‘The Hive’ Review: Faces in the Crowd

Late at night, in the chilly winter of Madrid in 1943, lonely strollers drift into the movie theaters. They watch “pictures filled with attractive, poetic names that pose vast human enigmas which are not always deciphered, or answered at all.” The huge, swarming cast of “The Hive,” which the Spanish writer Camilo José Cela published in 1951, trip over those “vast human enigmas” as they try to make sense of their own discordant and disconnected lives. But life is tough, time short, money scarce. Even if love, pity or wonder briefly stir them, every citizen has a job to finish, a bill to pay, a date to meet. Passersby feel sorry for the dog crushed by a taxi in the Calle de Torrijos but “everyone goes his own way.”

Throughout the 20th century, the shock of big-city life convulsed not only newly urbanized societies but their literature. Landmark frescoes of metropolitan hubbub and social fragmentation emerged from cities old and new, from the Dublin of Joyce’s “Ulysses” to Alfred Döblin’s “Berlin Alexanderplatz” and the New York of John Dos Passos’s “Manhattan Transfer.” (Cela and Dos Passos shared an inspiration in the Basque novelist Pío Baroja.) Once a proud imperial hub, the Madrid of Cela’s seething panorama has slipped into anxious, threadbare insecurity after Spain’s ruinous and fratricidal civil war. On its hectic streets his throng of strivers, grafters, grifters and chancers sweat to get ahead, or just get by, while “something like sorrow floats in the air and strikes into people’s hearts.”

Born in Galicia, with English, Italian and local ancestry, Cela (1916-2002) had scandalized the Spanish literary scene with the bleak determinism of his 1942 debut, “The Family of Pascual Duarte,” a murderer’s confession often bracketed with Camus’s “The Stranger.” Yet the future Nobel laureate in literature (in 1989) was never a straightforward radical. He fought for the nationalists in the Civil War and served as a censor for Franco’s victorious regime. Ironically, the Spanish authorities banned “The Hive” all the same for its sexual frankness; it first appeared in Buenos Aires. By 1953, the scholar J.M. Cohen had translated it into English with the help of the exiled Spanish author Arturo Barea.

In one of the seven prefaces to various editions that front James Womack’s savory new translation, Cela reckons that his novel has 160 characters. Other critics have counted over 200, in a mere 262 pages. Over three winter days, as Hitler’s forces falter on distant battlefields, Cela jump-cuts from scene to scene with cinematic brevity. Terse, urgent, agile, the narrative skips from life to life, mind to mind, with all the breakneck hurry of the urban crowd. One glance may seem to fix a character—Doña Matilde is “fat, dirty and pretentious”—yet when we meet the same personality again, other facets come to light. A group of core figures recur, from the hapless, idealistic poet Martín Marco and the ambitious Moisés family, with their three eligible daughters, to barman Celestino, print-shop worker Victorita, streetwalker Purita and café owner Doña Rosa, the last a bullying neighborhood bigwig who acts “like she’s a regional governor.”

Mr. Womack catches the bitter comic zest of Cela’s style. Dread and hardship mostly breed not kindness and solidarity but cunning, cynicism and passivity. “Madrid’s a village,” we learn, one in which toxic gossip spreads fast. In “this world where everything has fallen to pieces,” bankruptcy and disgrace lurk around the corner for even the swankiest business-owners. For young women, prostitution—either overt or politely disguised—can look like the only exit. The selfless Victorita, with her consumptive boyfriend, frets that she cannot turn down an indecent proposal; Nati won’t explain why she now dresses like a “princess.”

Meanwhile, postwar trauma hangs over “The Hive” like low December clouds: It’s “just one of those things” for Purita to have seen her father shot and mother die, “malnourished and tubercular.” A respected physician buys 13-year-old Merche, an “unplucked fruit,” after war smashes her family: “Some of them died; others emigrated.” Cela had a reputation for misanthropic mischief, but his novel tempers its asperity with aching tenderness. There are moments in the print shop when Victorita feels the cold and “wants to cry, wants so very much to cry.” But life, and the city, must go on.

Busy but becalmed, Cela’s Madrid thrums with ceaseless activity without any real movement. The hive becomes a giant jail with no remission or escape in view. Except, perhaps, for the child from a Gypsy family who sings in scene after scene. To him—like a true artist—“everything that happens is a miracle.” In the little flamenco singer’s clan, people may still live “with absolute freedom and autonomy.” Elsewhere, power seems invisible and implacable. For Martín, his worries feel like fate: “It’s uncontrollable, it’s like the tides.”

Mr. Womack’s translation boasts a lively pace and a rich demotic tang. Occasionally, his English idioms seem to swing back and forth between midcentury London and New York. So gay Señor Suárez, “alias the Snapperette,” gets called both a pansy (mostly American) and a poofter (distinctly British)—even a “muppet,” surely unheard-of on either side of the Atlantic in 1943. Whatever the epithets thrown at him, the Snapperette dares to rebel. Much more common is the obedience of the “good conformist” cop Morrazo, a Galician who “never got above himself” in a city—and a nation—now ruled in the name of piety and order.

For all its sadness, Cela’s laconic, swift-moving prose pushes forward with exhilarating energy. As café-table intrigue gives way to furtive erotic rendezvous or street-corner backchat, urban bustle and banter can spark its own fleeting happiness. When night falls, Martín relishes the “deep and implacable emptiness” of his meditative walks. He finds in park benches, with their random occupiers, “an anthology of everything unpleasant and almost everything joyous.” “The Hive” hosts just such a teeming congregation of wayward needs, fears and drives. As for those “vast human enigmas,” the city can’t stop to hear an answer.

—Mr. Tonkin is the author of “The 100 Best Novels in Translation.”