Mercè Rodoreda, Death in Spring, Trans. by Martha Tennent, Open Letter Books, 2009.«Considered by many to be the grand achievement of her later period, Death in Spring is one of Mercè Rodoreda's most complex and beautifully constructed works. The novel tells the story of the bizarre and destructive customs of a nameless town—burying the dead in trees after filling their mouths with cement to prevent their soul from escaping, or sending a man to swim in the river that courses underneath the town to discover if they will be washed away by a flood—through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy who must come to terms with the rhyme and reason of this ritual violence, and with his wild, child-like, and teenaged stepmother, who becomes his playmate. It is through these rituals, and the developing relationships between the boy and the townspeople, that Rodoreda portrays a fully-articulated, though quite disturbing, society.
The horrific rituals, however, stand in stark contrast to the novel’s stunningly poetic language and lush descriptions. Written over a period of twenty years—after Rodoreda was forced into exile following the Spanish Civi War—Death in Spring is musical and rhythmic, and truly the work of a writer at the height of her powers.
A book for the ages, Death in Spring can be read as a metaphor for Franco's Spain (or any oppressed society), or as a mythological quest novel. Similar to Shirley Jackson’s work (especially The Lottery), and featuring the imaginative qualities of Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa, Rodoreda’s last novel is a bold, ambitious statement, and a fitting capstone to her remarkable career.»
"The greatest contemporary Catalan novelist and possibly the best Mediterranean woman author since Sappho." — David H. Rosenthal
«What have we been doing without this book? (Well, those of us who don’t read Catalan.)
In her obsessive final novel (published posthumously in 1986, and translated now for the first time into English), the residents of an unnamed mountain village eke out a miserable existence by brutalizing nature, and by being themselves brutalized. The narrator poetically details the villagers’ violently arcane customs: how they bury their dead and dying inside trees; how they slaughter horses, eating the flesh raw (“chopped up and mixed with herbs”), and shaping the fat into balls that they hang in their houses; how the Senyor who lives above them hires men to cut back the ivy that would otherwise shatter his mansion. Pregnant women wear blindfolds lest their unborn children adopt other men’s appearances. Young children drown; other children stomp bees that are busy gorging themselves on honey. Black birds (“mourners”) are driven from their nests by vicious white birds, but return three days later to kill those birds. And every year men must swim the underground river beneath the village, to clear it of obstructions; their faces are torn away in the process, for which they are shunned.
The novel is harsh, and often gruesome, but it is never gratuitous; it is instead boldly earnest as it lays out a perverse logic by which nature and civilizations function. What I find particularly brilliant is the balance Rodoreda strikes between realism and fantasy: I often found it impossible to tell which customs might be true (or based in truth), and which (if any) were invented. The world is, after all, extremely strange, and it is a great and rare thing when an author is skilled enough to reflect this strangeness in her writing.
And to make it so fascinating. The short chapters and utterly hypnotic prose of Death in Spring make it a compulsive read—mysterious, tense, and repeatedly cathartic:
In front of me lay the forest, where the elderly went from time to time, and when they did, they locked us children inside wooden cupboards in the kitchen. We could only breathe through the stars on the cupboard walls, empty stars, like windows in the shape of a star. Once I asked a boy from a nearby house if he was sometimes locked inside the kitchen cupboard, and he said he was. I asked him if the door had two panels with an empty star on each side. He said, there’s an empty star, but it’s not large enough to allow much air in, and if the elders are long in returning, we start to feel ill, like we’re suffocating. He said he watched through the star as the elderly people set off, and after that he could see only walls and ashes. Everything conveyed a sense of loneliness and sadness. Even the walls grew sad and old when the elderly left them alone and all the children were locked in cupboards like animals. And what he told me about things was true: alone, they grew old quickly, but in the company of people they grew old more slowly and in a different way; instead of becoming ugly, they became pretty.
The narrator returns repeatedly to eccentric customs and observations, and our impression of the village and its inhabitants accumulates gradually, elliptically. Both grow more familiar, but never become any less mysterious, never any less sad or troubled (or troubling). The result is such that by the last page (and the ending is absolutely devastating) we feel as though we, too, have spent a lifetime there.
As I read (and I read this book repeatedly, over and over—to myself, to others, silently, aloud), I was reminded of a handful of melancholy films (Rodoreda’s writing is extremely descriptive). In particular, I thought of films that depict what it is like to be a child, and to live in the world and to observe it closely, but to not understand it. More than once I pictured John and Pearl floating downstream, orphaned and menaced by Robert Mitchum in Charles Laughton’s immortal Night of the Hunter (1955). Elsewhere, I thought of the little girls who arrive at their boarding school inside coffins in Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s instant-classic Innocence (2004). (The stars on those coffins strengthens this odd resonance.)
Death in Spring is the equal of those two great films; it is, without any exaggeration, one of the finest books I’ve read.» - A D Jameson
«In the oppressive world of the village, the dead are stuffed with pink cement and then entombed in trees. Children are locked in cupboards, and young men are sacrificed to the all-powerful river, which inexplicably runs beneath the village. Despite this strangeness, Death in Spring is not an experiment in fantasy or surrealism but, rather, an exploration of a meticulously-rendered alternate reality. The village’s bridges are specifically named, landmarks are pinpointed, and paths are described in detail, as are directions for getting from one place to another. Ultimately, however, this order is illusory. The village is precariously balanced on top of a swiftly moving river, and no amount of topographical precision will protect this troubled society from self-destruction.
Rodoreda’s prose is poetic without sacrificing any of its ferocity. Her powerful imagery often subverts expectations. In the world of this novel, “Spring is sad” and “plants and flowers are earth’s plague, rotten.” The greenness of Spring is “poisonous color." Life is irrelevant and destruction is happiness:
[Y]ou have to believe that it's all the same to have a face or have your forehead ripped away. It's all the same to live or die .... Learn to make fire by rubbing sticks together; learn to start a fire and you'll be happy. A fire that causes damage.
Death in Spring is an unforgettable book. It's purposefully strange in a way that’s not easily worked out. Because the book’s possible meanings are multiple and ever shifting, they will always be relevant. I expect I’ll be thinking about, and perhaps frustrated by, this book for a long time, and this haunting quality is the reason I’ve given this novel my highest rating. This challenging and bizarre novel will not appeal to everyone, but those up to the challenge, will be richly rewarded.» - Gwen Dawson
«Death in Spring can—and perhaps on one level, must—be read as an address to oppressive, authoritarian government, especially Franco's (Rodoreda spent twenty years in exile), but there is nothing provincial about it. As with Orwell's 1984, Zamyatin's We, or Kerenthy's Metropole, the critique—lifting itself with fantastic elements—transcends any specific target.
And Death in Spring is indeed bursting with fantastic images. Many of the images work to reveal a system of natural symbols that is at once suggestive, evocative, and deeply paradoxical—readers won't look at trees the same way. Other images, meanwhile, stem from the novel's nameless town and its overtly religious, often horrifically violent rituals. (The publisher's suggested comparison with Shirley Jackson's story The Lottery is somehow an injustice to the majesty of this town's cruelties.) Between these two systems, the natural and the ritualistic, is poised the novel's magic. In a typical novel, one system might overcome the other. But here, as in much of Garcia Marquez's work, time is the ultimate organizing force—and what a ruthlessly ambivalent force it is. Rodoreda braids antagonistic forces into a self-imploding folk tale about life and death, like a story Charon might relate to his passengers on the boatride between worlds.
The novel begins with transition and hesitation:
"I removed my clothes and dropped them at the foot of the hackberry tree, beside the madman's rock. Before entering the river, I stopped to observe the color left behind by the sky."
The narrator, a nameless boy of fourteen, on the cusp of manhood, simultaneously begins a journey and pauses. And while there is indeed a journey (years elapse, he marries, has children, participates in several rituals), it is also constantly forestalled (the boy's age is never mentioned again, and he never seems to age, he remains on that cusp). Starting, stopping: this is the narrative's basic modality and is so deeply reflected in the style that credit is due to Martha Tennant for providing the contradictory tug of stillness and of change, the constant oscillation revealing that the book's magnificent themes are alive and active at the level of the language, as well.
Of course, the pauses are only interludes; change is inevitable, things move forward (sort of): two more sentences, and we're in rushing water's cold embrace. The rest of the first chapter—the whole of it fizzing like a prose poem—comes at the reader in a rush of flashbacks interrupted by descriptions of landscape, interrupted by the recounting of certain rituals (including the dead-of-night excavating of red powder, with which the villagers repaint their houses), manifold, involuted, but poetic reflections that in turn are interrupted several times by a bee chasing the narrator to the far shore—a bee whose flightpath pretty accurately maps the narrative's loop-de-loop time and consciousness.
It's impossible to summarize all that unfolds. Death in Spring is as perfect and complete as a fugue, and one of those books (pace Flannery O'Connor) that would take every word of itself to paraphrase: the imagery is simply too integrated, the language too reverberant, the structure too exquisitely intricate.
But trust that with those first simple sentences, a dance of metaphorical action and traditional symbols is set in motion, a dance whose every step is choreographed with consummate artistic powers. The river, the madman's rock, the tree: all these core elements will grow exponentially in significance over the course of the novel. Supporting motifs mature and transform, beautifully weaving the larger images together (and weaving through them) with an almost-organic instinct: that bee in the opening chapter, for example, evolves into birds in the next chapter; and its bumbling flightpath gives way to fluttering butterflies. Glass balls—poof!—become soap bubbles, become balls of fat, become bird's eggs. Then, the bubbling of soap is "rhymed," as it were, with the bubbling of small butterflies, and their bubbling is rhymed with the bubbling of resin rising from the cross-shaped cut in a tree. On and on these symbol- and-image-systems go. Everything in this novel belongs, every living thing is a player in the struggle against the fear of death (and decay) emanating from the town, where the narrator flutters between childhood and adulthood.
As said before, neither nature, nor the town can win in any absolute sense. Paradox rules: metamorphosis—beginning with the stripping off of clothes in the opening sentence—is constantly interrupted by stasis; and in the universe of Death in Spring, some entrapments actually liberate.
From very early on, one wants badly to know: will the town's darkly violent rituals (rituals that steadily confuse oppressor and victim) liberate or destroy the narrator? But the story offers no easy answers; readers must plunge into the river of Rodoreda's metaphysics, where life and death penetrate each other inextricably, where a fantastic landscape mixes with beautiful language arranged in clockwork structures…and then, the answer does come, snapping perfectly into place, revealing the novel as an elegant and profound commentary on mysteries usually addressed only by religion.» - Hugh Ferrer
«I believe that Rodoreda is the great modernist Catalan author. From her earlier works, like Time of the Doves, through her later, even more ambitious and stylistically daring novels, like Death in Spring and A Broken Mirror, she created some of the most impressive literary works of the past century and she wrote the books that people will be reading a hundred years from now, still puzzling out her techniques and, especially in the case of Death in Spring, the meanings behind her words.
Rodoreda’s aesthetic evolution is one of the things that most impresses me about her writing. Time of the Doves is a very accomplished novel—a stream of consciousness novel about one woman’s life during the Spanish Civil War. It is very modernist in its conceits and concerns, and is stunningly beautiful. At the same time, today’s readers probably won’t find too many “new tricks” in this novel.
That’s not necessarily the case with A Broken Mirror and especially not with Death in Spring. A Broken Mirror is a family saga that progresses from a very Victorian opening to a very fragmented and postmodern conclusion. And aesthetically speaking, that’s where Death in Spring picks up.
There isn’t really an English-language equivalent to this masterpiece. A couple scenes call to mind Shirley Jackson, and the spooky atmosphere is sort of Poe-like, but both of those comparisons fall far short of what you’ll find here. This is a novel about an imagined village where life is organized around a series of baroque, almost medieval rituals. These rituals can be rather shocking—like the death ritual of filling a dying person’s mouth with cement to prevent his/her soul from escaping, or all of the routines involving the “prisoner”—but Rodoreda presents them through the eyes of an adolescent boy in such a naturalized, textured, lyrical fashion that the reader quickly comes to accept them as commonplace, or, as metaphors.
When they pulled the boy from the river, he was dead; they returned him to the river. Those who died in the water were returned to the water. The river carried them away and nothing was ever known of them again. But at night, at the spot where the bodies were thrown into the water, a shadow could be seen. Not every night. Not today or tomorrow, but on certain nights a shadow trembled. They said the shadow of the dead returned to the place where the man was born. They said that to die was to merge with the shadow. That summer, the shadow of the boy was clearly distinguishable. It was unmistakably him because he had been separated from one of his arms, and the shadow had but one arm. Struggling against the current, the shadow—which was only will, not body or voice—attempted to slip beneath the village. And as the shadow struggled, the prisoner neighed.
There’s a temptation to interpret this novel about a village ruled by a man living up on a hill as a political metaphor for life in Franco’s Spain, but I think that leads to an incomplete reading. This novel is richer than politics. (And just wait until you read the scene in which the protagonist interacts with the man on the hill! It’s touching, surprising, and almost funny.) The novel also has a strong elemental pull to it, as the four sections bring to mind the four seasons, and these bizarre rituals concerned with passing and renewal. It is Death in Spring after all.
Regardless of how one chooses to approach the book, I’m willing to guarantee that this is a one-of-a-kind experience.» - Chad W. Post
Mercè Rodoreda, War, So Much War, Trans. by Maruxa Relaño & Martha Tennent, Open Letter, 2015. Read an Excerpt
Despite its title, there is little of war and much of the fantastic in this coming-of-age story, which was the last novel Mercè Rodoreda published during her lifetime.
We first meet its young protagonist, Adrià Guinart, as he is leaving Barcelona out of boredom and a thirst for freedom, embarking on a long journey through the backwaters of a rural land, accompanied by the interminable, distant rumblings of an indefinable war. In vignette-like chapters and a narrative style imbued with the fantastic, Guinart meets with numerous adventures and peculiar characters who offer him a surrealistic view of an impoverished, war-ravaged society and shape his perception of his place in the world.
Like Rodoreda’s Death in Spring, nature and death play a fundamental role in this phantasmagoric narrative that seems to be a meditation on moral degradation and the often inescapable presence of evil.
A boy runs away to join the war and tells the horrific tales of his incessant travels.
Rodoreda’s last novel creates a nightmare world inhabited by Adrià Guinart, a 15-year-old who leaves “the prison of [his] home” with his friend Rossend. They become separated, and Adrià begins an endless journey, with the destruction and death of war always near. The story plays out in a series of encounters with iconic characters—the hanged man, the miller’s wife, a wise man, a hermit—all within a stark landscape reminiscent of Kafka and the fantastical apparitions of Garcia Márquez. It's a series of fairy tales held together by the narrative of a boy wandering a mythical world. Then the novel takes a different turn with a Gothic interlude. Adrià is taken into a house where Senyor Ardèvol and his housekeeper, Senyora Isabel, care for him, sheltering him from his nightmares in which “Death, with green teeth, sat on the belly of a cloud.” There is respite, and a family atmosphere, except for Ardèvol’s being consumed by an old mirror in the hallway where he sees disembodied eyes next to his own reflection. Adrià reads the papers left to him after Ardèvol’s death and pieces together the story of his life. When he forgoes the inheritance left him by the dead man, the story of wandering the bleak landscape resumes, and Adrià continues on his way to witness “everything that I had just seen but did not exist.”
Poetic, mythical, literate, laced with allusions to the world’s literature, this novel is a stew in which the flavors never quite come together. - Kirkus Reviews
Catalonia, the home country of the revered mid-century writer Mercè Rodoreda, is a land of betweenness. Nestled in the crux of France and Spain, it is technically referred to as an “autonomous community” of the latter—in other words, depending on who you ask, perhaps its own country, perhaps not. As one of the most famous artists (alongside Salvador Dalí, who was also Catalan) to spring forth from this land of uncertain boundaries and identities, Rodoreda almost too perfectly represents this torn state of mind in her works of fiction, where characters and settings are constantly shifting between dreams and reality, apposite desires, nationalist claims, life and death. In her penultimate novel, originally written in 1980, War, So Much War, she demonstrates in phantasmagoric Technicolor brilliance the ways in which even such a cleft spirit can be a vessel for extreme beauty.
