Camilo Jose Cela's most famous novel is set in Madrid, during the Second World War. The book was first published, I believe, in Argentina: its sly portrait of a city divided between rich and poor, victors and defeated, and its frank portrayal of the most intimate and sometimes sordid details of daily life must have conflicted with the picture of Spanish life propagated by the Church and Franco. The book's title, "La Colmena", or The Beehive" in English, is highly appropriate: the book consists largely of dialogue, interweaving the lives of hundreds of characters. By definition, none of them can really aspire to be heroes or heroines, either in life or in the novel.The result is a novel which gives a claustrophobic sense of hundreds of lives lived in close proximity, confined, indeed, within the modest length of Cela's novel. The book is also, at times, a comic as well as a realistic portrait of poverty: as a portrait of life under a dictatorship, it appears to stress not so much oppression as exhaustion and defeat. A persistent theme of the novel is exploitation: never on a grand scale, but petty and mean and extending into the intimate lives of its characters, especially of young women forced to grant sexual favours or prostitute themselves in an attempt to provide for their children, their relations and themselves. If the book has a fault it has to be in its somewhat sentimental portraits of such women. And yet, as I read, I found myself wondering about both the definition and literary value of sentimentality. Perhaps it is the first sign of an extension of sympathy to groups previously ignored or despised, as in the sentimental view of children which developed in the Europe of the late eighteenth century. In a country scarred by civil war and economic isolation, Cela's "sympathy" for his youthful female characters may have marked the first hesitant step towards the recovery of humanity in Franco's Spain. But as well as a political event, the publication of Cela's novel marked the beginning of a modest rebirth in Spanish literature after the years of war and exile. ( )