The Hive

Description

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 Jose Cela, the 1989 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, to Louis-Ferdinand Celine 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, Americo 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.

Camilo Jose Cela (1916-2002) won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1989. Though he wrote prolifically and audaciously in a number of different genres, he is best known for his novel The Hive, which was published in Argentina in 1951 after being banned in Franco's Spain. In addition to his writing, he produced drawings and paintings and also appeared in several films. James Womack is a poet and a translator from Russian and Spanish. His most recent poetry collection, Homunculus, was published by the UK press Carcanet in 2020. His translations include Manuel Vilas's Heaven and a collection of poetry by Vladimir Mayakovsky.

"There is a secret slot for Cela at his best, as lone of the great prose stylists, plural, of Spain - a man dangerously like us." -Roberto Bolano "Cela is the Goya of Franco's Spain." -Paul West "It is not to be wondered that the French censorship disapproves of Cela's novels . . . his literary affiliations are of the most radical; they are with Camus and Sartre, with Moravia, with Zola and French naturalism." -Saul Bellow "His best work . . . a carnivalesque reconstruction of the Spanish tradition, a nightmarish, surrealistic depiction of human endeavor." -Julio Ortega