Born in 1908, Rodoreda came of age as an artist at perhaps the exact worst time for a person of her origins: with the rise of Franco’s dictatorship during World War II, Catalonia was severely repressed on every front, including, most devastatingly for a writer, the banning of its unique and irregular language, Catalan. Rodoreda thus subjected herself to voluntary exile in Geneva from 1939–75, the period in which she wrote the majority of her nine complete works of fiction. Her most well known novel, In the Time of Doves, was published in 1962 and, with a painful irony, came to be translated into thirty languages. While all of her work, especially in the early years, has an autobiographical bent, her final two novels address most directly the effects of war that plagued her identity as a Catalan and as a writer. War, So Much War, and her final work Death in Spring (1986) are both stories of wandering and exile, of characters making journeys that lead them from being lost to being more lost; wherein the definition of “home” is under close scrutiny and left largely open-ended. Yet for all of the ambivalence they portray about the security and truthfulness of one’s roots, the two novels project an undeniable power in what’s possible when one is loosed from a fixed identity.
War, So Much War funnels this representation of an exiled, yet focused, self through the fifteen-year-old first-person protagonist Adrià Guinart. His story is episodic, picaresque—a riff on Don Quixote but with a less bumbling, naïve hero and without an acerbically wise sidekick. We meet Adrià when the world as he knows it is crumbling around him; most of his family has died, and with the threat of World War II looming, he and his best friend, the “junkman’s son” Rossend, leave their village in the capitol city Barcelona to join up with the army. Their service, though, provides anything but an escape from the unremitting suffering they knew at home. Along their journey, Adrià meets a sad and diverse group of wounded, lonely, and grieving individuals. They are undoubtedly types of fabulist nature, but they’re also people with distinctive voices whose wails of sorrow have a unique timbre and vibrato, whose stories form a patchwork-quilt portrait of the many atrocities rendering the country a blood-stained rag. Here are portraits of a man Adrià saves from being hanged, a boisterous miller’s wife (not the only character to recall The Canterbury Tales), a hermit, a band of misfit workers, and, most significantly, a dying Senyor and his loyal caretaker called a “canary woman.” Their stories represent a spectrum of desperation and hope, but ultimately set a stage of ubiquitous suffering: a world where, according to one dying man, a meteor shower is just “stars weeping because we are at war. . . . They have grown weary of seeing so much death.”
This clear, appropriate example of the pathetic fallacy suggests an inescapably bleak worldview in War, So Much War, one that makes the novel almost at times read like something produced in the present-day—a post-apocalyptic struggle to survive and preserve the beauties of humanity. But instead, what Rodoreda does so skillfully to avoid that monotone grey palette is deploy nature as a fundamental mode of surrealist escapism. Throughout the novel, Adrià speaks metaphorically of himself as a tree: when he leaves home, he “watered himself” in order to grow deeper roots, and this process allows him to be fixed and sprawling at the same time. Indeed, his most significant moment of transformation arises when he reenters the woods, having disowned the inheritance bestowed upon him by the dying Senyor Ardèvol. Ardia knew him for mere days in life but far longer through the papers Senyor leaves behind—a record, in essence, that extends his own life beyond the corporeal and into the immortal realm of letters, and which also, coincidentally relays the details of his own flight from his country and ultimate exile. By refusing to enter into and perpetuate this written network of exile at the same time he literally moves out of society and into the wild state of the woods, Adrià imposes his own exile twice over. The second leg of his flight throughout the book, however, is noticeably unbalanced with the first. Indeed, here he’s retreating, but it’s also a retreat back home, and lacking the perhaps the expected “turn” in his outlook that would make the return journey somehow different or developmental.
To understand this direction of the narrative and Adrià himself, it’s useful to return to the tree metaphor. In the woods, he realizes “I had become two people: the one sweating with fright and the one who believed there was no reason to be afraid. . . . It seemed to me it was no longer I who was walking, but the trees, the entire forest. Had I entered the woods or had the woods entered me?” With this question, Adrià essentially accomplishes the goal he set out with—to become a tree—but by unexpected means and with unexpected results. This fantastical non-self is nonetheless forced to reconcile with the remnants of war—the “so much charred life” all around him and waiting for him at home. This is a home he must embrace, though, as he realizes suddenly that “I wished I were above rather than below, a tree hugging the earth, deeply rooted, with branches aloft, the sun overhead, blue skies overhead, the furious aliveness of the stars overhead.” Reality and nonreality, seemingly incompatible, are forced together inside a single being, leaving the reader—and Adrià himself—with a bitterly uncertain sense of what can be reliably thought of as “real” and his own feelings toward it. That Adrià’s newfound self-awareness occurs so close to the end of the novel leaves little room for interpretation or judgment. The novel thusly posits that such a state of uncertainty is inevitable—sheer fact in and of itself, and not to be disputed.
Indeed, all throughout the novel’s short, fragmentary, and episodic chapters, scenes that are literal dreams are relayed with the same tone and voice as scenes that are not dreams (there are, of course, certain moments that lay somewhere in between, where neither the reader nor the character can trust if what’s happening is real). And thanks to the new, extremely sensitive translation by Maruxa Relano and Martha Tennent, who also translated Death in Spring into English for the first time in 2009, the equilibrium of that tone is preserved beautifully, allowing the language itself to mimic the betweenness of the world Rodoreda writes about—its real state and its fictional depiction here. The most important dreamscapes involve a young woman Adrià meets named Eva, who appears to him first beside a river and then erratically in real life and in his dream life. Their chaste romance carries with it many interpretations: it makes sense given that he is only fifteen, after all, and in a literal state of transition between childhood and manhood. But for all he’s experienced, it seems unusual that his sexual development leans toward childhood, whereas everything else about him leans away from it. In these dreams, then—of nature and of love—we see Adrià occupying yet another set of intertwining liminal states, which allows for the tension in his character-driven story to be sustained at such a high pitch.
It would be easy to argue that, with neither external nor internal nature able to provide any sense of stability for him, Adrià is fated to live an itinerant life, unbound by even the inheritance of a stranger. There’s another piece of evidence to prove this, too, which we learn immediately on page one of the novel: Adrià has a birthmark on his forehead that several people note as none other than the mark of Cain. However, Adrià’s resemblance to this most famous of biblical exiles—forced to suffer for eternity after betraying and killing his brother, Abel, to win God’s favor—ends at the physical. Adrià has not killed his brother; he’s only watched his family, his three luminous sisters, and others he comes to care about fall at the hand of some unknown, crueler fate. As a result, it’s perhaps misguided to read War, So Much War in a purely fabulist framework. Those who suffer did not necessarily do wrong; the rules of the universe are nothing more than arbitrary occurrences coincidently in sync with man’s more evil ways. Even Rodoreda’s nature is by and large atheist—there’s no deity behind the fantastical environment or peoples of Catalonia; one could read their stories as existential, not moral, parables in the way that one might the work of Nietzsche or Camus. What we take away mostly, then, from this overwhelmingly honest work of fiction is less the power of this author’s imagination and capacity for human excavation—though that of course is there, and an artistic truth if there ever was one; it’s more the sense that there are some truths too painfully real to be relayed as such, and thus need a scrim of fiction to be bearable at all. Fashioning a dream-self, tree-self, or any non-self provides a necessary counterpart to what would otherwise be a state of constant incarceration: where “my prison is not these walls, but my own flesh and bones.”
- Jennifer Kurdyla
Often considered the most important Catalan novelist of the 20th century, Rodoreda (Death in Spring) explores life during the Spanish Civil War in a unique coming-of-age story. Feeling suffocated living at home with his parents in Barcelona, Adrià Guinart runs away with a friend to become a soldier. However, the pair is quickly separated, and an attack on the soldier camp leaves Adrià alone and wandering the woods. He eventually decides to leave the fighting and sets out on an aimless journey, roaming from village to village, stumbling into situations that challenge his perception of the world. During his trip, Adrià often loses himself in the stories of those he meets, and this prompts him to become more reflective and aware. The young protagonist confronts mortality and witnesses how “the rumblings of war” can reach even remote areas of a nation, and how those affected can become cruel. Adrià’s memories surface within his narration, complementing the novel’s quick and fluid structure. The war described in this book is mostly internal, and the large conflicts are more conceptual—young and old, life and death, present and past. Rodoreda’s dreamy, poetic prose is served well by Relaño and Tennent’s remarkable translation. A significant entry among the works in the Catalan language. - Publishers Weekly
I managed to get my hands on an advance copy of War, So Much War, the first English translation of Mercè Rodoreda’s final novel, whose original Catalan version was published in 1980. The last shall be first, I guess: I’ve never read any Rodoreda until now, and hadn’t heard of her until last month, when my sister practically hurled a story of hers at my head. (I didn’t get to it.) So far the book has proven itself a weird but entirely bewitching introduction to the writer. The story follows Adrià Guinart, a teenaged boy who leaves his home in Barcelona at the onset of the Spanish Civil War, forging an errant path through the Catalonian countryside, making glancing and baffling contact with the fighting. More than anything, it’s a medieval romance. The first clue is the novel’s elliptical title (in Catalan: Quanta, Quanta Guerra…), which suggests romance’s cumulative, episodic, ongoing form. Sure enough, the plot is mostly a list of encounters. But romance is as much about discreteness as it is ongoingness, and each of the book’s short, reliably surreal chapters is like a small, beautiful stone. What is astonishing is that Rodoreda writes without visible contempt for her form—a brave stance, considering that the Western novel arguably had its genesis in the ridicule of medieval romance. But the farther I get into War, So Much War, the more I realize that Rodoreda’s form is the only one suited for her subject: the interruptions, the absurdities, the frivolities of war. —Oliver Preston
Mercè Rodoreda, The Selected Stories of Mercè Rodoreda, Trans. by Martha Tennent, Open Letter, 2011.
"The humor in the stories, as well as their thrill of realism, comes from a Nabokovian precision of observation and transformation of plain experience into enchanting prose." —Los Angeles Times
Collected here are thirty-one of Mercè Rodoreda’s most moving and challenging stories, presented in chronological order of their publication from three of Rodoreda’s most beloved short story collections:Twenty-Two Stories, It Seemed Like Silk and Other Stories, and My Christina and Other Stories. These stories capture Rodoreda’s full range of expression, from quiet literary realism to fragmentary impressionism to dark symbolism. Few writers have captured so clearly, or explored so deeply, the lives of women who are stuck somewhere between senseless modernity and suffocating tradition—Rodoreda’s “women are notable for their almost pathological lack of volition, but also for their acute sensitivity, a nearly painful awareness of beauty” - Natasha Wimmer
My infatuation with Mercè Rodoreda (1908–1983), the great Catalan writer, began in the early 1990s when I discovered the two books of hers that Graywolf had reissued in the mid-80s: The Time of the Doves, her classic novel set in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, and My Christina and Other Stories. I was bewitched—by the writer, by her books, by the pure, aching beauty and foreignness of the language and worlds. (I was captivated much as I had been by the New Directions paperbacks of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart and Soulstorm: Stories around that time as well.) Rodoreda’s collection, especially, struck a chord: each story was a short burst of light and heat, by turns dreamlike and allegorical yet often cut through with the terrifying epiphanies of women on the verge of some sort of a nervous breakdown. But for all her manifest powers, over time, Rodoreda, like Lispector, gathered dust on the shelves.
Recently, however, Rodoreda has begun to enjoy another moment of rediscovery in English translation, this time launched by Open Letter, which published her final novel, Death in Spring, in 2009 and has now released The Selected Stories of Mercè Rodoreda. It is a pleasure to delve back into the stories of Rodoreda, which in this collection give a full sense of the breadth of her work, from the finely etched realism of the collections Twenty-Two Stories and It Seemed Like Silk (some of which first appeared in Words without Borders, including in its October 2007 “Rambles through Catalunya” issue) to the stream-of-consciousness fever dreams of My Christina. Rodoreda’s characters struggle with the crushing realities of life—airless marriages, the shrinking of dreams and horizons brought on by war and poverty, illness and grief, separations and departures. There are radical mood swings, even within individual paragraphs: bursts of fleeting happiness and dizzy euphoria alternate with bouts of profound sadness and melancholy. Rain pours down across her dreary Barcelona landscape (and later in the Paris and Geneva of her Spanish exiles), but this is “not the rain of lovers, but the rain of those made sad by life’s repeated bitterness.”
Even when her highly sensitive lost souls appear satisfied by what their lives have wrought, there are moments of shattering self-awareness—recognition of their faded youth, the secrets and lies of married life, and the silent, almost imperceptible end of love. In “The Mirror,” a sixty-year-old widow recalls an afternoon years earlier when she was frozen with fear that “the most insignificant gesture would shatter that mirror of sad, fragile happiness.” While in “Happiness,” Teresa, still aglow with her new husband in Paris, nevertheless anguishes over her repressed doubts and the feeling of being “tyrannically imprisoned within four walls and a ceiling of tenderness.” Tenderness, indeed, can be a sign of both comfort and crippling anxiety. “She squeezed his arm tenderly,” writes Rodoreda in “Engaged,” “but she wanted to weep. Houses, trees, streets—everything seemed false and useless.”
As the stories gather steam over the course of the collection, the effect crescendoes. Several, like “Friday, June 8” and “Before I Die” from Twenty-Two Stories, are absolutely devastating, full-blooded portraits of personal disintegration that read like condensed novellas in the span of just a few short pages. Rodoreda is fully in her element here, and even as the pieces become more surreal and otherworldly toward the end—“The Salamander” features a metamorphosis redolent of Kafka—Rodoreda’s passionate vision continues to pulsate on every page. It’s a testament to the translator, Martha Tennent, as well, that the stories remain so alive and arresting today. In an essay on the publication of Death in Spring, Natasha Wimmer, the translator of Roberto Bolaño among others, called Rodoreda “a domestic existentialist, a brilliant composer of interiors, both physical and mental.” Reading this newly assembled collection, I was moved to realize how powerful that small, cloistered world still is. - Anderson Tepper
The Selected Stories of Mercè Rodoreda are a fascinating mix of personal disappointment and the darkly allegorical, stories that capture the precise moment when longing becomes futile and self-destructive. Living through a troubled romance in her early years then later fleeing into exile and poverty at the end of the Spanish Civil War, Rodereda's work reflects those turbulent moments and the disillusion that stems from them. Her stories
look inward, whether in disappointment with a cheating husband, or through grief, both expressed in rich allegorical language. It is the power to catch these moments, the spark of failure or the last legacy of something good, that makes her a rich story teller.
The stories from her first collection, Twenty Two Stories, focus more precisely on the relationships between men and women than those from the other collections. Her gaze is subtle and what she is looking for is that little moment when the relationship changes. Often it is as simple as realizing that a husband's morning kiss is missing. In "Happiness," she shows the transition from happiness to desperation with images of marital bliss, a night in Paris, a new bracelet, "If he could only know how much she loved him." She juxtaposes it with the wife's realization the next morning that her husband has not kissed her before going to the shower. As she sits in bed, that simple act of forgetfulness leads her to the conclusion: "It's over, she thought. Love is ending. And this is how it ends, quietly." It suggests an end, but for Rodoreda noting how things end, as subtle as it is, is not enough. She finds something darker as the wife retreats from her realization when her husband hugs her: "...she was tyrannically imprisoned within four walls and a ceiling of tenderness." The act of realization and freedom that the woman had are illusory, and she retreats to a position of self-delusion, where the easy thing is to accept the embrace even if it offers little.
The self-delusion that surrenders a woman's freedom is a constant in Rodoreda's stories. Her characters are often on the cusp of realizing their power, but they retreat, holding an image drawn from society of what they should be. In "Afternoon in the Cinema," a young woman narrates the last date she had with her boyfriend. It wasn't a good one; he was too busy working his black-market business. But she wants to marry him anyway. She's a simple woman who says things like, "The couple in the movie was really in love. I can see we're not in love like that." But like so many of Rodoreda's characters, there is a self-awareness that she refuses to acknowledge. "What I'd like to be able to explain is, even though I'm almost always dead, down deep I'm happy." It is a desperate statement by someone grasping for something that doesn't exist, and Rodoreda leaves you to imagine the coming disaster.
