That morning, the morning that seems endlessly repeated, still manages to nudge the city’s face into view. A city that feels like a tomb, a carnival, a hive. The sentiment is almost sacred, and it invites a quiet, almost reverent reflection about what makes a city endure—and what it means to witness its slow change day after day.
Reading La Colmena again, a 1951 novel reissued in 1996, is like watching a swarm of characters drift through a postwar Madrid, especially around Doña Rosa’s café. From the opening pages, there is Cela’s masterful descriptive grit—an artful blend of expressionist brushstrokes and metonymy that captures the whole through tiny, intimate moments. The café’s gruff proprietor, in a single line, hints at the weight she carries as she drags her scales through the room, a visceral image that anchors the day-to-day rhythm of the narrative. Of all the portraits, only the events of a few days are shown, but the rest is clearly inferred—the ordinary survival, punctuated by brief episodes in the lives of a few memorable people, like Miss Élvirа and Martín Marco. The rest feels universal, because, like many customers at the café, they believe that things happen by chance and that there is little sense in trying to fix them. This becomes a social snapshot of Madrid, conveyed in words without political sermonizing, told with calm storytelling and a shared sighing acceptance of a future that never quite arrives for anyone featured there.
The writer’s return to the book came through a recent session of the History of Literature workshop, held at a university venue in Elda and focused on postwar social realism in the fifties. For the author, this work stands tall among Worsening a landscape of memory, and in their search for a copy they found only a note-filled edition at home. A quick dash to the local library restored the pleasure of the read, reaffirming the power of libraries to bring neglected treasures back to light.
Set in the social realism of the fifties, it marks one of the most productive eras in Spanish letters. The novel uses a trusted omniscient narrator to expose the era’s realities through vivid character sketches, situational threads, spaces, and, crucially, dialogue. It aligns with the traditions of nineteenth-century realism and naturalism, but Cela adds a signature twist: experimentation through fragmentary structure. The book unfolds in 217 sequences inside a linear timeline, teeming with characters and countless plots without a clear beginning or end. It recalls cinematic techniques seen later in ensemble films, where threads weave together to form a larger tapestry, yet here the cadence is more intimate and noir-ish, a touch reminiscent of the late twentieth century’s montage-heavy cinema, though set decades earlier.
The social themes span poverty, evasion of laws, a sense of dwindling hope, and the everyday compromises people make to survive. The roles of women, gender norms, prostitution, crime, and even homophobia surface alongside more philosophical meditations on daily life. The author often steps back to classify reality and interpret what is seen in ordinary moments, like the way street benches become a cross-section of human experience, hosting a spectrum of moods and stories. Those benches are described as a compact anthology of both the worst and the best that life offers. The book also distinguishes among nocturnal types, from pure nocturnals to those drawn to cinemas in the city center or in the neighborhoods, a nuanced social taxonomy that enriches the texture of the narrative across pp. 175-176.
So why read this novel? It deserves a prominent place on any list of Spain’s greatest works. It offers a reread that reveals new layers of meaning, with a sharper eye for the life pulse of that era’s urban labyrinth. The colmena—the hive—continues to prompt reflection on the audacity in life, a moment when well-meaning men watch from the edges, astonished, yet lacking a full grasp of the unfolding reality. Even when the author keeps a respectful distance, the book remains a profound, unsettling examination of a society at a crossroads, where every small action echoes in a larger social chorus.