FICTION

MAZURKA FOR TWO DEAD MEN by Camilo Jose Cela , translated from the Spanish by Patricia Haugaard (New Directions: $21.95; 312 pp.) In this 1983 novel by Nobel Prize-winner Camilo Jose Cela, the mazurka of the title is played by a blind whorehouse accordionist on two occasions only: when Baldomero (Lionheart) Gamuzo is killed in 1936, at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and when his brother Tanis avenges the murder in 1939. But the mazurka also is the novel itself. Like a musical composition, it arranges apparently random bits of history, legend, gossip, superstition, humor and bawdiness in calculated ways so that meaning emerges from repetitions, recurrences, themes broken off to be completed later.

This isn’t as complex as it sounds. Readers used to conventional narratives should have little trouble following this one. The point of Cela’s experiment is to immerse the story in its context--a backward, rural area (Galicia, at the northwestern tip of Spain) where life hasn’t changed much since medieval times and where people are bound by a web of family ties and regional mythology that, during the war, is torn by the impact of the modern world. Meanwhile, Cela never forgets that the mazurka is a dance. He writes with gusto about that fundamental two-step of human existence: sex and death.