In "Engaged" she is at her most elusive, and yet manages to show a whole relationship. The story starts simply enough, with a couple pausing in front of a flower store so the fiancé can look at the flowers. But the questions come quickly: "Why don't you give me flowers?" He replies, "Don't you know that giving flowers is passé?" The dynamic between the couple is quickly established. It could be a small thing, but as the story develops the man emerges as a cold fellow and the woman as one who wants love. He insists on studying alone for two months, which either suggests something is going on or he just has different priorities. He then initiates a test of trust and goes through her purse and then offers her his wallet, where she is surprised to find a tiny slip of paper: "She unfolded the paper. 'Yes, I'll marry you.' She had written it because she was speechless when he asked her if she wanted to be his wife." Again it seems if he is honest, in love, but the act of honesty, looking through each other's wallets, is not trust, but suspicion. He continues, logically, "'This is what we have to do, always.' he said, slipping the wallet into his pocket. 'There can't be any secrets between you and me. Ever. We'll be like brother and sister.'" It is the end of the dream, and for the fiancée this marks the transition away from love, away from the ideal marriage that is always in the distance, unobtainable.
"Before I Die" is the best of the early stories and shows Rodoreda's impressive ability to inject mystery into a story. The narrator is an 18 or 19 year-old art student, and a free spirit with fairly straightforward, almost brusque manners. She meets a stranger in a café and they quickly marry in a quiet service that no one attends and they eat dinner afterwards alone. The narrator appears to be self-possessed, the opposite of Rodoreda's self-deluded narrators who dream about the ideal love. Then the narrator finds some letters that her husband tells her she is not allowed to read. When she manages to steal them from the briefcase he keeps with him at all times, she discovers there was another woman, and that their relationship, including the honeymoon in Venice, has all been an act of reliving the previous relationship. She doesn't try to fool herself into continuing the relationship, instead tries to get revenge. It is a self-destructive act that will not hurt the man. He doesn't care; he is just looking for a replacement lover and is not going to be devastated by a girl who has deluded herself into thinking she is more important than she really is. Foolish romanticism doesn't lead her into a loveless marriage, worse, it leads to her destruction.
Where things take a dark turn is in her allegorical works, which construct a unique vision where the natural world is ambivalent and the humans have the most primal manners. These are stories that go beyond the fantastic, or even magical realism, which often sits with a reality that the reader is familiar with. Here Rodoreda reconstructs everything. In "Salamander" the story begins with an illicit rendezvous in the forest. But it takes a turn for the strange when the narrator is burned at the stake for having the relationship. As the flames swirl around her and the man she had the affair with stands with his wife watching her burn, she begins to melt and turns into a salamander. It is a Kafkaesque transformation, but for Rodoreda it is an opportunity to explore the recurrent image of a woman undone by men who take advantage of her. The salamander, instead of escaping, returns to the home of her lover to be with him, even if she is just sitting under the bed. Despite her escape she can't stay away from him. It is part of the confusion that leads her to say, "I began to pray for myself, because inside me, even though I wasn't dead, no part of me was wholly alive. I prayed frantically because I didn't know if I was still a person or only an animal or half-person, half-animal." Ultimately, she is forced to become an animal, but that world is no better than the human, and the story ends with three eels playing with one of her hands, which they have ripped off. She finds herself between two worlds, a natural one that has a sense of continuity, it has always been there and it always will. And the human one, which by its nearness to the natural, gives one the impression that it will always continue too, and that the petty wives, cruel children, and the villagers ready to kill for so little will always continue on.
The Selected Stories of Mercè Rodoreda show a writer who had a masterful grasp of storytelling and a willingness to experiment with different forms of writing. Her subtle and precise manner of examining the lives of women who convince themselves they want what is antithetical to them, makes the stories beautiful and troubling. Reading them is sure to leave one happy to be in the presence of a great writer, and just slightly melancholy by her exacting vision. - Paul Doyle
Mercè Rodoreda, The Time of the Doves, Trans. by David H. Rosenthal, Graywolf Press; Reprint edition , 1986.
The Time of the Doves - by Mercè Rodoreda - is the powerfully written story of a naïve shop-tender during the Spanish Civil War and beyond, is a rare and moving portrait of a simple soul confronting and surviving a convulsive period in history. The book has been widely translated, and was made into a film.
The narrative voice in Mercè Rodoreda’s novel, The Time of the Doves, wraps the reader in the dizzying world of a young woman. Through first person narration and the use of stream of consciousness, Rodoreda places the reader inside the head of Natalia as life happens to her.
Rodoreda starts sentence after sentence with “And,” even she using it as a conjunction between sentences: “[a]nd I stuck up for Quimet’s mother and said yes, she had put salt in the food. And the neighbor said if she ate food that was too salty it took her appetite away and Quimet said…” This and the lack of commas gives Natalia’s narration a breathless feeling like she is so wrapped up in the story that she couldn’t stop talking if she tried. This hurriedness also gave me the impression that she wasn’t stopping to think about what she was saying, there was no after the fact analysis. It was an interesting effect for something narrated in the past tense. Most often writers add layers of reflection and reinterpretation to stories narrated in the past tense. The character has had years to mull over events and interject meaning. By combining the breathlessness with the past tense, Rodoreda gave me the impression that Natalia was reliving these events and there was a lot of unprocessed anxiety wrapped up in them.
Natalia is aware of the actions going on around her: “Quimet started complaining furiously about his leg;” and to a certain extent she feels how those actions impact her: “I felt like they’d emptied me out of myself and filled me with something very strange. Someone I couldn’t see kept blowing into my mouth and played at inflating me;” but she doesn’t even contemplate escaping it. Natalia needs a sympathetic audience and the reader is closer than a girlfriend to whom Natalia complains about her life, but she has no concept that she has any control over her own fate. This intimate quality means the reader is involved in Natalia’s confusion.
Natalia was so caught up in the whirlwind of her life that the war crept up on her. Her life existed outside of history or political context for most of the first half of the novel. Rodoreda drops in a reference to the king on page 71 and Natalia mentions “the rich were mad at the Republic.” It isn’t until “Cintet and Quimet never stopped talking about the street patrols and how they’d have to be soldiers again” that the war comes home for Natalia. This was a very interesting effect. Usually when I read books about wars, they are about wars, the war is heavily foreshadowed through the rest of the book and often there are battle scenes. What Rodoreda accomplished was showing how ignorant people can be about impending political strife when they are wrapped up in their lives. Natalia couldn’t meditate on ridding her house of doves, let alone how the political situation was shaping up around her.
Although I interjected my own thoughts and feelings into the novel, e.g. wondering why she didn’t know what a jerk Quimet was, so strong was the narrative voice that Rodoreda changed the way I read the book. Natalia is living without much premeditation, evidenced by sentences like: “[u]p to the moment he got undressed, you could say I’d never really taken a good look at him.” I am used to reading for clues to a character’s ultimate fate, to having some idea where the character is going. This sentence was like a smack in the face. It forced me to experience Natalia’s life as she was experiencing it because she was so unpredictable. I could worry for her, but I couldn’t anticipate her. We are so controlled by Natalia’s worldview that when “a militiaman knocked on the door and told me Quimet and Cintet had died” and she goes up to the roof “to breathe,” we don’t know if she is relieved or in shock or devastated.
I find myself slipping into the “and, and, and” mode sometimes when I am writing, but I usually go back and edit it out. This novel conveyed that sense of rawness, where the character is experiencing everything simultaneously, that I would like to experiment with, but I sometimes found it exhausting to read. I felt like I was being whipped around like Natalia was allowing herself to be and the only control I had was to put the book down. I think it is something I could use as an effect, but I wonder if I would be able to give up the control of having my characters act on their own behalves. Rodoreda’s treatment of Natalia and the war was spot on. To worry and anticipate political strife would have implied some sort of forethought and would have been completely out of character. I was truly placed inside Natalia’s world and at the mercy of her interpretation of it. -
Mercè Rodoreda, My Christina and Other Stories, Trans. by David H. Rosenthal, Graywolf Press, 1984.
Years after her death, Mercè Rodoreda's work is enjoying a well-deserved renaissance. The seventeen stories that comprise this volume vary tremendously in tone and style, from the hallucinatory to the bleakly realistic, from tales of tenderness and love to stories that might best be called folktales, reality merged with dream.
Rodoreda (1908-1983) is termed by translator Rosenthal, with fierce enthusiasm, ""the greatest contemporary Catalan novelist and possibly the best Mediterranean woman author since Sappho""; she wrote novels, the best known of which is The Time of the Doves, as well as stories. And this collection, published in Spain in 1967, exhibits remarkable range. ""That Wall, That Mimosa""--in which a romance triggers an allergy and an allergy recalls a romance--nearly parodies Proust yet is lovely and evocative rather than smirky. ""Pain"" is a portrait of pure urban anxiety: a woman can't bear the wait for a visit from the man who may or may not become her lover. ""The Hen"" is a bitter tale of rural substitution and violence: a hen is first turned into a pet, then into a stand-in for a wife. But, while Rodoreda's psychological studies are effective, her surrealism is what is most indelible here, reminiscent of Bruno Schulz's high-flying mastery--in tales of metamorphosis, in the title story of a shipwrecked sailor's life inside a whale (which he gnaws on for nourishment), and in the nocturnal visits of ""The Gentleman and the Moon."" (""On the moon, nothing the first few days. Lots of light, that's for sure, because the moonlight on earth is very different from the moonlight on the moon. On the earth the moonlight's spread out, while on the moon it's all packed together. The night's huge paws hold it down, and we see only what escapes from between the fingers."") A compelling stylist, well translated--with passages of stunning imagery in virtually every story. - Kirkus Reviews
Mercè Rodoreda, Camellia Street, Trans. by David H. Rosenthal, Graywolf Press, 1984.
Camellia Street is one of the major novels of Merce Rodoreda, a brilliant Catalan writer whose works are widely read and admired throughout the world. This is the story of Cecelia and of the war-torn, disoriented Barcelona of the 1940s and 1950s. It is a profoundly feminist work that etches one powerless woman's strength in the face of male brutality; it ends on a note of tenuous rebirth.
Merce Rodoreda's strong and disquieting novel is about a profound and seemingly endless series of abandonments. At the outset the infant named Cecilia is left outside a garden gate on Camellia Street in Barcelona. She is taken in by a childless family of modest means and a certain elegance who raise her, not as their own, exactly, but as a sort of favored adjunct to their life.
These substitute parents, Senyor Jaume and Senyora Magdalena, are not cruel or heartless but lack basic understanding of the nature of child-rearing. As she grows up with them, Cecilia is never allowed to forget her questionable origins.
Still, it's not a bad life. Senyor Jaume in particular shows warmth and affection toward the young orphan, allowing her into his secret world in the tower of the house. There the two of them look at stars while downstairs the women trade juicy bits of gossip.
Cecilia's frequent response to all this is to run away. On her first excursion she meets up with a father and daughter on an outing and grasps the man's hand, only to be slapped away by the little girl. Later, she sneaks off to the opera, where a sort of hallucinatory elegance washes over her.
She meets Eusebe, an urchinlike street kid who opens the carriage doors of the wealthy. She sneaks out to join him, and together they travel the streets, sharing the magic and squalor of nighttime Barcelona. Then the war comes.
The Spanish Civil War is not a major player in "Camellia Street" as it was in the author's powerful novel "The Time of the Doves." Yet it dominates the background. Franco's victory robbed Catalonia of its language, its culture and much of its identity; the fascists made Catalan citizens exiles in their own country, and they drove Merce Rodoreda into 20 years of silence.
Heralded in the late 1930s as a master of fiction and probably the most important literary figure in Catalonia, she was forced to flee the country in 1939. Eventually she settled in Geneva, where she remained, voiceless and out of place, until the repression of the fascist years in Spain began to ease its grip. After the death of Franco, she returned in triumph to Barcelona, where she died in 1983.
None of this torment appears explicitly in the novel, but the exile's themes of loss, disorientation, abandonment and isolation inform its pages. Cecilia often seems to dwell in fog of self-absorption, keeping the world at bay while looking mostly inward:
"I realized I was completely different. . . . I fell in love with myself. . . . (O)utside the mirror was the lovable one and inside the one who loved her." - James Polk
“Camellia Street, published in 1966, is the starkest of all Rodoreda's works. It chronicles the life and, obliquely, the times of Cecília C, a street-corner prostitute and later a kept woman in numb, exhausted postwar Barcelona. Cecília, a foundling whose name is written on a scrap of paper pinned to her bib, never takes to her adoptive parents. She flees their stifling attentions and obsessive chatter about her origins as soon as she can – first in search of her father, who has appeared to her in a vision, and then more definitively with her first lover, Eusebi. From this point on her life is, in her own words, spent “searching for lost things and burying dead loves”. Incapable of either emotional attachment or shared sensual pleasure, Cecília lives frozen in her own narcissism and anomie. The parallels between her inner life and the disoriented, catatonic Barcelona of the 1940s and 1950s are striking, but Rodoreda never presses the point. Everything is presented from Cecília's point of view, in a stream-of-consciousness similar to that in The Time of the Doves . Though not as much of a victim as Jean Rhys's heroines, Cecília resembles them in her helpless, bitter drift through a world of lovers who either quickly bore her or whom she never liked in the first place.
Whing her fog of passivity and static self-absorption, however, Cecília longs vaguely but insistently for something else. Sometime it's another lover, some man whom she can't get for the moment. At other times she craves the emblems of glamour, which she first encounters through her demimondaine “cousins” Raquel and Maria-Cinta. A poor, half-starved streetwalker with all her grand conquests of her, Cecília seeks a luxurious car and starts to fantasize:
I thought someday I'd have a car too and sit in the back with a pearl necklace and pearl earrings and a ring with a white pearl and a black one and the chauffeur would open the door and say “miss” with his cap in his hand. And I'd be wearing a pink dress.
More importantly, Cecília craves love from her father, or from a child. But instead, in her affair with Marc (which occupies a third of the book), she experiences a perverse cruelty and jealousy that slowly build into scenes of hallucinatory intensity. The atmosphere of paralyzed claustrophobia, petty suspicion and spying, stifled daydreaming and male brutality that dominates this section is foreshadowed by Cecília's first response to her new lover: “I didn't move and just stared at him like a bird a snake is about to gobble up”. A series of abortions and miscarriages –the last nearly fatal and provoked by a blow from Marc or one of his friends−deprives her of any chance to have children. The warmly paternal presence she seeks also eludes her until the last chapter. Then, after seeking out the night watchman who had originally found her on a doorstep, Cecília lets herself become a child again and reaches out to the old man. Thus Camellia Street, a tale of emotional stupor in a world of moral corruption and self-betrayal, seems to end on a note of tenuous rebirth:
I looked around and it seemed like the ceiling was higher, the window was bigger and he seemed taller too like he'd been growing while we talked and I hadn't noticed. Everything was bigger and I was smaller. I put my feet on the rung under the chair, with my elbows and my knees and my face in my hands. I say very slowly, “I'll buy you a rosebush, a thick wool sweater, a cockatoo and aniseed…bushels of aniseed.”
To place Camellia Street and its author in their proper perspective, the American reader may find some historical background useful. Catalan is a language spoken by approximatedly seven million people, some of whom live in the Balearic Islands, others in a small strip of southern France that includes Perpinyà (Perpignan), and others in Spain proper, from Alicant (Alicante) to the French border and between the Mediterranean Sea and Aragon. A Roman language, Catalan is closer to Provençal and Italian to Castilian (the language normally called “Spanish”).
The most interesting Catalan literature is of two periods: from the late Middle Ages through the early Renaissance, and from around 1870 to the present. The first era produced such outstanding writers as the lyric poet Ausiàs March (ca. 1397-1495) and the novelist Joanot Martorell (ca. 1410-1468), whose masterpiece Tirant lo Blanc was described by Cervantes as “the best book of its kind in the world.” During the past century, Cataloniahas produced an astonishing body of artistic work. In the visual arts, the genius figures like Salvador Dalí, Antoni Gaudí, Juli Gonzàlez, Arístides Maiollol, Joan Miró and Antoni Tàpies is universally recognized. Catalan writing is of equally high quality, but the world has been slower to become aware of its virtues−partly due to a lack of good translations, and partly because of the Franco government's deliberate suppression.
