The novel is set in Madrid during World War II: it is a period of deep economic crisis, marked by widespread squalor and a sense of "hopeless waiting"—the expectation of generic change paired with resigned pessimism. Dona Visi is happy because her daughter has found a fiancé,

someone studying for a position as a notary

, her husband

tosses and turns between the sheets,

Fine, hold off on ringing the church bells. (...) Let's wait and see how it turns out

, and her husband knows full well, having run into his daughter prostituting herself. Madrid is a city where everyone

walks aimlessly, with hands in empty pockets -- pockets that, at times, are not even warm -- with empty heads, empty eyes, and in their hearts, without anyone being able to explain it, a deep, implacable void. (...) Night falls (...) over the city's strange heart. Thousands of men sleep wrapped around their women, without thinking of the harsh, cruel day that perhaps lies in wait for them, like a wildcat, in just a few hours. Hundreds upon hundreds of students lapse into solitary vice. And a few dozen girls wait -- what are they waiting for, my God? Why do you deceive them so? -- their minds full of golden dreams.... If

The Family of Pascual Duarte

(see the review on this site) revolves around a character dominated by a bloodthirsty disposition, by an irresistible fate, here we have a series of episodes, anecdotes, and figures in a disordered succession that makes it difficult to trace a unifying thread. On the other hand, what is the point of delving into the story of Elvira, already a weary prostitute, or that of Celestino, who talks to himself, or of understanding better who

the neighborhood poet really is, (who) has red cheekbones and sometimes, when the mood strikes, faints in the Café and has to be carried to the restroom. They are numerous figures, physical and thus contextualized, yet also allegorical of a human condition; and it is futile to dwell on them, so similar is their fate. If two reference points are really to be found, they can be identified in Dona Rosa and Martín. The former

comes and goes between the tables of the Café, bumping into customers with her enormous backside

, at the center of a kaleidoscope of the defeated and the resigned,

with their elbows on the old, crusty marble of the tables, (...) once funerary slabs

(a magnificent image of a world where everything has crumbled). And she, the formidable tavern-keeper,

pats her belly (...) Move along, move along.... Everyone in their place. (...) The hairs of her mustache twitched defiantly, solemnly, like the antennae of a cricket in love and full of pride. Martín is a young intellectual who survives on a few newspaper articles, on meals provided by his sister—who sets something aside for him without her husband's knowledge—and on the generosity of a brothel madam, who allows him to sleep in a warm bed beside a young prostitute.

He feels the young woman's hair on his face, feels her naked body beneath the sheets, feels her breath which, at times, is slightly raspy, almost imperceptibly so

, and he recites a melancholy poem to her, dreams of being hired by the Social Security Institute, of visiting his mother's grave, and does not even realize that the Francoist police are searching for him.

Martín, out of a vague premonition, does not want to hurry.....

It is true that we are in 1940s Spain, but isn't this

hopeless waiting" perhaps the very sentiment pervading us right now, in the face of announcements of dramatic turning points (peace in Ukraine, the end of the genocide in Gaza), only to find ourselves repeatedly trapped in the most brutal paralysis? Are we not like the characters of this hive, a metaphor for our own condition? We would not feel so close to Cela's narrative had the author not relied on a dry, essential, and intense style, so distant from the convolutions of contemporary Spanish writers such as Cercas, Marías, and Aramburu (see the numerous reviews of their novels on this site). Cela's prose, steeped in raw magical realism, recalls Grazia Deledda's Canne al Vento (see the review on this site). The novel's limitation lies precisely in the dispersal of its many anecdotes, in the disorientation of the narrative—elements that make it difficult to navigate the reading and assign it an overarching meaning. One must simply surrender to it, without searching for a cohesive plot.

Why read it? Splendid prose, a metaphor for our current condition

The Hive