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The HiveAuthor: Camilo José Cela Translators: J. M. Cohen and Arturo Barea Spanish Literature Series June 2001 250 pages, 5.5 x 8 Dimensions: Paperback, 1-56478-268-9 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $10.36—20% OFF! 
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Book Description
Banned for many years by the Franco regime, Cela's masterpiece presents a panoramic view of the degradation and suffering of the lower-middle class in post-Civil War Spain. Readers are introduced to over a hundred characters through a series of interlocking vignettes, transforming this book from a social document into a towering work of inventive fiction. Filled with violence, hunger, and compassion, The Hive captures the ambitions and constraints of life under a dictatorship.
About the Author
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Camilo José Cela, winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize for Literature, was born in 1916 in Galicia in a family with aristocratic roots. His father was a Spaniard, his mother of English birth but also with some Italian blood. His medical studies were interrupted due to the civil war, after which he returned to Madrid to study law. In 1942, he published the novel that made his name, La familia de Pascual Duarte. Since then he has devoted himself entirely to literature. He lived on Mallorca for decades, starting in 1954. In 1956 and until 1979, he published the magazine, Papeles de Son Armadans in which, during the Franco era, he could give space to the young opposition. He died in 2001. |
About the Translators
| J.M. Cohen was born in London in 1903 and attended Cambridge University for graduate studies. He became a schoolmaster in the early 40s but quit in 1946 to study writing and translation full-time. He gained acclaim for his 1950 translation of Don Quixote and went on to become what The Times (UK) called "the translator of foreign prose classics for our times." |
Praise
"A web of sordid episodes in the lives of unimportant people, the dregs of society. A lover of crude realism . . . Cela is reminiscent of the Celine of Journey to the End of the Night."—New York Herald Tribune"In the face of dictatorship, Cela has the courage to write the truth as he sees it and the talent to transform his merciless vision of contemporary Madrid into a series of Goya-like vignettes . . . Such scenes, written in a bare, vigorously perceptive prose, infuse The Hive with uncommon power."—Time
"The Hive is rather abruptly and sketchily represented, it is forceful and it is bald."—Saul Bellow, New York Times
"A work concerned with the picture of Madrid as a whole, it is reminiscent of Dos Passos. Yet, in this way, the author has managed an attack on Franco Spain and its poverty without one political word."—Library Journal
"One of the most gifted and powerful writers in contemporary Europe . . . There are few novels which possess the despair and bitterness which Cela displays in The Hive. One almost believes Cela is not an author, but a grotesque version of a butterfly collector."—Robert Boyle, Commonweal
"The setting is Madrid, considered by some the protagonist of the novel. It is this very collectivity and simultaneity of action that has made The Hive one of the most important Spanish novels of the twentieth century."—Michael Ugarte, Nation
"His best work . . . a carnivalesque reconstruction of the Spanish tradition, a nightmarish, surrealistic depiction of human endeavor."—Julio Ortega
"Cela prefers the weird, the apparently meaningless and the amorphous. The world of his novels has been likened to that of Hieronymus Bosch and Brueghel; he sees man as a prisoner in a forbidding universe where chaos and imperfection always defeat the idealist."—Paul West
"The Hive produces no heroes, no grand events, no solutions, but a powerful sense of the human condition. It transcends its immediate time and surroundings to disturb and fascinate all readers in their own circumstance."—John W. Kronik
"The Hive is the only novel which sets out to depict that twilight world of a community living under open arrest, where no warders provide even the most inadequate meals, where the nagging enemy is hunger, not starvation, and the police State is corrupt and inefficient rather than ruthlessly oppressive."—Times Literary Supplement