Over 300 characters in post-Civil War SpainSpanish 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.
Inside the mind of a murdererThe Family of Pascual Duarte, published in 1942, is the debut novel of Spanish author Camilo José Cela, who would go on to win the 1989 Nobel Prize in Literature. The novel is written in the form of a memoir by a death row inmate. A preface explains that this prisoner left the manuscript behind at the time of his execution. Pascual Duarte, the narrator, states from the very beginning that he has been imprisoned for committing a murder, and the reader waits for the details of that crime to be revealed as Duarte relates his life story. The dark tale he tells provides a glimpse into a mind gradually descending into insanity.
Pascual lives in Southwestern Spain, near the Portuguese border. Though I have limited knowledge of Spanish geography, Cela makes it sound like this region is far from financially affluent and somewhat of a Wild West compared to the sophisticated civilization of Madrid. Little is specified about Pascual’s means of making a living, but it is clear he lives a hard life replete with alcohol and violence. His mother abuses him physically and verbally. Perhaps the only bright spot in Pascual’s family life is his friendly relationship with his sister, but she leaves the home to work as a prostitute. Pascual and his family are plagued by death, particularly the deaths of children, which brings about a sort of antagonistic relationship between Pascual and fate itself. As he endures what he perceives as divine persecution, he exhibits violent tendencies that only grow more intense as the book progresses, thus foreshadowing his drive to commit murder.
The Family of Pascual Duarte calls to mind Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger, which was published the same year. Both Pascual Duarte and The Stranger’s Meursault try to make sense of a senseless universe in which they are seemingly driven by social, economic, and hereditary forces to commit crimes that marginalize them as the deviants of humanity. Duarte is driven mad by the sheer pointlessness of an indiscriminately harsh existence that yields no reward. While Camus approaches his narrative with a tone of ironically deadpan nonchalance, Cela’s view into Pascual’s mind is harsher and more disturbing. It calls to mind the brutally frank and bleak investigations into the criminal mind that one finds in Georges Simenon’s darker psychological novels like Dirty Snow and The Reckoning.
Cela has crafted a near-perfect novel. Its main fault is its ending. Rather than leading the reader all the way to the gallows, Pascual’s autobiographical narrative ends far short of his execution. Thus, many of the questions raised in the book’s introductory chapters remain unanswered, leaving the reader feeling a bit cheated. Perhaps this is intentional on Cela’s part, however. In this way the reader suffers a taste of the vindictive arbitrariness of events that has plagued Pascual throughout his life of bitter disappointments.
Many years ago I read Cela’s novel The Hive. While I found much to appreciate in that book, it contains a fair amount of political content that I couldn’t fully understand without an informed knowledge of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath. The Family of Pascual Duarte, on the other hand, revolves around more universal themes of life and death, love and family, crime and punishment, obsession and insanity. Despite the dark circumstances of Pascual’s life and his status as a transgressor on the fringes of society, the reader can’t help but sympathize and identify with the underlying humanity of Cela’s tragic protagonist.
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