The Hive (New York Review Books Classics)

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 Jos Cela, the 1989 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, to Louis-Ferdinand Cline and Curzio Malaparteall ferocious writers, truculent, badly spoken, even foulmouthed. However provocative and disturbing, Celas novels are also flat-out dazzling, their sentences as rigorous as they are riotous, lodging like knives in the readers mind. Cela called himself a proponent of uglyism, of nothingism. But he has the knack, to quote another critic, Amrico 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.