Since Franco's death, Catalans have moved steadily toward self-government. They now have a bilingual government and a Statue of Autonomy. Free elections to the Catalan parliament recently took place. The study of Catalan is obligatory in the schools, and Catalan daily newspapers, television channels, and radio stations are free to operate. Thanks to authors such as Rodoreda and the poets J.V. Foix, Salvador Espriu, and Vicent Andrés Estellés, Catalan literature has remained as vital as ever. One hopes that these writers, who have spoken so eloquently for and to their nation, will now begin to receive the recognition they deserve in the United States.” - David H. Rosenthal
Mercè Rodoreda, A Broken Mirror, Trans. by Josep Miquel Sobrer, Bison Books, 2006.
In its moment of great splendor the novel was held as a mirror of society: Mercè Rodoreda shatters that mirror in this, her most ambitious novel, which tells its story in brilliant fragments, a vision reflected and refracted and finally coming together in a richly articulated mosaic of life. Through this Broken Mirror, the reader sees events and characters spanning three generations and composing a kaleidoscopic family history ranging over six decades and turning upon events both intimate and historic—most notably the Spanish Civil War.Opening with Teresa Goday, the lovely young fishmonger’s daughter married to a wealthy old man, the story shifts from one perspective to another, reflecting from myriad angles the founding of a matriarchal dynasty—and its eventual, seemingly inevitable disintegration. A family saga extending from the prosperous Barcelona of the 1870s to the advent of the Franco dictatorship, A Broken Mirror is finally also a novel about the inexorable passing of time.
The works of Catalan writer Rodoreda (The Time of the Doves) are difficult to find in English, and this translation will be particularly welcome to readers of Spanish and European literature. Set in Barcelona, this family saga spans six decades, from the 1870s to the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Teresa Goday, a beautiful young woman with humble origins and an illegitimate child to boot manages to marry a wealthy older man. When he dies she remarries and has a daughter, Sofia, who becomes the heir to Teresa's large estate, where Teresa also plays godmother to her illegitimate son Jesus Masdéu. Sofia marries once she also grows into an alluring woman, but adultery and its results are constant themes, as Sofia's philandering husband brings an illegitimate daughter, Maria, into the household to be reared alongside their sons as a "cousin"-with tragic and haunting results. Murder, suicide, incest and class conflicts abound as the novel's short sections dip back and forth in time; what's impressive is Rodoreda's muted depiction of it all, rendered without authorial judgment. - Publishers Weekly
Three generations of a family flourish and decline in Barcelona.
Separated into three parts, and narrated from multiple perspectives, ranging from that of a vitiated aristocrat to a discontented servant, the story begins in the late-19th century and follows the fortunes of Teresa Goday, her children and her grandchildren through the revolution and the rise of Franco. Teresa, a charming gold-digger, secures for herself two wealthy husbands and a beautiful villa. An essentially goodhearted worker, Teresa is larger than life, managing to please her husbands, seduce their friends and ensure the loyalty of her servants, all the while stockpiling a fortune for her daughter and her illegitimate son. Yet this carefree, exuberantly romantic woman produces a severe, uncompromising daughter, who in turn produces a weak-willed son. Once Teresa’s grandson is of an age to head the family, he has succumbed to depression and lives in poverty. The villa Teresa secured for her family falls into disrepair and passes from her family’s control. Most captivating is how the author reveals the inner life of her characters precisely and unsentimentally, often merely with a well-turned sentence. The prose is rich, almost lush, but it is also impersonal, without artificial or romanticized descriptions of an ideal past or a lost future. Rodoreda is also perfectly attuned to the differences in each narrative voice: Teresa’s sections are sensuous and ambitious, imaginative and fresh, for example, while the servants’ narratives are at once sullen, admiring, respectful and angry. Equally arresting is the acute depiction of how people confront the physical and mental ruin of passing time; this is the thread that unites each of the sections more surely than the family resemblances, which becomes harder and harder to discern in each passing generation.
Beautifully muted and intricate rendering of the aristocracy of Barcelona. - Kirkus Revie
As the biographical note explains, Rodoreda is a Catalan writer now being rediscovered as literary force more than 20 years after her death. This novel opens as young Teresa Goday works a minor scam on her wealthy husband in order to raise funds to have her illegitimate son secretly adopted. From there the kaleidoscope of perspectives (which cannot accurately be called a “plot”) shifts between Teresa’s first and second husbands, her son Masdéu, her daughter Sofía, Sofía’s playboy husband Eladi, and their children, who are by turns vicious and pathetic. Several generations of servants also provide their perspectives on this decaying noble family.
The personal sagas are paralleled by national drama, including the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship, though I only know this from reading the back cover. Very little mention is made of the political turmoil of the times, and the war appears to last for fewer than ten pages. Readers with expectations of loose ends being tied up, mysteries solved and character paths crossing will be disappointed; Rodoreda gives us a pastiche rather than a linear narrative. The soap opera-esque beginning leads us to expect either a happy ending or a very sad one; for better or for worse, this expectation is turned on its head. The translation suffers some minor bumps and hitches from time to time, with two or three (apparent) errors that interfere with the smooth readability of the prose.
Despite its slender appearance, this book is neither a quick read nor a light one; pick it up if you enjoy reading gorgeously experimental descriptions of love, death, adultery, incest, murder and spiritual hunger. - Val Perry
Mercè Rodeoreda’s novels have been translated and published in English, and although she’s become one of—if not the—most important Catalan writers of the twentieth century, it still feels like her work is greatly overlooked in this country. Which is a shame, since her writing is fantastic, and would greatly appeal to readers of Virginia Woolf and the like.
Along with The Time of the Doves, A Broken Mirror was the Rodoreda novel most recommended to me during a recent visit to Barcelona, and with good reason. This novel is a sweeping family saga, covering three generations, and a slew of important historical events, including the Spanish Civil War. In terms of the plot, the book is interesting enough, containing all necessary soap opera aspects, such as illegitimate children, incest, hidden secrets, financial scheming, and the like, all told in a very compelling way, drawing the reader into the world built around Teresa Goday, a pretty, young woman who marries a wealthy old man. Her children and grandchildren populate the novel and infuse it with memorable characters, conflicts, and events, one of the most remarkable being the haunting chapter in which one of the children drowns.
In contrast to most family epics, this book is only a couple hundred pages, as Rodoreda foregoes lengthy expository passages in favor of a more direct writing style that gets to the heart of the matter in a way that’s not entirely dissimilar from the writings of Nathalie Sarraute and Marguerite Duras. And it’s the stylistic advancements Rodoreda makes as the narrative develops that is most impressive about this book.
Split into three distinct parts, the family’s disintegration runs in parallel to the style in which it’s written, moving from a time/style of Victorian-like elegance, to a more modernist period, before concluding in a more fragmented, postmodern style. This development is strikingly evident in comparing the opening of the book with its conclusion.
As previously mentioned, it opens with an air of elegance:
Vicenc helped Senyor Nicolau Roviera into the carriage. “Yes, Sir, as you wish.” Then he helped Senyora Teresa. They always did it that way: first he, then she, because it took two of them to help Senyor Nicolau out again. It was a difficult maneuver, and he needed a lot of attention.
The end has a different feel entirely:
A few days later other shadows came to cut down the trees and to raze the house. Soon they saw by the trunk of the chestnut tree a disgusting rat, with a head that had been gnawed on, surrounded by a bunch of greenish flies.
In my opinion, the best novels are the ones that develop in complicated and interesting ways, challenging the reader’s expectations. Rodoreda’s book does just that. This novel is a true artistic accomplishment, and at the risk of writing in jacket-copy speak, I have to say that this is a true modern classic that deserves a much wider audience. - Chad W. Post
Mercè Rodoreda, In Diamond Square, Trans. by Peter Bush Virago, 2014.
Natalia, a pretty shop girl from the working-class quarter of Gracia, is hesitant when a stranger asks her to dance at the fiesta in Diamond Square. But Joe is charming and forceful, and she takes his hand. They marry and soon have two children; for Natalia it is an awakening, both good and bad. When Joe decides to breed pigeons, the birds delight his son and daughter - and infuriate his wife. Then the Spanish Civil War erupts; Natalia remains in Barcelona, struggling to feed her family, while Joe goes to fight the fascists, and one by one his beloved birds fly away...
Barcelona, early 1930s: Natalia, a pretty shop-girl from the working-class quarter of Gracia, is hesitant when a stranger asks her to dance at the fiesta in Diamond Square. But Joe is charming and forceful, and she takes his hand.
They marry and soon have two children; for Natalia it is an awakening, both good and bad. When Joe decides to breed pigeons, the birds delight his son and daughter - and infuriate his wife. Then the Spanish Civil War erupts, and lays waste to the city and to their simple existence. Natalia remains in Barcelona, struggling to feed her family, while Joe goes to fight the fascists, and one by one his beloved birds fly away.
A highly acclaimed classic that has been translated into more twenty-eight languages, In Diamond Square is the moving, vivid and powerful story of a woman caught up in a convulsive period of history.
When I read La plaça del Diamant (In Diamond Square) for the first time, I couldn’t put it down. I wanted to know what finally happened to war widow, Pidgey, and her children in the wake of the Spanish civil war. I started it at 3pm, after lunch, and finished it at 9.30, in time for dinner, Barcelona-style. I’d just moved to live in that city and was catching up on Catalan literature. It was only when I came to translate the novel a few years later that the life story of the girl from Gràcia struck a deeper, personal chord. Continuously reading as a professional doesn’t mean that reading becomes a clinical process. You still react emotionally while you repeatedly engage with the language you are transforming, making hundreds of thousands of changes…
As I reread the story of Pidgey’s struggle for survival during wartime on the home front, I was reminded of the way my mum would tell me about her six years bringing up two daughters in a small rural town – alien to her, a lass from a tenement in the centre of Sheffield – when my dad was away being a nurse in northern France and the deserts of the Middle East. She told me of the fortunes being made on the black market by uncles who were small farmers, but couldn’t find the occasional egg for her young daughters, the tussles with aunts, the evacuated family that came to lodge, the bombs… Sometimes reading sparks these very personal connections, but not always. It helped me understand that Mercè Rodoreda’s novel wasn’t only about women at the home front in Barcelona; behind her heroine stood the women she had met in France during the Occupations on her many flights from the Nazis and her struggle to make a living, and, more generally, women left to cope, wherever, in bellicose times.
Then there was also the little matter of the two translations that already existed that I would only read once I’d as good as finished mine. I only knew their titles – Eda O’Shiel Sagarra’s The Pigeon Girl and David Rosenthal’s The Time of the Doves – and that I wanted ‘Diamond Square’ in my title, and that the birds that flutter and die throughout to be very definitely pigeons, and not doves, with all the positive and negative connotations those birds evoke – their iridescent rainbow plumage and dirty bombing habits.
Individual memories and literary choices! What to do about ‘Colometa’ the nickname the narrator is given by her first love, the boisterous carpenter, Quimet, and his too. If you don’t translate names when they are highly symbolic, then they may have an exotic, foreign ring, and the resonances a Catalan reader feels are lost. So I opted for ‘Pidgey’ and ‘Joe’. Reading Pidgey on every other page when the young wife is worrying about feeding her children, surrounded by pigeon feed, pigeon shit and broody hens must be more powerful than a repetition of ‘Colometa’. Similarly with a working-class Joe rather than ‘Quimet’, diminutive for ‘Quim’ (with all its sexual innuendo for English readers that is non-existent in Catalan) from Joaquim. That’s what I wanted to feel and hear as a reader, and as a translator, you are your first reader. You can’t create for that mythical ‘general’ reader, ‘mid-Atlantic’ audience or conventional English literary taste. Otherwise, why translate at all? - Peter Bush
This classic Catalan novel was first published in 1962, and this is the third English translation, to mark the book’s fiftieth anniversary. Rodoreda was still living in exile when she wrote the book in the aftermath of the Civil War, but her work soon became the symbol of the re-emergence of that extraordinary culture and minority language from Franco’s military and linguistic stranglehold. The indomitable spirit of Natalia, or La Colometa (the pigeon girl) as she is known in Catalan, emerges from the story told in the first person of her youthful passion and marriage, and then gradual slide into poverty as Catalunya was hit by economic depression and increasingly radical politics.
As with many powerfully written narratives, selected details and an understated tone paint a painfully vivid picture of suffering and starvation during the civil war years. Natalia’s focus is entirely domestic and this too reflects the parabola of her own life: the walls, doors, crockery and furnishings peel, crack and are sold as she and her children slide into poverty. At one point the intensity of the stream-of-consciousness prose reflecting Natalia’s mental state culminates in an ear-splitting scream. I was uncomfortable with some of the translated names in the book (Natalia’s husband becomes Joe in English, rather than Quimet as in previous translations); more successful was the choice of her own nickname Pidgey, rather than La Calometa.
Names aside, Natalia’s voice will echo in your ears, like the surging waves inside the couch shell which comfort her as she pieces together her life in Barcelona. There are some books that you know will remain with you forever. For me this is one, and I would strongly recommend that, if you haven’t already done so, you read it now. - Lucinda Byatt
English-language readers are not spoiled for choice if they want access to literature written in Catalan. In the Nineties, only one novel translated from Catalan was published in the UK, the late Jesús Moncada’s The Tow-path (El camí de sirga). This month, the third translation into English of La plaça del Diamant, under the title In Diamond Square, is published by Virago. In its 50 years in print, it’s been translated to 28 languages. In 2008 it was translated for the third time into Italian and sold 30,000 copies in its first six months. Peter Bush, Barcelona resident and translator of In Diamond Square told me, “It’s a common assumption that novels in translation are necessarily difficult to read and of minority interest. In Diamond Square is very readable.”
By 1962, the Franco dictatorship, then in the 23rd year of its hold on the country, was obliged to liberalise slightly as its economic and political isolation ended. It was becoming possible to publish in Catalan again after two decades of the severest military, economic and linguistic repression. Rodoreda’s novel became a symbol of Catalan literature emerging from the dark.
Joan Sales, Rodoreda’s publisher, tells the story of the première of the 1982 film of La plaça del Diamant: “A crowd of several thousand men and women packed the Rambla de Catalunya outside the cinema...When Mercè Rodoreda with difficulty crossed that tightly packed crowd, one of the longest and most deafening ovations I have heard in my life broke out... See, I said to myself, how 40 years of the profoundest persecution has not been able to suppress our people...which knows how to thank an author who spreads beyond the limits of our nation a language and literature that implacable persecution has not been able to kill.”
A successful writer in an oppressed language becomes more than a writer, she becomes representative. Yet despite the hype, the novel has to be good to bear this weight. And La plaça del Diamant is a stunning novel. It reads like a thriller. Many readers comment how they devoured it at one sitting. Rodoreda’s skill makes us want to read right to the end to know what’s going to happen to her heroine, Natàlia or, as she will forever be remembered to everyone who has read the novel, La Colometa.
Narrated in the first person, the book opens in the Plaça del Diamant at the Festa Major de Gràcia, where La Colometa first meets Quimet—for whom she breaks off her engagement to another man. The story starts out during the last years of the Spanish Republic, and documents La Colometa’s life through the Spanish Civil War and then against the backdrop of the Franco dictatorship, and up to the mid-Fifties.
Their marriage starts with the sexual passion of “a week of wedding nights” and riding out fast on Quimet's motor-bike. Her life veers between this excitement and drudgery as the feckless Quimet’s furniture-making workshop declines. He starts to breed pigeons, but gives them away, while she feeds them, cleans the cages and looks after their two children, all the time working as a cleaner.
When the Civil War erupts, Quimet and his friends Cintet and Mateu go off to fight. The effects of war bring her to the end of her strength; destitute, she considers killing her two children and herself. Rodoreda’s character struggles to come to terms with her love for Quimet, with loss and moving forward into another kind of life. The denouement of the book is subtle and moving. You will have to read it to understand why La Colometa screams in Diamond Square.
The greatest achievement of the book is the vigour and consistency of La Colometa’s narrative voice. She is ignorant, ingenuous, at times downtrodden, but also sensitive and perceptive, as her very detailed descriptions of everyday life and shifting feelings show. Rodoreda has La Colometa dwell on things: domestic utensils, weather, the feel of a wall under her fingers, shapes and lights. At times, the book reaches stream-of-consciousness intensity, though usually in quick sentences that push the narrative forward. Much of the writing has the extreme sensitivity often associated with lyric poets, but it is not precious or abstract. “It is one of the few novels about women in wartime narrated by a working-class woman,” says Peter Bush.
