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moodswinger 's review for:
La colmena
by Camilo José Cela
La Colmena (The Hive in English) could easily be compared to a puzzle. The story, told in six chapters and an epilogue, is not told chrnologically (one of the features that quickly endears me to a book) and the cast of 160-something characters all belong to roughly the same social circle, despite belonging to different social classes. It is now up to a dedicated reader to create the multi-branched cast tree for the uninitiated to jump in.
Despite being born in Spain, my knowledge of Spanish Literature is rather scarce, compared to Literature in English. As part of an assignment, I've sought to correct this partially by reading La Colmena. This novel comes up in discussions about Ulysses, Manhattan Transfer, Berlin Alexanderplatz and Le Sursis, because they all have their corresponding cities as the subject. La Colmena, specifically, centers about the city of Madrid in December of 1942, when dictator Francisco Franco had been in power for three years, and citizens believed it would be better for them if Hitler (allied with Franco) won World War II.
But the novel is hardly about Hitler sympathizers, and instead most of it revolves about how hard it was, for most of the citizens, to have enough to eat and a place to sleep. Women prostitute themselves to those who the Spanish Civil War found to be the victors, either because they fool themselves that it's love, because they have nowhere else to turn to, or because they need money to save the men they actually love. Men and children beg for money, and invariably know someone with tuberculosis (apparently, a whooping 10% of the Spanish population those days was sick with this disease!).
The character at the center of this misery is Martín Marco, who considers himself an artist and has no job to speak of. He begs here and there, eats at his married sister's place, sleeps at another friend's place, sometimes a madame friend will allow him to platonically share a bed with one of her girls for the night . . . Martín, like many then, is at risk because his identification papers mark him as an undesirable, a jobless vagrant. Something like that would soon land you in the newspapers, in the wanted section.
All in all, if fanciful stylings are not your thing (you heathen!), La Colmena also provides the reader with a stark portrait of post-Civil War Spain.
Despite being born in Spain, my knowledge of Spanish Literature is rather scarce, compared to Literature in English. As part of an assignment, I've sought to correct this partially by reading La Colmena. This novel comes up in discussions about Ulysses, Manhattan Transfer, Berlin Alexanderplatz and Le Sursis, because they all have their corresponding cities as the subject. La Colmena, specifically, centers about the city of Madrid in December of 1942, when dictator Francisco Franco had been in power for three years, and citizens believed it would be better for them if Hitler (allied with Franco) won World War II.
But the novel is hardly about Hitler sympathizers, and instead most of it revolves about how hard it was, for most of the citizens, to have enough to eat and a place to sleep. Women prostitute themselves to those who the Spanish Civil War found to be the victors, either because they fool themselves that it's love, because they have nowhere else to turn to, or because they need money to save the men they actually love. Men and children beg for money, and invariably know someone with tuberculosis (apparently, a whooping 10% of the Spanish population those days was sick with this disease!).
The character at the center of this misery is Martín Marco, who considers himself an artist and has no job to speak of. He begs here and there, eats at his married sister's place, sleeps at another friend's place, sometimes a madame friend will allow him to platonically share a bed with one of her girls for the night . . . Martín, like many then, is at risk because his identification papers mark him as an undesirable, a jobless vagrant. Something like that would soon land you in the newspapers, in the wanted section.
All in all, if fanciful stylings are not your thing (you heathen!), La Colmena also provides the reader with a stark portrait of post-Civil War Spain.