The Hive

“Over three winter days, as Hitler’s forces falter on distant battlefields, Cela jump-cuts from scene to scene with cinematic brevity. Terse, urgent, agile, the narrative skips from life to life, mind to mind, with all the breakneck hurry of the urban crowd….For all its sadness, Cela’s laconic, swift-moving prose pushes forward with exhilarating energy.” —Boyd Tonkin, The Wall Street Journal“The Hive remains an inevitable monument in Spanish literature, an updated [Goya’s] Disasters of War, whose vignettes revolve around the endurance of the Spanish character through the ravages of poverty and despotism.” —Adrian Nathan West, The New York Times Book Review “Three hundred characters in 260 pages. How do you possibly keep track of so many names, so much intrigue?….But the blurring of identity is in line with Cela’s reduction of human beings to a few basic needs….In this limbo between realism and absurdism the characters struggle for survival….It was more or less inevitable that such a negative vision of life in Madrid would be banned under Franco’s dictatorship.” —Tim Parks, London Review of Books“There is a secret slot for Cela at his best, as lone of the great prose stylists, plural, of Spain — a man dangerously like us.” —Roberto Bolaño “Cela is the Goya of Franco’s Spain.” —Paul West “It is not to be wondered that the French censorship disapproves of Cela’s novels … his literary affiliations are of the most radical; they are with Camus and Sartre, with Moravia, with Zola and French naturalism.” —Saul Bellow“His best work … a carnivalesque reconstruction of the Spanish tradition, a nightmarish, surrealistic depiction of human endeavor.” —Julio Ortega“The Hive represents contiguous cell structures that seldom overlap. Six chapters subdivide into hundreds of brief sequences that honeycomb like tunnels through a subway … Madrid is just one colony in an apiary of complex social structures called Spain; and the universe, which may or may not have a hive-mind of its own, is a macrocosm of which Spain is but an infinitesimal part.” —Kevin Anthony Brown, New English Review

Camilo Jose Cela (1916-2002) won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1989. Though he wrote prolifically and audaciously in a number of different genres, he is best known for his novel The Hive, which was published in Argentina in 1951 after being banned in Franco’s Spain. In addition to his writing, he produced drawings and paintings and also appeared in several films.

James Womack is a poet and a translator from Russian and Spanish. His most recent poetry collection, Homunculus, was published by the UK press Carcanet in 2020. His translations include Manuel Vilas’s Heaven and a collection of poetry by Vladimir Mayakovsky.

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