The book is a sustained tour-de-force, taking us through the Republic, Civil War, the victory of fascism and into the dictatorship. It explains 25 years of Catalan history, but without mentioning a single public event. History is seen through the eyes of this working-class woman with her feet on the ground. On the outbreak of the military uprising, in July 1936 (though the book mentions no dates), while Quimet “was running through the streets” with the other young men, and as her friend Julieta joins the militia, too, La Colometa finds the grocer has run out of food, there’s no gas, no milk. Yet she is not the passive housewife. She too is conducting her revolution: getting rid of the pigeons that enslave her.
In her introduction, reprinted in this new translation, Rodoreda rejects firmly a criticism by the Mallorcan novelist, Baltasar Porcel, that La Colometa is “simple-minded”. “She does what she has to do in her situation in life”, Rodoreda rejoins and compares her character with other famous literary heroines. “I think La Colometa is more intelligent than Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina and no-one’s ever thought of saying they were simple-minded. Perhaps because they were rich, dressing in silk.” We could add that Natàlia could hardly have told the story of her life so acutely if she were “simple-minded”.
I asked Peter Bush about the problems of translating such a particular voice as Natàlia’s. “The right voice is key to any successful translation. I prepared myself by reading several novels about the working-class from the Thirties or Alan Sillitoe, whose characters speak non-standard English. I read Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate for the impact war has on ordinary people. And I drew on my own experience; my mother lived six years through the Second World War with my father away and in later years, she never stopped talking about it.” Impressed, I ask him if he always prepares a translation so thoroughly. “With books that are really original, I try to read around them. Translators…are important gatekeepers, especially when ushering the literature of a ‘minority’ culture into the space of world literature.”
After decades of isolation, this year sees several Catalan books in English translation. Three of them are classics, all three translated by Peter Bush: In Diamond Square, Uncertain Glory by Joan Sales (who was also Rodoreda’s publisher), and Josep Pla’s The Grey Notebooks. There are several others, by contemporary writers such as Francesc Serés or Najat El Hachmi. Why this sudden flurry? In part, due to Catalunya being the guest country at the 2007 Frankfurt book fair and also through the translation subsidies offered by the Ramon Llull Institute.
In Diamond Square is highly unromanticised, the non-epic counterpoint to, say, André Malraux’s account in Days of Hope of anarchists racing in their wild heroism across the Plaça de Catalunya up against machine-guns. It articulates the fight to survive war and hunger through the consciousness of a young, working-class mother. No excuse not to read it now! You will be moved by La Colometa’s indomitable spirit. - Michael Eaude
If Mendoza’s An Englishman In Madrid gives us a foreign male’s view of run-up to the Spanish Civil War, Rodorera’s In Diamond Square gives us the female civilian equivalent. Neither protagonist is politically motivated but Anthony Whitelands, in Madrid, becomes involved with the right-wing Falange, while Natalia, In Barcelona, becomes (involved isn’t the right word, so let’s say) affected by the left-wing opposition. Escape is always an option for Whitelands, not so for Natalia. Reading both novels in the past fortnight felt like living in parallel universes.
Rodoreda’s novel is reputably the best Catalan novel ever written. First published in English as The Time of the Doves, in – if the reviews on Amazon are to be believed – an execrable translation, Virago Press have commissioned a new one by renowned translator Peter Bush, which reads beautifully
Natalia is a working-class girl with working class expectations: love, marriage and a family. Engaged to someone who doesn’t excite her, she is swept off her feet during a street party in Diamond Square. I’m not going to judge Joe by modern day standards but this error in judgement causes no amount of grief. Dearie me, the things women used to put up with! Anyway, following her heart rather than her head, Natalie marries him heralding “the time of the doves”, a time when her life and her home are overtaken by the doves that Joe decides to breed.
The political situation is just background noise in this domestic drama until Joe and his friends leave to fight the left-wing cause. Natalia is left to survive with two young children to feed and it is hard – not just for her – but for everyone in Barcelona. And yet, as the doves leave Natalia’s home, she gains a measure of self-esteem and independence previously unknown and once the war is over, she finally finds happiness in an unexpected place.
Politics feature only as they affect Natalia’s life. And she is such a passive character – her voice is matter of fact, non-judgmental. Actually simple and annoying to my way of thinking. But it is not what the author intended. Natalia is depicted as a woman of her time, the salt of the earth, and I should know better than to impose 21st century values on 1930’s Spain. - lizzysiddal
Living in Barcelona in the early 1930s, shop girl Natalia meets a determined young man at a fiesta in Diamond Square and Joe – with ‘little monkey eyes’ and ‘little medal-like ears’ – tells her she will become his wife within a year.
Written in 1960 and translated into more than 20 languages, this compelling tale of life before, during and after the Spanish Civil War, is narrated by a woman as intense as she is passive.
Joe, a carpenter, and Natalia do indeed marry and have a son and daughter. Joe breeds pigeons – ten pairs turn into many more – which live in the loft space and peck away at Natalia, with their appetites, their stench, their comings and goings. When the war erupts, Joe leaves to fight the Fascists and Natalia remains in Barcelona, struggling to feed the children.
In the prologue to the book’s 1962 publication, Rodoreda wrote that In Diamond Square is ‘a novel about love, as someone has said that it isn’t’ noting the central character has only one thing in common with her – ‘ namely the fact she feels at a loss in the midst of the world’.
Like a Jean Rhys character, small woes weigh heavily on Natalia from the off – her fingertips ache from tying gilded raffia around cake boxes at work, and the elastic holding up her petticoat ‘sliced’ into her. ‘My father always said I was a prickly so-and-so…’ she remarks. ‘On the other hand, I really did feel that I didn’t know what I was doing on this planet.’
There is a growing sense of playful menace about motorbike-riding Joe, with his sermons about men and women and their respective rights. He taps his wife sharply on the knee, pinches her under her arm, pours a handful of birdseed down the back of her blouse, and makes her kneel down in the street to beg forgiveness in a row he has manufactured about her going for a walk with her former fiancé, Pete. ‘My mother had never told me about men,’ says Natalia, whose parents’ marriage was summed up by ‘Sunday afternoons sitting in the dining room not saying a word to each other’.
Rodoreda denied feminist intent but it’s easy to interpret the novel – and its symbolism of a set of scales etched onto the stairs to the couple’s flat with ‘one of the scales set slightly below the other’ – as a study of a woman’s lot, as much as a comment on the unequal human existence (not least in a war setting, with the hunger, poverty and shaven heads of children, the city’s lights painted blue, and the death of fighters).
The kaleidoscope of evocative images is constant – Joe’s tricky mother with her house of ribbons and a ‘cream eiderdown patterned with red roses and a frilly red border’ and Father John’s watery black clothes ‘as if he was made from the wings of a fly’. There are smells of grain and potatoes and spirit of salts in the grocer’s, the boom…boom sound from a conch shell, the flutter of white paper roses at a wedding and a guest wearing earrings with lilac-coloured gems.
Wonderfully vivid and intense, In Diamond Square has a pervasive sense of hope and yearning with an emotional jolt around every corner as well as the occasional flash of humour – Natalia and Joe’s marriage party is gate-crashed by half-a-dozen men in their forties celebrating a successful appendicitis operation endured by the fellow dancing with a deaf-aid hanging from his ear.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez has called In Diamond Square ‘the most beautiful novel published in Spain since the Civil War’ and this translation from Catalan by Peter Bush deftly captures the rich intricacy of Rodoreda’s lingering prose, the mix of want and sadness, and the tenacity of the human spirit. -
Catherine Jones
Before the meeting: I came to this book with inaccurate expectations. Gabriel Garcia Marquez describes it on the cover as ‘the most beautiful novel published in Spain since the Civil War’, which I misread, lazily, as ‘about the Spanish Civil War’. True, the action of the novel spans the years of the Civil War, which is a major element in the story, but it would be quite a stretch to say the novel is about the war. The novel tells the story of Natalia, a naive, uneducated young woman from Gracia, then a poor area of Barcelona rather than what the internet now calls ‘one of the city’s hippest areas’. She marries a volatile young man whose entrepreneurial ambition fills their apartment, bizarrely and malodorously, with pigeons. The Civil War disrupts their family life when her husband and their male friends joins the militia – we see none of the combat, and none of the reasons for the war are discussed or explained, but we stay within Natalia’s narrow horizons, following her through wretchedness, deprivation, despair and unexpected happiness (though, to save spoilers, not necessarily in that order).They marry and soon have two children; for Natalia it is an awakening, both good and bad. When Joe decides to breed pigeons, the birds delight his son and daughter - and infuriate his wife. Then the Spanish Civil War erupts, and lays waste to the city and to their simple existence. Natalia remains in Barcelona, struggling to feed her family, while Joe goes to fight the fascists, and one by one his beloved birds fly away.
A highly acclaimed classic that has been translated into more twenty-eight languages, In Diamond Square is the moving, vivid and powerful story of a woman caught up in a convulsive period of history.
When I read La plaça del Diamant (In Diamond Square) for the first time, I couldn’t put it down. I wanted to know what finally happened to war widow, Pidgey, and her children in the wake of the Spanish civil war. I started it at 3pm, after lunch, and finished it at 9.30, in time for dinner, Barcelona-style. I’d just moved to live in that city and was catching up on Catalan literature. It was only when I came to translate the novel a few years later that the life story of the girl from Gràcia struck a deeper, personal chord. Continuously reading as a professional doesn’t mean that reading becomes a clinical process. You still react emotionally while you repeatedly engage with the language you are transforming, making hundreds of thousands of changes…
As I reread the story of Pidgey’s struggle for survival during wartime on the home front, I was reminded of the way my mum would tell me about her six years bringing up two daughters in a small rural town – alien to her, a lass from a tenement in the centre of Sheffield – when my dad was away being a nurse in northern France and the deserts of the Middle East. She told me of the fortunes being made on the black market by uncles who were small farmers, but couldn’t find the occasional egg for her young daughters, the tussles with aunts, the evacuated family that came to lodge, the bombs… Sometimes reading sparks these very personal connections, but not always. It helped me understand that Mercè Rodoreda’s novel wasn’t only about women at the home front in Barcelona; behind her heroine stood the women she had met in France during the Occupations on her many flights from the Nazis and her struggle to make a living, and, more generally, women left to cope, wherever, in bellicose times.
Then there was also the little matter of the two translations that already existed that I would only read once I’d as good as finished mine. I only knew their titles – Eda O’Shiel Sagarra’s The Pigeon Girl and David Rosenthal’s The Time of the Doves – and that I wanted ‘Diamond Square’ in my title, and that the birds that flutter and die throughout to be very definitely pigeons, and not doves, with all the positive and negative connotations those birds evoke – their iridescent rainbow plumage and dirty bombing habits.
Individual memories and literary choices! What to do about ‘Colometa’ the nickname the narrator is given by her first love, the boisterous carpenter, Quimet, and his too. If you don’t translate names when they are highly symbolic, then they may have an exotic, foreign ring, and the resonances a Catalan reader feels are lost. So I opted for ‘Pidgey’ and ‘Joe’. Reading Pidgey on every other page when the young wife is worrying about feeding her children, surrounded by pigeon feed, pigeon shit and broody hens must be more powerful than a repetition of ‘Colometa’. Similarly with a working-class Joe rather than ‘Quimet’, diminutive for ‘Quim’ (with all its sexual innuendo for English readers that is non-existent in Catalan) from Joaquim. That’s what I wanted to feel and hear as a reader, and as a translator, you are your first reader. You can’t create for that mythical ‘general’ reader, ‘mid-Atlantic’ audience or conventional English literary taste. Otherwise, why translate at all? - Peter Bush
This classic Catalan novel was first published in 1962, and this is the third English translation, to mark the book’s fiftieth anniversary. Rodoreda was still living in exile when she wrote the book in the aftermath of the Civil War, but her work soon became the symbol of the re-emergence of that extraordinary culture and minority language from Franco’s military and linguistic stranglehold. The indomitable spirit of Natalia, or La Colometa (the pigeon girl) as she is known in Catalan, emerges from the story told in the first person of her youthful passion and marriage, and then gradual slide into poverty as Catalunya was hit by economic depression and increasingly radical politics.
As with many powerfully written narratives, selected details and an understated tone paint a painfully vivid picture of suffering and starvation during the civil war years. Natalia’s focus is entirely domestic and this too reflects the parabola of her own life: the walls, doors, crockery and furnishings peel, crack and are sold as she and her children slide into poverty. At one point the intensity of the stream-of-consciousness prose reflecting Natalia’s mental state culminates in an ear-splitting scream. I was uncomfortable with some of the translated names in the book (Natalia’s husband becomes Joe in English, rather than Quimet as in previous translations); more successful was the choice of her own nickname Pidgey, rather than La Calometa.
Names aside, Natalia’s voice will echo in your ears, like the surging waves inside the couch shell which comfort her as she pieces together her life in Barcelona. There are some books that you know will remain with you forever. For me this is one, and I would strongly recommend that, if you haven’t already done so, you read it now. - Lucinda Byatt
Many people rush through the Plaça del Diamant on their way from the Fontana metro towards the Verdi cinemas, or pass quickly through this undistinguished square on the way to the more popular and beautiful Gràcia squares of Vila de Gràcia or La Virreina.
But stopping for a moment, one notices along one side of this fairly ordinary square, a low, black sculpture of a naked woman screaming—in anguish or perhaps liberation. She is surrounded by pigeons. The monument commemorates a scene toward the end of the novel La plaça del Diamant, and the woman is its heroine, La Colometa, the Pigeon Girl. Written by Mercè Rodoreda (1908-1984) in an intense spring and summer 1960 of her Geneva exile, it was a huge critical and popular success when it came out in 1962.English-language readers are not spoiled for choice if they want access to literature written in Catalan. In the Nineties, only one novel translated from Catalan was published in the UK, the late Jesús Moncada’s The Tow-path (El camí de sirga). This month, the third translation into English of La plaça del Diamant, under the title In Diamond Square, is published by Virago. In its 50 years in print, it’s been translated to 28 languages. In 2008 it was translated for the third time into Italian and sold 30,000 copies in its first six months. Peter Bush, Barcelona resident and translator of In Diamond Square told me, “It’s a common assumption that novels in translation are necessarily difficult to read and of minority interest. In Diamond Square is very readable.”
By 1962, the Franco dictatorship, then in the 23rd year of its hold on the country, was obliged to liberalise slightly as its economic and political isolation ended. It was becoming possible to publish in Catalan again after two decades of the severest military, economic and linguistic repression. Rodoreda’s novel became a symbol of Catalan literature emerging from the dark.
Joan Sales, Rodoreda’s publisher, tells the story of the première of the 1982 film of La plaça del Diamant: “A crowd of several thousand men and women packed the Rambla de Catalunya outside the cinema...When Mercè Rodoreda with difficulty crossed that tightly packed crowd, one of the longest and most deafening ovations I have heard in my life broke out... See, I said to myself, how 40 years of the profoundest persecution has not been able to suppress our people...which knows how to thank an author who spreads beyond the limits of our nation a language and literature that implacable persecution has not been able to kill.”
A successful writer in an oppressed language becomes more than a writer, she becomes representative. Yet despite the hype, the novel has to be good to bear this weight. And La plaça del Diamant is a stunning novel. It reads like a thriller. Many readers comment how they devoured it at one sitting. Rodoreda’s skill makes us want to read right to the end to know what’s going to happen to her heroine, Natàlia or, as she will forever be remembered to everyone who has read the novel, La Colometa.
Narrated in the first person, the book opens in the Plaça del Diamant at the Festa Major de Gràcia, where La Colometa first meets Quimet—for whom she breaks off her engagement to another man. The story starts out during the last years of the Spanish Republic, and documents La Colometa’s life through the Spanish Civil War and then against the backdrop of the Franco dictatorship, and up to the mid-Fifties.
Their marriage starts with the sexual passion of “a week of wedding nights” and riding out fast on Quimet's motor-bike. Her life veers between this excitement and drudgery as the feckless Quimet’s furniture-making workshop declines. He starts to breed pigeons, but gives them away, while she feeds them, cleans the cages and looks after their two children, all the time working as a cleaner.
