The Hive by Camilo José Cela

Over 300 characters in post-Civil War Spain

Spanish author Camilo José Cela won the 1989 Nobel Prize in Literature. His 1950 novel La Colmena, published in English as The Hive, is one of his most highly regarded works. Because of censorship under the Franco regime in Spain, the novel was first published in Argentina.

Doña Rosa owns a cafe/bar in Madrid. This establishment serves as the hub of the novel, where the denizens of its neighborhood rendezvous and converse. Spokes radiate outward from this hub, however, as we also get to see the characters in their homes, at work, or at other sites in the city, where the reader meets everyone’s spouses, siblings, and children. The novel contains over 300 characters who are all interconnected through a complex web of relationships. One would really need to construct some kind of chart or diagram to keep them all straight. That’s one of the things that I don’t like about the novel, because to some extent I feel that if the reader is required to do that sort of thing just to figure out what’s going on, then the author hasn’t really done their job. On the other hand, the reader really has to admire the ingenuity and intricacy of Cela’s complex literary construction. It’s as if French author Honoré de Balzac crammed all of the characters of his Comédie Humaine into the pages of one volume. The result is a collage of experiences that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The story takes place in 1943, shortly after the Spanish Civil War, which is referred to throughout the book simply as “the war.” Through the lives and interactions of these myriad characters, Cela creates a vivid document of what life was like in Madrid at that time. The novel is not critical of the Franco regime because Cela himself was a Francoist. I don’t believe Franco is even mentioned in the book; if so, no more than once or twice. The Hive was banned in Spain because of its sexual content, not because of any political commentary. The impressions of urban Spain that comprise the novel, however, do not paint a positive portrait of this time in Spain’s history. The overwhelming societal image one gets from The Hive is one of economic insecurity. Many of the characters are poor or struggling to get by. They must employ crafty strategies just to find the money for a cup of coffee or a cigarette. Everyone’s looking for an angle to survive and thrive. The women in this novel, in particular, are in dire straits, forced to work as prostitutes or attach themselves as mistresses to paying gentlemen. Married or not, just about every man in this book has a mistress. The depiction of morality and sexuality in this book is not judgmental but rather matter-of-fact in its bluntness and pragmatism.

The tone of the novel is darkly satirical. Among the 300 characters, Cela is representing realistic types of people one would find in Madrid, but he’s also making fun of them, caricaturing them. The feeling is something similar to one of George Grosz’s expressionistic cartoons of a crowded cityscape filled with ugly decadence. To really understand everything Cela has to say in this novel, I think you would need to have lived through ‘40s or ‘50s Madrid. I certainly don’t claim to have gotten all of it. The ending, in particular, left me scratching my head. Someone’s in trouble with the law, but why exactly? To an outsider like me, however, this novel really succeeds at imparting a vivid impression of what life was like in this particular time and place. When I read foreign literature in translation, that’s what I’m looking for. Through Cela’s artful kaleidoscopic structure, The Hive provides a full-immersion excursion into post–Civil War Spain and delivers a memorable reading experience.