An NYRB Classics Original
The translator
Anthony Kerrigan has compared the work of Camilo José Cela, the 1989
winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, to that of Louis-Ferdinand
Céline and Curzio Malaparte. These are, Kerrigan writes, “ferocious
writers, truculent, badly spoken, foul mouthed.” However
provocative and disturbing, they are also flatout dazzling as
writers, whose sentences, as rigorous as they are riotous, lodge like
knives in the reader’s mind. Cela called himself a proponent of
“uglyism,” of “nothingism.” But he has the knack, the critic
Américo Castro reminds us, 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, this virtuosic
group portrait of a wounded and sick society was first published in
Buenos Aires in 1951 because in Spain it could not be published at
all. This new translation by James Womack is the first in English to
present Cela’s masterpiece in uncensored form.