When the Civil War erupts, Quimet and his friends Cintet and Mateu go off to fight. The effects of war bring her to the end of her strength; destitute, she considers killing her two children and herself. Rodoreda’s character struggles to come to terms with her love for Quimet, with loss and moving forward into another kind of life. The denouement of the book is subtle and moving. You will have to read it to understand why La Colometa screams in Diamond Square.
The greatest achievement of the book is the vigour and consistency of La Colometa’s narrative voice. She is ignorant, ingenuous, at times downtrodden, but also sensitive and perceptive, as her very detailed descriptions of everyday life and shifting feelings show. Rodoreda has La Colometa dwell on things: domestic utensils, weather, the feel of a wall under her fingers, shapes and lights. At times, the book reaches stream-of-consciousness intensity, though usually in quick sentences that push the narrative forward. Much of the writing has the extreme sensitivity often associated with lyric poets, but it is not precious or abstract. “It is one of the few novels about women in wartime narrated by a working-class woman,” says Peter Bush.
The book is a sustained tour-de-force, taking us through the Republic, Civil War, the victory of fascism and into the dictatorship. It explains 25 years of Catalan history, but without mentioning a single public event. History is seen through the eyes of this working-class woman with her feet on the ground. On the outbreak of the military uprising, in July 1936 (though the book mentions no dates), while Quimet “was running through the streets” with the other young men, and as her friend Julieta joins the militia, too, La Colometa finds the grocer has run out of food, there’s no gas, no milk. Yet she is not the passive housewife. She too is conducting her revolution: getting rid of the pigeons that enslave her.
In her introduction, reprinted in this new translation, Rodoreda rejects firmly a criticism by the Mallorcan novelist, Baltasar Porcel, that La Colometa is “simple-minded”. “She does what she has to do in her situation in life”, Rodoreda rejoins and compares her character with other famous literary heroines. “I think La Colometa is more intelligent than Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina and no-one’s ever thought of saying they were simple-minded. Perhaps because they were rich, dressing in silk.” We could add that Natàlia could hardly have told the story of her life so acutely if she were “simple-minded”.
I asked Peter Bush about the problems of translating such a particular voice as Natàlia’s. “The right voice is key to any successful translation. I prepared myself by reading several novels about the working-class from the Thirties or Alan Sillitoe, whose characters speak non-standard English. I read Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate for the impact war has on ordinary people. And I drew on my own experience; my mother lived six years through the Second World War with my father away and in later years, she never stopped talking about it.” Impressed, I ask him if he always prepares a translation so thoroughly. “With books that are really original, I try to read around them. Translators…are important gatekeepers, especially when ushering the literature of a ‘minority’ culture into the space of world literature.”
After decades of isolation, this year sees several Catalan books in English translation. Three of them are classics, all three translated by Peter Bush: In Diamond Square, Uncertain Glory by Joan Sales (who was also Rodoreda’s publisher), and Josep Pla’s The Grey Notebooks. There are several others, by contemporary writers such as Francesc Serés or Najat El Hachmi. Why this sudden flurry? In part, due to Catalunya being the guest country at the 2007 Frankfurt book fair and also through the translation subsidies offered by the Ramon Llull Institute.
In Diamond Square is highly unromanticised, the non-epic counterpoint to, say, André Malraux’s account in Days of Hope of anarchists racing in their wild heroism across the Plaça de Catalunya up against machine-guns. It articulates the fight to survive war and hunger through the consciousness of a young, working-class mother. No excuse not to read it now! You will be moved by La Colometa’s indomitable spirit. - Michael Eaude
If Mendoza’s An Englishman In Madrid gives us a foreign male’s view of run-up to the Spanish Civil War, Rodorera’s In Diamond Square gives us the female civilian equivalent. Neither protagonist is politically motivated but Anthony Whitelands, in Madrid, becomes involved with the right-wing Falange, while Natalia, In Barcelona, becomes (involved isn’t the right word, so let’s say) affected by the left-wing opposition. Escape is always an option for Whitelands, not so for Natalia. Reading both novels in the past fortnight felt like living in parallel universes.
Rodoreda’s novel is reputably the best Catalan novel ever written. First published in English as The Time of the Doves, in – if the reviews on Amazon are to be believed – an execrable translation, Virago Press have commissioned a new one by renowned translator Peter Bush, which reads beautifully
Natalia is a working-class girl with working class expectations: love, marriage and a family. Engaged to someone who doesn’t excite her, she is swept off her feet during a street party in Diamond Square. I’m not going to judge Joe by modern day standards but this error in judgement causes no amount of grief. Dearie me, the things women used to put up with! Anyway, following her heart rather than her head, Natalie marries him heralding “the time of the doves”, a time when her life and her home are overtaken by the doves that Joe decides to breed.
The political situation is just background noise in this domestic drama until Joe and his friends leave to fight the left-wing cause. Natalia is left to survive with two young children to feed and it is hard – not just for her – but for everyone in Barcelona. And yet, as the doves leave Natalia’s home, she gains a measure of self-esteem and independence previously unknown and once the war is over, she finally finds happiness in an unexpected place.
Politics feature only as they affect Natalia’s life. And she is such a passive character – her voice is matter of fact, non-judgmental. Actually simple and annoying to my way of thinking. But it is not what the author intended. Natalia is depicted as a woman of her time, the salt of the earth, and I should know better than to impose 21st century values on 1930’s Spain. - lizzysiddal
Living in Barcelona in the early 1930s, shop girl Natalia meets a determined young man at a fiesta in Diamond Square and Joe – with ‘little monkey eyes’ and ‘little medal-like ears’ – tells her she will become his wife within a year.
Written in 1960 and translated into more than 20 languages, this compelling tale of life before, during and after the Spanish Civil War, is narrated by a woman as intense as she is passive.
Joe, a carpenter, and Natalia do indeed marry and have a son and daughter. Joe breeds pigeons – ten pairs turn into many more – which live in the loft space and peck away at Natalia, with their appetites, their stench, their comings and goings. When the war erupts, Joe leaves to fight the Fascists and Natalia remains in Barcelona, struggling to feed the children.
In the prologue to the book’s 1962 publication, Rodoreda wrote that In Diamond Square is ‘a novel about love, as someone has said that it isn’t’ noting the central character has only one thing in common with her – ‘ namely the fact she feels at a loss in the midst of the world’.
Like a Jean Rhys character, small woes weigh heavily on Natalia from the off – her fingertips ache from tying gilded raffia around cake boxes at work, and the elastic holding up her petticoat ‘sliced’ into her. ‘My father always said I was a prickly so-and-so…’ she remarks. ‘On the other hand, I really did feel that I didn’t know what I was doing on this planet.’
There is a growing sense of playful menace about motorbike-riding Joe, with his sermons about men and women and their respective rights. He taps his wife sharply on the knee, pinches her under her arm, pours a handful of birdseed down the back of her blouse, and makes her kneel down in the street to beg forgiveness in a row he has manufactured about her going for a walk with her former fiancé, Pete. ‘My mother had never told me about men,’ says Natalia, whose parents’ marriage was summed up by ‘Sunday afternoons sitting in the dining room not saying a word to each other’.
Rodoreda denied feminist intent but it’s easy to interpret the novel – and its symbolism of a set of scales etched onto the stairs to the couple’s flat with ‘one of the scales set slightly below the other’ – as a study of a woman’s lot, as much as a comment on the unequal human existence (not least in a war setting, with the hunger, poverty and shaven heads of children, the city’s lights painted blue, and the death of fighters).
The kaleidoscope of evocative images is constant – Joe’s tricky mother with her house of ribbons and a ‘cream eiderdown patterned with red roses and a frilly red border’ and Father John’s watery black clothes ‘as if he was made from the wings of a fly’. There are smells of grain and potatoes and spirit of salts in the grocer’s, the boom…boom sound from a conch shell, the flutter of white paper roses at a wedding and a guest wearing earrings with lilac-coloured gems.
Wonderfully vivid and intense, In Diamond Square has a pervasive sense of hope and yearning with an emotional jolt around every corner as well as the occasional flash of humour – Natalia and Joe’s marriage party is gate-crashed by half-a-dozen men in their forties celebrating a successful appendicitis operation endured by the fellow dancing with a deaf-aid hanging from his ear.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez has called In Diamond Square ‘the most beautiful novel published in Spain since the Civil War’ and this translation from Catalan by Peter Bush deftly captures the rich intricacy of Rodoreda’s lingering prose, the mix of want and sadness, and the tenacity of the human spirit. -
Catherine Jones
It’s a gripping story, with some brilliant images, but the thing that struck me most strongly was the language. Natalia is the narrator, and her voice is what makes the novel what it is. She begins:
Julie came to the cake-shop just to tell me they would be raffling coffee pots before they got to the lucky posy; she’d seen them and they were lovely, an orange split in two, showing its pips, painted on a white background. I didn’t feel like going to the dance or even going out, after I’d spent the whole day selling cakes and my fingertips ached from tying all those gilded raffia knots and handles. And because I knew Julie could manage on as little as three hours’ sleep and didn’t mind whether she slept or not.
She begins as she plans to go on, with leaps in logic (from the coffee-pot design to the question of whether she will go out or not, omitting to mention that Julie had come to take her there), syntax that doesn’t quite cohere (‘And because’ – huh?), attention to details that lead nowhere (‘an orange split in two’ etc), lack of orientation (who is Julie?), unexplained cultural references (are we supposed to know what ‘the posy’ is?), and so on. Then it took me a moment to figure out that the third they was a different they from the first two, that Julie is talking about the coffee pots, not the people who were raffling them, and because that tiny awkwardness feels like the kind of thing that happens in translation, I lost confidence as a reader , and as I read on I couldn’t tell how much of the narrative voice was Natalia’s and how much was the sound of Peter Bush wrangling the transition from Catalan into English. I wasn’t necessarily critical of the translation: perhaps this is one of those books that defies translation – as I imagine Malcolm Knox’s The Life to be. (A literal translation of DK’s ‘Well yeah … but no’ would probably leave Catalan readers floundering, but how else do you translate it?)
I read on, enjoying the book, but my unease about the translation persisted, and about a hundred pages from the end I turned to the Internet for help. I don’t know what I expected, but I found an excellent article from the British journal The Translator, ‘Language and Characterization in Mercè Rodoreda’s La Plaça del Diamant‘ by Helena Miguélez Carballeira, which discusses the language of the book in the context of two previous translations. According to Ms Carballeira, Natalia’s discourse is what the boffins call escriptura parlada – spoken writing. Mercè Rodoreda sets out to ‘trace the discursive peculiarities’ of the uneducated Catalan working-class. Her speech is also full of features that mark it as peculiar to Barcelona, and is full of the euphemism, attention to detail and diminutives that mark stereotypically feminine speech. More than that, Carballeira argues (and I’m persuaded) that
Natàlia is a woman who feels uneasy with the very act of speaking. … The characteristics of [her] conversational, unmediated speech as a discursive device in the novel are rather predictable: there is an extensive use of idioms and colloquialisms, interjections and onomatopoeias. This yields a constant, highly idiomatic, non-straightforward use of language.
That is to say, Natalia is at least as big a headache for a translator as Knox’s DK.
A gauge of the difficulty of the task is the differences between translations. Carballeira discusses a number of fascinating examples. Here’s just one, quoted in a discussion of Natalia’s use of euphemism:
The original Catalan (1962):
I mentre em dedicava a la gran revolució amb els coloms va venir el que va venir, com una cosa que havia de ser molt curta.
From Eda O’Shiel’s The Pigeon Girl (1967):
And while I devoted my energies to the grand revolt against the pigeons, there took place what had to take place, and it seemed as if it would be over quickly.
From David H Rosenthal’s The Time of the Doves (1986):
And while I was working on the great revolution with the doves the war started and everyone thought it was going to be over quickly.
From Peter Bush’s In Diamond Square (2013):
And while I was waging my big revolution against the pigeons, what was brewing came, that they said would be a two-day wonder.
Having read this article when I was struggling, part way through the book, I had a much better time with the rest. Some of Peter Bush’s decisions had confused me. For example, he names Natalia’s husband Joe, possibly as what Carballeira calls a domesticating strategy, but when I read that his name is Quimet in the original I realised that the discord between his English name and his Catalan context had niggled away at the edge of my mind, creating a sense of unreality like the one in some CGI movies, where figures don’t quite seem to touch the ground. And another example: Joe/Quimet refuses to call Natalia by her name but calls her Pidgie, without explanation of where the name comes from – to my ear that sounded a bit like Piggsy, and so vaguely insulting, and it was a long way into the story that I realised it was short for Pigeon, and that Joe/Quimet was obsessed with those birds; in the original he calls her Columeta, which my computer translates from the Catalan as, you guessed it, Pigeon. Maybe to a British ear ‘Pidgie’ sounds more affectionate than ‘Pigeon’, but ‘Pigeon’ would have worked fine for me.
This experience makes me suspect that if I’m going to read books in translation a little bit of research will make the whole experience go better. As it happens I’ve been to Barcelona, so quite a few of the local references – Tibidabo, Parc Güell, etc – made immediate sense to me. If I hadn’t been there, I doubt if I would have bothered to get out a map, but it wouldn’t have been a bad idea. (I do think I was right, though, not to read the author’s spoilerish 1982 ‘Prologue’ until after I’d read the book.)
- shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2013/05/02/merce-rodoredas-in-diamond-square-with-the-book-group/DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY:
A Broken Mirror by Mercè Rodoreda (trans. Josep Miquel Sobrer). Bison Books,
Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda (trans. Martha Tennent ). Open Letter,
The Selected Stories of Mercè Rodoreda (trans. Martha Tennent ). Open Letter, .
The Time of the Doves by Mercè Rodoreda (trans. David H. Rosenthal). Graywolf,
The lodestar of modern Catalan letters died in 1983, with little recognition outside her homeland. In part it was the twentieth century that had occluded her. She spent her most productive years exiled by choice from Franco’s Spain, every few years sending home another manuscript to a country that at best discouraged her language, at worst outlawed it in the street. (DON’T BARK, read the signs in Barcelona government offices; SPEAK THE LANGUAGE OF THE SPANISH EMPIRE.) Her later years saw the return of Catalan prizes and Catalan bestsellers, and she regularly claimed both distinctions. But she continued to write at a double remove—from an anonymous existence in Geneva, for a half-clandestine reading community—and this, as much as her uncompromising style or subject, committed her in life to a reception in the minor mode.
Today, of course, Spain is a country whose constitution enshrines minority languages as “objects of especial respect and protection,” and the Autonomous Republic of Catalonia now holds up Mercè Rodoreda as a national treasure. Barcelona offers commemorative sculptures, libraries, gardens in her name; government-supported institutes sponsor conferences and translations; a yearlong festival marked her 2008 centennial. Her international champions include Gabriel García Márquez, who has set the deslumbramiento—blinding brilliance—of her prose beside that of Juan Rulfo. Yet she has not, somehow, found the same readership in English as the younger cadre of male Iberians—Goytisolo, Marías, Lobo Antunes—to say nothing of her closer contemporaries, Saramago and Cela. Apart from two recent, welcome titles from Open Letter, her English catalog has drifted in and out of print. To be sure, fame is a black box. But there is no question that Rodoreda is a uniquely difficult writer—not in her sentences, which are as clean as any in the century, but in the starkness of her emotional climate. Her subject, both in the earlier domestic books and the later irrealist ones, is the destructiveness of desire, the brutishness of power, the primacy of hunger and death. She was not alone, in or out of Spain, in choosing these topics. Her particular power and challenge lies in the style that she created to address them: a fearsomely pure deployment of words, empty of rhetoric, in which the beauty of the world shines so clearly as to seem a kind of cruelty.
She is a hard author to pin down. It is impossible, for instance, not to think of her as a feminist when the suffering of the powerless, and of women in particular, commands so much of her attention. Yet in a late interview she declined the label. In her opinion, she said, feminism was “a little bit literatura.” To distance herself from literature is of course to take a literary position; here it is the modernist project, rejecting the literary structures of an earlier age. There are books whose events are not plotted, but simply drift through the everyday, or are knocked off course by incomprehensible blows from without; whose objects carry no meaning but their own inscrutable existences; whose characters include no heroes or villains, since every possible action hangs suspended in a neutral moral field. This is the mode of Flaubert, in most ways the mode of Proust and Joyce, and Rodoreda too makes it her own.
