Considered by many scholars and critics to be the "dean" of contemporary Spanish fiction, Camilo Jose Cela is one of Spain's most controversial novelists. In Understanding Camilo Jose Cela, Lucile C. Charlebois examines the 1989 Nobel laureate's ten most important novels. She shows that in addition to being unequivocally Spanish in their concerns, characters, and imagery, the novels speak to the larger world with their insights into our most basic needs, desires, and fears.

Charlebois describes Cela's childhood, participation in the Spanish Civil War, and life in Spain during and after Franco's dictatorship. She shows that in spite of the repression that beset his homeland during so much of his career, Cela successfully developed his gift for technical experimentation and creative renewal. As a result, he produced textured discourses that bristle with fragmentation and ambiguity, hilarity and profanity, iconoclasm and alienation.

Charlebois identifies Cela's favored stylistic devices, including the interior monologues, soliloquies, and streams of consciousness that characterize the split personalities of many protagonists.

She also discusses Cela's recurring themes, noting that he commonly portrays family and societal dysfunction, intertwines fact with fiction, superimposes literature on art, disseminates historical fact with fictive prodigality, and dilutes sarcasm with the pathos that underlies an unabashed ridicule of all pretense.