Novel
The Hive
La colmena
Camilo José Cela · 1951
Synopsis
Madrid, three winter days in 1943, in the misery of the post-war years. Around doña Rosa's café, a proprietress as hard on her employees as on her customers, hundreds of characters cross paths who do not always know one another: Martín Marco, a penniless writer who lives by his wits, destitute poets, shopkeepers, landladies, Victorita, ready to sell herself to care for her tuberculous fiancé. The narrative moves from the café to the street and the apartments, in brief interwoven fragments, and gradually builds a portrait of a city.
Context
The censors refused the book for immorality: the civil censor would have admitted it if the author toned down certain scenes, while the ecclesiastical censor opposed it. It therefore appeared in Buenos Aires in 1951, and in Spain only in 1955. Six chapters and an epilogue are made up of short interwoven fragments, with no hero and no continuous plot; critics have seen in it the legacy of Baroja and Valle-Inclán and the mark of foreign novelists, Dos Passos foremost. Mario Camus brought it to the screen in 1982, and James Womack retranslated it into English in 2023.
Who it is for
A choral novel made of hundreds of brief fragments; one must give up trying to remember every name and follow the comings and goings.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the most important Spanish novel of the years following the Civil War; selected by El Mundo among the hundred best novels in Spanish of the twentieth century.