“I would like to say something about the innocence of my characters,” she writes in a late prologue.
Had I to appear as the coryphaeus in an imaginary ancient tragedy, I would approach the public and begin my recitation this way: ‘Before the sun, the clouds and les esteles—as Bernat Metge calls the stars (quantes esteles ha en lo cel)—I can swear that my parents made me innocent.’ But I am a person like others, laden with personalities, and perhaps the most marked of my multiple personalities is a certain kind of innocence that has consoled me in the world where I have been given to live. Wishing to write with a certain idiosyncrasy, I have cultivated over the years—and this is innocence—a kind of purity—which must mean, at heart, being oneself—with the fewest adulterations possible. I have cultivated a forgetting of everything that seemed harmful to my soul, and an admiration for those things that do me good: the ineffable moments given me by the quiet force of flowers, the slow patience of precious stones, the purity of earth and the great abysses of the sky, at once so near and so far, where all the constellations shine and tremble.”
She has slipped from talking about her characters to talking about style, and her chosen images are both beautiful and inhuman. In particular the flowers, a favorite theme, are well glossed by Beckett’s insight into Proust: that his people are flora rather than fauna, and follow their desires with as little moral sense as budding plants. Innocence is blind, and need not exclude even murder, as Rodoreda’s fiction discovers more than once. A lifelong gardener, she had no illusions about botanical struggles for water and light. In one of her novels a girl dies impaled on a laurel branch; elsewhere a boy responds to his mother’s beating by planting himself up to the knees, hoping to sprout roots and leaves; her last book is about a village where men are ritually murdered and stuffed into trees. The laurel, certainly, points to Apollo and Daphne. But where Ovid uses metamorphosis as an escape hatch, to be invoked when divine lust or wrath have carried matters past any possible moral balance, Rodoreda does not see nature as a state of repose. Still her love of a beautiful flower is real. And since the distinction between nature and culture is unimportant to her, she also lavishes description on jewels and clothes, furniture, dishes, household linens—in short, all of the domestic articles that a feminist of her generation might have rejected as shackles or mystifications. She is a very hard author to pin down.
There was an early Rodoreda, separated by twenty years and two wars from the author whose books are read today. Mercè Rodoreda i Gurguí was born in 1908 to a bookish, lower-middle-class family in the Barcelona suburb of Sant Gervasi. An only child, she quit school at age ten and finished her education in the family library. Her grandfather died when she was thirteen, and her uncle Joan, fourteen years her senior, returned from Argentina with a small fortune. They fell in love, received a papal dispensation, and married on her twentieth birthday. The following year a son was born.
The teenage Rodoreda had expected marriage and motherhood alone to satisfy her, the Barcelona of the thirties held other doors open to women. Her literary career began in 1932, a year after the Spanish republic, with a novel titled Sóc una dona honrada? (“Am I an Honorable Woman?”, untranslated). She paid to have it published—which is to say, property laws being what they were, her husband paid. More remunerative work followed, largely through magazines; by the time the war started, she was hosting conferences on “Woman and Revolution” and writing propaganda articles for the Republic. Her novels of this decade—there were five in all—have been called “psychological” in style, which is one way of saying that they don’t yet read like Mercè Rodoreda. In later life she refused to have any republished except Aloma (1938, untranslated), the last and most successful, and this only after she had reworked the prose from beginning to end.
Aloma is both autobiographical—the story of a lower-middle-class girl of twenty-three, something like her creator, who falls into an ill-advised love affair with her brother-in-law—and deeply bookish. Each of the twenty short chapters takes an epigraph which might come from Boccaccio or Proust, Elective Affinities or The Sexual Tragedy of Leo Tolstoy. Aloma’s own name is taken from Ramón Llull, the medieval originator of Catalan literature. Amid these precocious touches from a writer still in her twenties, a violent imagination occasionally comes alive to sound the themes of entrapment and victimhood. Aloma’s opening challenge, “Love makes me sick!”, is made literal in the story of a stray cat who is assaulted by the neighborhood tom and repeatedly births her litters in the backyard, making so much noise that a neighbor finally clubs her to death. The cat returns to Aloma in a dream, now wearing shoes and glasses, and implores her, “Don’t let them trick you, don’t get married, read, read….”
There is nothing subtle in this sequence, but its placement at the start of a coming-of-age story is striking, to say the least. Rodoreda is already suspicious of literatura as a maker of ideologies, and she has Aloma take the cat’s advice but take it badly. The book she chooses is a serial romance; as in other corrective fictions, it leads to a disenchanting real-life affair. By the time that Aloma escapes, pregnant, into the city’s underworld, she has resolved to join those “girls who face life without illusions.” Something like that is the young Rodoreda’s sense of authorial vocation—though Aloma herself, it is implied, will turn to a grimmer career.
There is, unfortunately, no barrier to reading Aloma as the author’s reflection on her own decade of marriage. Her literary activities had brought her into connection with Andreu Nin, an anarcho-syndicalist and man of letters whose Catalan translation of Anna Karenina ended up giving Aloma its first epigraph. Between the writers there was mutual esteem and friendship, perhaps more. A letter from Nin, contents unknown, appeared in Rodoreda’s household and prompted a terrible scene that concluded with her husband throwing himself at her feet and kissing them—a gesture that finds queasy echoes in her later stories of unhappy marriage. In 1937 she separated from her family. The war had flared; Nin was detained on the Ramblas, probably by NKVD agents, and was never seen again. In 1939, a few months before the defeat of the Republic, Rodoreda boarded a government bibliobús and fled with ten other writers to France, where a kind of exiled artist’s colony had been set up at a chateau in Roissy-en-Brie. Aloma had just been awarded the Premi Crexell, and she found herself a celebrity. She seems to have made a scandalous impression at the chateau: she laughed loudly, she wore pants, she caught flies in the communal dining hall and drank them down with her wine. She started an affair with the writer Joan Prat, whose marriage was likewise in a state of separation. The writers’ colony soon broke up, in part because of the amorous disturbance, but Rodoreda and Prat would remain together throughout the war and for two decades afterward.
She left little account of the war years in France, other than what appears in her fiction. There is the story “Orléans, 3 Kilometers,” with its mesmerizing scene of the city in conflagration, and the descriptions in her novels of hunger: “what’s a crust of bread when you’re starving? Even to eat grass you’ve got to have the strength to go out searching for it.” They found themselves in Paris, Limoges, Bordeaux; they subsisted on her work as a seamstress. In a letter written at the war’s end she summed up, “I have met very interesting people and the sweater I am wearing is inherited from a Russian Jewess who killed herself with Veronal.” Soon after the peace, a mysterious paralysis took hold of her right arm and left her unable to write. She spent hours in the Louvre. She saw exhibitions by Klee and Mirò. A screening of Méliès’s Trip to the Moon affected her deeply. Later she would say that she gave up writing for twenty years because it seemed there were more important things to do, but this may be a selective memory. Displaced from fiction, her creative drive found outlet in painting watercolors and making collages. She also produced a small body of poetry; like other exiles, she took Ulysses as her theme.
Prat found a position as a translator with UNESCO, and he and Rodoreda relocated to Geneva. They had some contact with the young Julio Cortázar, not yet the author of Rayuela, who impressed her with his sense of vocation: he had determined, he said, to spend as little of each year as possible earning money for subsistence, and to keep the rest for writing, music and travel. After four years of paralysis, she regained the use of her arm as inexplicably as she had lost it, and she and Prat came to an arrangement. They would live together, at a certain remove, since his work often took him to Vienna; her name would be Madame Prat as far as the neighbors were concerned; and he would see indefinitely to her financial needs so that she could take up writing again.
As Rodoreda’s fiftieth year approached, she began to publish stories with an exiles’ press in Mexico. In 1957 Spain lifted its ban on the Catalan printed word, and the following year she broke her long silence with the collection Vint-i-dos contes (“Twenty-Two Stories,” well represented in Martha Tennent’s Selected Stories of Mercè Rodoreda). These stories document a second apprenticeship, consciously undertaken by a writer not yet satisfied with her achievement. They vary widely in style and subject; what links them is their tone of disillusion. (Il·lusió: their favored word for happiness and pleasure, aspirations and dreams.) Many are quiet vignettes of lower-class Barcelona, with no plot other than the marking out of limits. At their strongest they are reminiscent of Dubliners, and conclude with the same gesture that, in Joyce, is doubtfully called “epiphany”: an apparition of cosmic sadness that exceeds the sufferer’s understanding and may frustrate representation entirely.
Not all narrators here are women, but where they are, they tend to follow Rodoreda’s basic story from Aloma forward: a woman meets a man, and unhappiness follows. The story of seduction, with its infinite possible variations, is played out deftly. The narrator of “Before I Die,” a free-spirited art student, is accosted by a man who claims that she has taken his café table. She throws her drink at him. He wipes his trousers. He makes her a gift of two doves, which she roasts and serves to him. The subsequent story of marriage, and the slow suffocation of becoming the lady of a house, is equally well drawn. After being bluntly told by a serving woman, “It’s not good to be sad,” the narrator concludes, “That was how I learned what they call seny,” invoking the word that Catalans have used for centuries to describe their own national character. Its connotations are of practicality, compromise, common sense: a slightly more worldly version of the innocence whose cultivation allows Rodoreda to get by in the world. Yet “Before I Die” turns out to be a story where seny is not enough, and finishes with an uncharacteristic turn to the melodramatic. The husband turns out to have a secret, becoming a villain, and the narrator’s heroism consists in rejecting him and life together. One feels that this is the kind of thing Rodoreda would later dismiss as literatura, and she will not indulge the mode again.
While writing these stories she was also conceiving four or five different novels: most of her remaining life’s work, in fact, which would take twenty-five years to write. The first to be completed, though late in publishing, was Jardí vora el mar (1967, “Garden by the Sea,” untranslated), a diffuse work in which an estate gardener stoically recounts the romantic intrigues of his masters and his daily work with the plants. The next was La plaça del Diamant (1962, “Diamond Square”), her first full-length masterpiece and still the most generally loved of her works. It was rendered into English by David H. Rosenthal, the best of her translators, as The Time of the Doves.
The breakthrough of this novel is the appearance of Rodoreda’s mature style. Though many earlier stories approach it, only here does her hard transparency find its full range. The narrator Natalia, another working woman, relates her experience simply but with fine modulations:
It was a calm, cloudy day. Whenever a ray of sunshine got through, the lady’s shawl would sparkle and so would her coat, which was fly-colored like Father Joan’s cassock. A gentleman coming the other way said hello to her and they stopped for a moment and I pretended to look in a shop window and I saw the lady’s face in the glass and she had big jowls like a dog and the lady started crying and suddenly she raised her arm a little and showed the gentleman the candles and they shook hands and both went on their way and I started following the lady again because it kept me company to watch her and to watch her shawl fluttering a little on each side in the breeze she made walking.
It reads like an anecdote being spoken aloud, but unobtrusively, without conversational markers. Whether the phrasal units are split into sentences or concatenated with “and” (the lightweight Catalan i), they are uniformly short, concrete, heavily weighted toward the physical and domestic, though they can extend to cover outbursts of emotion as well. Sentence by sentence, they work out the quality of innocence. To maintain that quality over the length of a novel shows magisterial restraint on the author’s part.
Natalia’s walk takes place at the book’s deepest trough, in a Barcelona flattened by war. She is gathering courage to buy a bottle of hydrochloric acid, which she plans to pour into her children’s mouths in order to save them from death by starvation. “I went down the stairs,” she says, “feeling like they were very long and ended in hell”; and then describes the tiles and the railing. Her innocence, if innocence is the word, is the solvent that allows heaven and hell to hang in suspension beside the mundane. Every twenty or thirty pages the narrative lifts its austerity long enough for a metaphor, and they are without exception stunners. “The main altar, all covered in golden lilies with gold-leaf stems and leaves, was a scream of gold pushed farther and farther up by the pillars until it reached the spires on the roof, which gathered up the scream and sent it on to heaven.” The same is true of the occasional surreal outbursts, not all of which can be attributed to Natalia’s hunger-addled imagination. When she first kisses her fiancé, the Lord appears in a cloud and, reaching out with long arms, shuts himself inside, as if closing a cupboard. Much later she will meet a flood of tiny red bubbles, like fish roe, containing the souls of the war dead.
The seduction plot is brutally brief in this instance. Natalia is accosted at a street festival by a young man, Quimet, who insists that she dance with him and says that she will be his wife by Christmas. With his monkey’s eyes, jealous caprices, suspicions of the devil and bouts of rage, Quimet is one of Rodoreda’s most unsettling creations, all the more so because of his wholly plausible fits of adolescent enthusiasm. One enthusiasm is for the Republic; another is for filling the house with birds that he plans to sell. These creatures, coloms in Catalan, are rendered differently in the two English translations: either it is The Time of the Doves, or else The Pigeon Girl. Joseph Conrad once complained that no English word is a word, that each has moral connotations blurring its edges. A dove is peace, fidelity in marriage, the carrier of the olive branch, the third person of the Trinity. A pigeon spreads disease and shits on statues. It is conscripted as a messenger or bred into grotesque shapes; it is inexterminable as the rat. A colom is all of the above. The ambivalence that these animals can carry in Catalan is what makes them the emblems of the book. They give Natalia her adopted name—Quimet dubs her Colometa—and they give her domestic plight its sensory correlative. It is obvious that they will never make money; Quimet gives away two of every three pairs; the house is full of their stink; they take over the rooftops, the children’s room; they scratch, they peck; strangest of all, they are also winged creatures and beautiful.
The doubleness of the coloms is of a piece with the novel’s general moral suspension, in which Natalia—incredibly—never condemns her appalling husband outright. It is not the case that, as Natasha Wimmer has written, Rodoreda’s women exhibit an “almost pathological lack of volition.” We see Natalia deliberate over two marriage proposals, and her choices, though questionable, are made at liberty; she must find work on her own; when she decides that life inside a dovecote is unbearable, she personally destroys the enterprise by shaking the eggs lifeless—a campaign she refers to, without irony, as “the great revolution.” That is at least as much volition as one expects in, say, an Edith Wharton heroine. What Natalia almost never does is express judgment. Her two marriages are both made with misgivings; as we read, we feel that one turns out far better than the other. But Rodoreda understands that every home is both a shelter and a trap, and her business is not to resolve that doubleness. She never ceases to turn things about, showing the shelter in the trap, and the trap in the shelter, until a final account becomes impossible to conceive.
The events of revolution and war are likewise shown entirely from below. The phrase that Rosenthal translates as “the war started” reads in the original: va venir el que va venir. What came, came. By Natalia’s account, one might at first assume that nothing came but a gas outage. War is a disruption of the minutiae of life that it is her business to record; it is hunger and shortage of work. Though she suffers for having a husband who supports the Republic, to have her express support for the cause, which had meant so much to Rodoreda, would violate the book’s logic. Rodoreda’s people face the impersonal world not in the way of the bildungsroman, which integrates the self into that world, nor in the way of naturalism, which has the world destroy the self, but through a simple juxtaposition, always tentatively posed. La plaça del Diamant ends as if it were a comedy, with a wedding that ought to be a conciliatory ritual. But Natalia’s son has started his military service and is dancing with the fascist uniform on, and her daughter has inherited Quimet’s monkey eyes and demonic aspect: “that thing that’s so hard to describe but it’s all to make you suffer.” The sense of wonder that marks the great writers comes, in this book, by way of an extraordinary fictional effect: the sense that no piece of it could stand for anything other than itself.
Two more novels followed in the next decade, both more or less realist. El carrer de les Camèlies (1966, translated by Rosenthal as Camellia Street, out of print) teases out the hint of picaresque in La plaça del Diamant—the unpredictable events, the alliances suddenly formed and broken—and makes it into a fully realized structural principle. Cecilia C., another narrating innocent, is made to repeat the seduction plot again and again, in variously extreme modes; among other things the book is a study in male jealousy. We often see Cecilia kept under lock and key—in one harrowing sequence she is continually drugged—and it says much for Rodoreda’s stylistic integrity that of all the beings in Cecilia’s world, only the author seems never to exploit her. The book’s turning point comes when Cecilia decides to make her pattern of liaisons into an explicit business. In other hands this might read cynically, as a harlot’s progress. Rodoreda treats it with the same ambivalence as her earlier subjects, and once again what should structurally be a happy ending turns strange and sad.
