It’s an interesting side-note to learn, after reading The Hive, that Cela not only won the Nobel prize for literature, but he was also on the Nationalist side in the civil war. In my reconfigured world, no Franquista can be a good guy. The novel is set during WW2, the early years of Franco’s regime. Whilst Franco is never referred to, there are several characters who are rooting for the Nazis. As I read it, before discovering the above, I took it as the writer’s way of illustrating their character’s lack of historical judgement, but the above information suggests this might not have been the case. At the same time, the novel was censored in Franco’s Spain, and had to be originally published in Argentina, a source of some ironic mirth on the part of the writer, as noted in his introduction.
The Hive is one of the more remarkable works of twentieth century literature. It features a multitude of characters (at least 160, according to the writer’s intro.) There is no coherent plot. The characters drift in and out of the book. Whilst the first section occurs in a cafe, and one thinks this is the bedrock of the novel, subsequent sections range out into other barrios of Madrid. Only one character, the impoverished poet, Martin, maintains any kind of a followable thread. The effect is, as the title suggests, a representation of the city as a teeming nucleus of souls, all of them with their own agenda. Sometimes the paths of these souls will cross, but more often than not they won’t. It’s a Cubist novel, and as brilliant a representation of the life of a city as you are likely to come across, a sister novel to Ulysses or Berlin Alexanderplatz.
Whilst one might imagine that a novel so lacking in plot or narrative might be unreadable, the opposite is the case. The Hive is a breezy, gossipy read. We drop in on people’s lives, and then drop out. There are pearls of wisdom, and gobbets of stupidity. Every character has their fears and their desires. The Hive might be another way of thinking about the very idea of the novel. Stories scribbled on the subway wall, buried beneath the streets.
I started the novel last Thursday, during the final hours in my stay in the Spanish capital. I was sitting in a cafe, near my hotel, on the Calle Fuencarral. I did not expect that the novel would lead me into another cafe on Calle Fuencarral, peopled like this one, with the flotsam of the streets, the teeming life of a city that lives in its streets and its cafes and bars, a city which was little different from the one I was inhabiting, in spite of the bridge of seventy years of history.
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