Living With Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks A Novel of Despair from Spain And a Buoyant One from France Camilo Jose Cela is apparently the only novelist of any stature to have developed in Franco's...
...Though page after page is devoted to descriptions of death, the novel is full of the joy of life and is as hopeful as The Hive is bitter...
...the descriptions of landscapes are as passionate and as rich as any Giono has written...
...Of some we see enough to glimpse their stories, and in the end tragedy seems to be lying in wait for one of the less evil but ineffectual characters...
...Readers of The Hive (Farrar, Straus & Young, $3.50) will understand why it has never been published in Spain, for this is the kind of bitterly honest book that no totalitarian regime could tolerate...
...It is possible that Giono now and then has his tongue in his cheek as he contemplates his romantic young hero, but if Angelo is something of a Don Quixote, he has all of the Don's admirable and lovable qualities and only a few of his ludicrous ones...
...Toward the end of the book, a doctor unfolds what would today be called a psychosomatic theory of the plague, but surely this is to be taken with a grain of salt...
...Here, the inmost feelings of people are not any more affected by an obsessive longing for a cigarette or a hot meal...
...Nor by the constant fear of official persecution...
...and he, too, chooses to do so by giving us brief glimpses of a variety of its inhabitants...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks A Novel of Despair from Spain And a Buoyant One from France Camilo Jose Cela is apparently the only novelist of any stature to have developed in Franco's Spain, and he is by no means in good standing with the regime...
...his work with a brave and sensible nun...
...but, as Barea says, the novel has qualities that can speak to any reader anywhere...
...Certainly life in The Hive is grim beyond anything most of us have experienced...
...We follow some of these people about the city and meet many new characters in the process...
...And it is a method that serves very well to communicate the disgust that is his dominant emotion...
...Whatever the book may or may not mean, it is exciting to read...
...Throughout the novel, Angelo is traveling in plague-stricken country, but he is so innocent and romantic that he never thinks of the plague as something that can touch him...
...Not only is the account of the plague magnificent...
...Both in purpose and in method it resembles John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer...
...To begin with, we move rapidly among the habitues of a cafe presided over by the bullying Dona Rosa...
...I have no idea what conclusions Giono expects to be drawn from this fable...
...But there is nothing resembling a plot...
...The background of the story is the plague that overran Southern France in 1838, and its ravages are described in almost overwhelming detail...
...Like Dos Passos...
...It is a long way from the tight, hard realism of The Hive to the expansiveness of Jean Giono's new novel, The Horseman on the Roof (Knopf, $4.00...
...Most bizarre of all is his pilgrimage with the beautiful Marquise de Theus, during which he conducts himself with perfect propriety in a series of difficult and unconventional situations...
...If they are not among the successful, they cringe...
...Cela employs his method skilfully, for he has a great gift for suggesting a character with a short description or a few lines of dialogue...
...If they have achieved some degree of success, they are vain and arrogant...
...Those who are not vicious come close to being contemptible, and the few who are capable of good intentions are ineffectual...
...Angelo's courage and gallantry are very fine, and so is his capacity for finding admirable traits in his fellow men...
...He goes on: "The key word was, of course, 'any more.' The hunger and misery of The Hive are no part of the world of English readers any more...
...And the book is full of bizarre and dramatic incidents: the days Angelo spends on the roofs of a town...
...Cela is painting the portrait of a city...
...The majority of the characters are greedy and treacherous...
...Arturo Barea, who has written a sympathetic introduction for the English translation, in spite of the fact that he and Cela were on opposite sides in the Spanish Civil War, fears that English and American readers may find it not merely distasteful but almost incredible...
...As he shifts abruptly from person to person, we are always expecting to find someone who is better than those we have hitherto met, and we never do...
...He tells of a Swedish friend of his who rejected a comparable novel "because family life with us isn't a bit like that any more...
...But attention is focused on the romantic figure of Angelo, a Piedmontese nobleman and army officer, who is in exile because of his sympathies with the movement for national liberation...
...It doesn't, and he plays his role of knight-errant to the end...
...Romanticism and realism are blended in curious proportions and with consummate skill...
...This is not, fortunately for us, our world...
...The Madrid Cela shows us is a city of lost souls...
...the life of the camp in which he finds his foster-brother...
Vol. 37 • January 1954 • No. 4
