Complete and uncensored in English for the very first time, a
fragmented, daringly irreverent depiction of decadence and decay in
Franco's Spain written by the 1989 winner of the Nobel Prize in
Literature.
The translator Anthony Kerrigan compared Camilo José Cela, the 1989
winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, to Louis-Ferdinand Céline and
Curzio Malaparte--all "ferocious writers, truculent, badly spoken, even
foulmouthed." However provocative and disturbing, Cela's novels are also
flat-out dazzling, their sentences as rigorous as they are riotous,
lodging like knives in the reader's mind. Cela called himself a
proponent of "uglyism," of "nothingism." But he has the knack, to quote
another critic, Américo Castro, of deploying those "nothings and lacks"
to construct beauty.
The Hive is set over the course of a few days in the Madrid of 1943,
not long after the end of the Spanish Civil War, when the regime of
General Francisco Franco was at its most oppressive. The book includes
more than three hundred characters whose comings and goings it tracks to
hypnotic effect. Scabrous, scandalous, and profane, The Hive is a
virtuosic group portrait of a wounded and sick society.
