Buttockitis
Tim Parks: ‘The Hive’, 13 July 2023
The Hive
by Camilo José Cela, translated by James Womack.
NYRB, 262 pp., £15, March,978 1 68137 615 8 Show More
by Camilo José Cela, translated by James Womack.
NYRB, 262 pp., £15, March,
“... Three hundred characters in 260 pages. How do you possibly keep track of so many names, so much intrigue? It’s hard to imagine a reader of Camilo José Cela’s masterpiece, The Hive, who hasn’t asked this question – who hasn’t wondered, after twenty or thirty pages, whether or how to go on. Do you just accept the confusion? Or, alternatively, keep elaborate notes – perhaps sketching out, as I did, a web of relations on a very large sheet of paper? Cela began the novel in 1945, when he was 29 ... ”