When the Swedish Academy last week announced its choice for the 1989 Nobel Prize for Literature, the reaction across the globe might be summarized as Que Cela, Cela? Was the award to Spanish author Camilo Jose Cela, 73, another example of the Academy's penchant for giving unheard-of writers undreamt-of recognition? Yes, in the sense that Cela has not had much impact outside his native land for a quarter-century. But on reflection, the better answer is no, for Cela, though now little read, has amassed a body of powerful, disturbing work -- and lived a risky, iconoclastic life -- that fully merits the world's attention.

Gregory Rabassa, the eminent translator and authority on Spanish literature, says Cela "kept the Spanish novel alive during those awful years." That period, of course, encompasses the Spanish Civil War and the wrenching adjustments afterward to the Franco dictatorship. Cela, raised in Madrid by his Spanish father and English mother, was a university student in 1936 when the war erupted. He joined what readers of Hemingway or Orwell will recognize as the wrong side, taking up arms with Franco against the Republic. He continued his education in conflict, hearing the oxymoronic battle cry of some of his fellow soldiers: Viva la muerte!

Being among the victors did not bring Cela many spoils. In 1942 his novel The Family of Pascual Duarte caused a sensation. Ostensibly the memoir of a triple murderer awaiting execution, the novel portrayed a Spanish countryside awash in madness, vengeance and bloodshed. The work was harshly attacked. Mordantly, Cela dedicated the book "to my enemies, who have been of such help to me in my career." In 1951 came The Hive, which was banned outright by the Franco government. This terse, episodic novel retailed the incidental miseries of some 160 inhabitants of a squalid Madrid.

Cela's flippant disdain for authority -- of whatever sort -- earned him the respect of exiled Spaniards who might otherwise have excoriated him for his allegiance in the civil war. In later years his fierce independence won increasing regard. He was among those, after Franco's death, who were asked to write a new Spanish constitution. Beyond that, his best novels, with their violent, poetic hyper-realities, affirmed a tradition that stretches from Cervantes to Gabriel Garcia Marquez.