prize winner Camilo José Cela. Gibson is perhaps best-known for his work on Lorca and Dalí: the British public is most familiar with him through his BBC documentary series on Spain, Fire in the Blood. A review of the Cela biography in La Razón by Jorge Irrutia is not complimentary, and among other things accuses Gibson of believing he’s the first to say things about Cela that are long-established truths in Spain and of not knowing that by 1935 Cela had already published several poems. But in an El País interview, Gibson claims that the book is a “bio-study”, not literary criticism - even though the book dedicates plenty of time to establishing literary influences (Joyce, dos Passos, Valle-Inclán) on Cela which the writer himself often failed to acknowledge. One such “influence” is the plagiarism of which Cela was accused after publishing La cruz de San Andrés; Gibson apparently devotes plenty of the kind of detailed research at which he excels to this episode. The biography will be worth reading, because Ian Gibson, who represents a vital link between Spain and the English-speaking world, always is.
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