Among the native novels [to emerge from Spain since the Civil War] the most significant, both in terms of their perception of contemporary Spanish life and also in sheer literary quality, have been José Cela's—Pascual Duarte's Family, his recently published The Hive, and a little volume of travel sketches in rural Spain, Viaje a la Alcarria….

The first thing that strikes one on reading one of these recent Spanish novels is the chasm of feeling that separates them from that literary renaissance of the twenties and thirties which graced European literature with the works of Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset, of Galdos and Barojo and Sender, of Lorca and Machado…. [While] the writers now emerging have not forgotten this departed generation, they themselves are working in an atmosphere which is inevitably dominated and changed by the Civil War and its social aftermath.

One thing unites them with...