Camilo José Cela, whose new book, "The Hive," is one of the first important literary documents to reach us from inside the fascist state, is suffused with anger and bitterness at society in Madrid. "They lie," he says, "who want to disguise life with the crazy mask of literature. The evil that corrodes the soul, the evil that has as many names as we choose to give it, cannot be fought with poultices of conformism or the plasters of rhetorics and poetics. My novel sets out to be no more—yet no less either—than a slice of life, told step by step, without reticences, without external tragedies, without charity, exactly as life itself rambles on."

Wonderful words—which we have not often heard in this country since the first generation of native realists in the 1900's. It is interesting, too, that our own intellectual return to realism … is such a delayed sequel to the new generation of European novelists who have had to face the historical crisis directly and intimately. And "The Hive" itself, as a study of impoverished, frustrated lower-middle-class city people—less vicious, really, than ignoble and less ignoble maybe than starved—has undoubted power and a deliberately flat, acrid, angry style.

Cela's true position, however, is that of the aristocratic moralist who scourges the values of a corrupt and decaying urban society; the moments of warmth and affection in his narrative are few. (p. 404)