The Hive (New York Review Books Classics)

Cela may not have been an entirely admirable man, but he was a superb novelist. Madrid in the posguerra is brilliantly captured here.

This novel is of course, a classic, and amore than a classic: It seems to rule over modern Spanish literature the way Joyce's Ulysses rules over modern English literature. And I enjoyed this colloquial translation by Womack.The picture of mid-century Madrid and its many types of people is fascinating. And yet, the paucity of plot means that the novel goes on a bit too long. There are too many prostitutes, a couple too many useless poets, too many disgusting predatory men.

Uno de los mejores libros de Cela. Inteligentemente escrito, como un coro de personalidades que van dando y volviendo en relación a la muerte y el sexo.

One of the most exciting and vivid modernist novels I've ever read, and the most serious and least irritating of Cela's fictions. If you can, read the Dalkey Archive published translation by J.M. Cohen which has a far more useful introduction by the great Spanish 20th century writer Arturo Berea instead of Cela's own tedious introductions. Womack's translation is tone deaf, occasionally obtrusively ham-handed or prissy, and persnickery, substituting "explanations to the uneducated reader" instead of direct translations, but it relies enough on Cohen to give the jist if you have no choice.