Word: cela
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This book is the second novel to reach the U.S. from Franco Spain in the past three months, and the second to show that thoughtful and compassionate Spanish writers take a grim view of life. In The Hive (TIME, Oct. 5), Camilo José Cela highlighted the plight of poverty-stricken Madrileños. In The Final Hours, José Suárez Carreño, 39, portrays the night life of Madrid and offers a world where love is impossible and the human condition hopeless...
...HIVE (257 pp.)-Camllo Jose Cela-Farrar, Straus & Young...
Camilo Jose Cela is a 37-year-old Spanish novelist with a rare distinction: although he fought in Generalissimo Franco's army during the civil war, joined the Falange and to this day lives and works under the Fascist regime, his novel about Madrid is being cheered by emigre Spanish Republicans. So rare a distinction stems from a rare quality. In the face of dictatorship, Novelist Cela has the courage to write the truth as he sees it and the talent to transform his merciless vision of contemporary Madrid into a series of Goya-like vignettes...
Such scenes, written in a bare, vigorously perceptive prose, infuse The Hive with uncommon power. It is too bad that Novelist Cela's method is self-defeating. He spreads himself too thinly over too many characters, and his vignettes, taken together, lack the sharpness that they have separately. But many a lesser, more successful novelist would give his best typing finger to be able to evoke the bitterness, insight and compassion that Novelist Cela packs into brief scenes that plunge straight at the heart...