Mirall trencat (1974, translated by Josep Miquel Sobrer as A Broken Mirror) is a quite different major work, constructed to look, at least in its beginning, like a nineteenth-century family chronicle. A marriage is made, an inheritance is secured, a house is founded, and then—the novel’s great surprise—nothing happens but life, and the slow transition into death. Along the way we pass all the components of melodrama: theft, adultery, concealed parentage, murder, the possibility of incest. The war too makes a background appearance. But the book is so determined not to assemble these elements into a consecutive plot that its effect is of a series of set pieces: serving girls bathing outdoors, the aged master straightening the spines in his library, and again and again the moment of death, since we do see most of the characters arrive at their ends. The reader expecting a genuine nineteenth-century novel may find this a tedious business. But Rodoreda has been master of her form for some time now, and the project of Mirall trencat, like that of Lampedusa’s The Leopard, is the slow disassembly of the nineteenth century. She refuses to mete out rewards or punishments; she will mark no act as an absolute transgression. In the last chapters the human world fades entirely away, ceding place to the animal and vegetable kingdoms, and to an ever-growing population of ghosts.
Written along the way was La meva Cristina i altres contes (1967, translated by Rosenthal as My Christina and Other Stories), a collection of unpredictable short works, most of them masterpieces. Many take place in a rural, vaguely premodern setting, where the fear of witchcraft stands in for the constraints of small-town life. People turn into animals, sometimes explicitly, sometimes obscurely. “A White Geranium Petal” is a tale of marital sadism made bearable, and even beautiful, by the intercession of a cat figure that wanders between life and death. The Cristina of the title story turns out to denote a whale that swallows the narrator and becomes his home for a number of years. In these stories, and in the concluding colloquies of Mirall trencat between the living and dead, the realist Rodoreda disappears for good.
Even Rodoreda’s champions sometimes shy away from the very late work. She has become a fabulist, which is new, and her bleakness is less mitigated than ever. Still it should be understood that her aims have not changed. It has been said that late Rodoreda is atypical in using male narrators—though of all her novels, only La plaça del Diamant and El carrer de les Camèlies are actually narrated by women. Again, it is said that the late works abandon her domestic focus, though all the elements of domestic according to Rodoreda—physical detail, physical labor, exhaustion and hunger, the doubleness of security and imprisonment—are still in place. If these elements project more starkly than before, they do so through the loosening of late style. As the artist’s vision turns hermetic, the hand lets drop certain canons of realism; as when the late Titian or Rembrandt blur darkness into their forms, or in the black paintings that were Goya’s endgame. Literature may have no better answer to the grotesques and devouring gods of the Quinta del Sordo than Rodoreda’s last two novels of metamorphosis and ritual sacrifice, wandering and war.
Quanta, quanta guerra… (1980, “So much war, so much…,” untranslated) is the story of Adrià Guinart, an adolescent who runs away from home to fight in the Civil War. The book is only obliquely a war novel. Fear and chance soon separate Adrià from his detachment, and he spends the rest of the book drifting through the ravaged country, begging or stealing his food, working odd jobs, receiving unprovoked beatings and listening to stories. Though his situation recalls the original Spanish pícaro, Lazarillo de Tormes, he is far less worldly. By the middle of the book he has chanced to inherit a property, and does what Lazarillo would never do, giving it away. His wandering innocence might better suggest Don Quijote, but again, Rodoreda’s grimness is not Cervantes’s cynicism. In many ways the book is closer to the chivalric romances that Lazarillo de Tormes and Don Quijote are supposed to have displaced. Adrià is a knight errant of the lowest social order, with no definite quest, wandering only because, as he puts it, “I liked to go my way alone so that I could look at things nice and slow.”
Early on Adrià is given a lady to champion: the girl Eva, whom he meets bathing in a river and thereafter in a handful of dreamlike scenes, some of which really are dreams. Their relations, though chaste, provide Adrià a catechism in love: “She didn’t like people who loved her. Loving her was like tying her up, like not letting her move. She needed to feel free to go where she wanted, and to help whoever she wanted, without the help turning into an obligation. I like you… because you don’t tie me up, and because you have that face.” One of Rodoreda’s innocents has finally met another. We are granted a glimpse, very rare in her work, of a relation between men and women that could end in something other than subjection; but first the war must be got through.
Many of Adrià’s encounters are historically situated: we see trucks and planes, soldiers and corpses. Others suggest folklore or myth. The influence of surrealism has grown so strong that at times—when Adrià, leaving home, sees his dead father holding his infant self in his arms, or when Eva’s eyes are described as violet spangled with gold—the novel seems to continue the vein of Spanish poetry that was cut short with García Lorca’s death. Adrià’s search for food and shelter is glossed by myths of wartime, one of which is worth quoting at length, if only because an English version is still lacking:
And then a rain of stars began to fall. I had never seen such a thing. They’re weeping because it’s war, said the old man, who had sat up and seemed to have always known me. The stars all fell to one side; the wind from the heights must have kept them from falling in a straight line. Many burned up in the air, others made it to the ground. There were pink ones and blue ones. They’re tired of seeing so much death. I’d always heard, I said, that a rain of stars announced a war; I never thought they could keep falling when the war had gone on so long. They come in different kinds: there are those that announce a war, and then these, that maybe are trying to say we’ve had enough and who knows when it will stop… wars, my boy, everyone knows when they start and no one knows when they finish. That’s something even children know, I said. What do you mean? That if everyone knows something, it’s not worth repeating. I’ve noticed how people talk just to talk, and always say the same things. What should they do instead? They should just say what’s worth saying, and that’s it. Life, if you don’t know how to remember it, is a repetition. Why don’t you want men to repeat themselves when they talk? Because I’m sick of it. Well, you mustn’t like it any better that you too are only a repetition.
Too much of this would ruin the book, and Rodoreda is careful to alternate these dialogues with concrete, fairy-tale encounters. We meet a man who carries an embalmed cat as his totem, a man who eats honey until he becomes round as a ball, a man who walks with his back to the sun and moon so as always to adore his shadow. Their life stories are given to Adrià as naturalist tales of unhappiness, each punctuated by a moment—“then the war came”—that wrenches life from its context. Each new episode is disconnected from that before.
The technique is new, but the intent of the earlier books remains: to write war from the bottom up, as a series of interruptions that can’t be forced into a story. Of course only a certain type of war novel is possible from these premises. The Tolstoyan survey of troop movements and council rooms is foreclosed. War, under this view, is a state too disruptive to fit inside history; it asserts itself as the cosmic force of Heraclitus, father and king of all, and breaks history apart. Juan Benet, whose novels portrayed the Civil War as a freezing of time, embodied this force in his mythical Numa, a guardian of the wilderness who annihilates all intruders with a shotgun. The end of Quanta, quanta guerra… confronts Adrià with a similar figure out of time, who is revealed—uniquely in Rodoreda’s work—as an instance of absolute evil. Here Eva’s lesson of freedom in love finds its letter-perfect reversal, and a few pages condense the old themes of domination and domestic entrapment into one of the blackest nightmares in European literature. To confront it, either in opposition or in redemption, is as senseless as confronting the war itself. Adrià responds in the only way he can. No further task is left him but to bury the dead, and to return to a home that may not remain.
Rodoreda’s last novel was an intermittent labor of more than twenty years, and remained unfinished on her death. Though her editors have assembled a compact reading text of La mort i la primavera (1986, “Death and Spring,” translated as Death in Spring by Martha Tennent), it may well be that the book is necessarily partial, unfinishable in the manner of Kafka’s longer narratives. The setting is another ahistorical village; the form this time is a mad ethnography of its social practices. Pregnant women are made to wear blindfolds so that they will not fall in love with other men. A single prisoner is punished for theft by being kept in a cage until he begins to neigh, at which point he is said to have lost his humanity. The village is placed above a subterranean river, and every year a man must swim the underground passage, suffering mutilation of his face, to ensure that the supporting rocks are not being washed away. When the villagers approach their deaths they are taken to a forest, where pink cement is poured into their mouths to prevent the soul from escaping with the last breath. Once they are choked lifeless they are entombed upright in trees, which gradually digest them.
Of all Rodoreda’s books this is the most static. The published version arranges the village descriptions around a skeletal plot in which the narrator, a boy of fourteen, sees his father die and marries his sixteen-year-old stepmother, a naif with a withered arm. They make inconclusive gestures at upending the social order, throwing away the coloring for the cement and rearranging the markers in the forest cemetery; later the narrator suffers a more concerted ostracism, and is finally made to swim the underground river. Still these have the feeling of temporary deviations, and do nothing to diminish the sense of the village itself as timeless protagonist. “I can begin the story of my life wherever I wish,” says the boy; “I can tell it differently… I cannot remove anything or add anything.” In an alternate arrangement of Rodoreda’s fragments, he would have lost his status as sole narrator.
When the English Death in Spring was published, some American reviews, seeking a context for its extremity, compared it to Blood Meridian. The comparison does not go deep. McCarthy’s is a frontier story, which is to say that it is about the edges of empire, and its version of Mister Kurtz, like the original, plays out the fantasy of a civilized intellect dropped into a wasteland and made a god. Rodoreda’s violence, by contrast, is institutional. She makes no claims about the human state beneath its social veneer, since her society is not a veneer but a structure of force legitimized by myth. This is not to say that her people are automata; many of the villagers, for instance, question the practice of murder by cement. But there is no outside to the law of violence. The distinction between nature and culture has been obliterated. Not only do humans engage in animalistic struggle; nature itself has taken on the human qualities of ritual and malice. The local bees are said to possess the use of reason, deliberately pursuing people and carrying pieces of gravel to steady themselves in the wind. A local black bird, the “mourner,” lays an annual clutch of three eggs, which it then yields to an invading white bird—though if the white bird is slow to take over, the black bird will crush its own eggs or peck the hatchlings to death. Once the eggs have hatched, the black bird kills the white bird and recovers its brood: two black fledglings, one white. This is natural science out of Herodotus, and its inversion of modern nature writing is one of the most uncanny and frightening things in the novel.
La mort i la primavera is a hard book to read. Its moral appeal, however, is no different from that made by the writer in her twenties who began her a novel about a young woman with the death of a cat. What Rodoreda asks of her readers is a minute attention to suffering; what she offers in exchange is a minutely worked beauty. Not every reader will want to make the bargain, and it may always set limits on her popularity. She enlists in no cause, and offers no remedy for pain but that which comes in the bare act of attention. Nonetheless she is a great modernist author, precisely in the tradition of Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett. Like them she offers a vision of life that might be characterized as nihilistic, and like them, she threads that vision together with an idiosyncratic formal beauty and the moral force of refusing all false consolation. I will show you life, is the message of books such as these. Here are its conditions. You may have it under no others. Do not look away. -
Mercè Rodoreda (1908 — 1983) was an important postwar Catalan writer whose novel La plaça del diamant (translated as The Time of the Doves, 1962) has been translated into over twenty languages. Rodoreda fled to France during the Spanish Civil War and, robbed of her home and language, wrote almost nothing for nearly two decades. She began to write short stories as a way of reclaiming her voice, and many of these tales contain more than a touch of the surreal or fantastical. Rodoreda often used the weird in the service of transformation and commentary on repression, ignorance, and other unfortunate human behaviors. As argued by regular contributor Larry Nolen, Rodoreda’s short story “The Salamander” (1967), found in The Weird via Martha Tennant’s exquisite translation, fits comfortably within that artistic mission. - Adam Mills, editor of “101 Weird Writers”
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The word “weird” does not have an exact cognate in the Romance languages. Whereas synonyms for “weird” include “bizarre, odd, or strange,” in Spanish extraño - or in Catalan, estrany — can also denote foreignness or that quality of estrangement in people where one is separated by chance or will from the rest of humanity. It is very difficult to sum up this emotional state in a single pithy English expression, as the closest equivalent is the borrowed French estrangement, which carries a more pejorative connotation than it does in English.
Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda’s fictions are imbued with estrany. In her 1967 short story, “The Salamander,” we see a nameless village girl who is hounded by her fellow villagers after being seduced by a married man:
But ever since the day his wife took him away, people in the village have looked at me as if they weren’t looking at me, some furtively making the sign of the cross when I walked by. After a while, when they saw me coming they would rush inside their houses and lock the doors. Everywhere I heard a word that began to haunt me, as if it were born from light and darkness or the wind were whistling it. Witch, witch, witch. The doors would close and I walked through the streets of a dead village. When I glimpsed eyes through parted curtains, they were always icy. One morning I found it difficult to open the front door, a door of old wood split by the sun. In the center of it, they had hung an ox head with two tender branches wedged in the eyes. I took it down – it was heavy – and, not knowing what to do with it, left it on the ground. The twigs began to dry, and as they dried, the head rotted; and where the neck had been severed, it swarmed with milk-colored maggots.
Here the multiple senses of extraño/estrany can be seen. Not only do we see the bizarre detail of a quickly-rotting ox head with rapidly drying twigs in its eye sockets, now flush with teeming swarms of maggots, but we experience the distance forced between the narrator and the villagers because of her seduction. “Witch, witch, witch”: such damning words only a few centuries ago, and yet they still have a faint echo of nefarious power to them even today.
Rodoreda has set up in this single paragraph two complementary yet different events: the weirdness of the head and the estrangement of the narrator. Each ties into the other. As she is persecuted and eventually dragged to a stake to be burned alive, the strangeness about and around her becomes ever more pronounced. A headless pigeon. A premature, stillborn sheep. The difficulty in starting the fire and after that, the transformative effects of the fire. These scenes and details are then filtered through the intimate third-person point of view of a bewildered, yet ultimately curious young woman fascinated by the changes in her condition, both physical and metaphorical. All of these elements coalesce to create a weird tale of transformation.
This combination of strange-as-setting and strange-as-emotional-condition makes several other of Rodoreda’s fictions undeniably compelling. Much of this is probably due to Rodoreda’s own personal experiences. A rising Catalan writer during the turbulent 1930s, she was forced to flee into exile, first to France and then Switzerland after the outbreak of World War II. This exile affected her output, as she wrote virtually nothing from the 1938 publication of Aloma until the 1958 publication of the collection Twenty-Two Stories. Several of these stories later appeared in Martha Tennant’s translation in the 2011 collection Selected Stories of Mercè Rodoreda, which also included later stories such as “The Salamander”.
Unlike her pre-war writings, which were more psychological in nature, Rodoreda’s post-war short fictions utilize vivid, strange imagery to convey a sense of loss and separation. Take for instance this snippet from “The Mirror:”
I woke when it was still dark. Someone beside me was weeping. The smell of night and wind reached me. He had returned. I felt the suffering, and it calmed me. He wept with his face close to my back; the smell of wind and night were in his hair. Against my skin I could feel his burning breath broken by sobs. Another breathing, within my belly, burned me. Every drop of blood gathered together to create flesh. I lay very still, observing the shadows in the corners of the room. Dawn would devour them. I held a monster within me, a footless, handless monster. I thought my belly moved, that hands were forming as I watched, determined to emerge. A bitter, sour taste coursed into my mouth. He wept, and I fell asleep.
Here the narrator is mourning the impending loss of her husband, Roger, while pondering their son that she is bringing to term. The act of generation is here described in visceral terms, with the blood drops “gathered together to create flesh.” In her despair, she sees their unborn child as a “footless, handless monster.” “The Mirror” thematically resembles “The Salamander” n both its reflection upon loss and betrayal and its use of the irreal to accentuate the narrator’s emotional stresses.
Rodoreda’s posthumous novel, Death in Spring, like “The Salamander,” utilizes a Catalan village setting to explore the nature of human relations and a search for identity. Published in 1989, Death in Spring further explores the dual senses of alienation and self-discovery through the eyes of a young village girl. Whereas “The Salamander” used fire imagery to describe the narrator’s transformation, in Death in Spring water, particularly a local stream, serves as a metaphor for change:
I lowered myself gently into the water, hardly daring to breathe, always with the fear that, as I entered the water world, the air – finally rid of my nuisance – would begin to rage and be transformed into furious wind, like the winter wind that nearly carried away houses, trees, and people.
Throughout the novel, water is never a metaphor for peace. Instead, it is a destructive force, one that batters bridges, bludgeons unfortunate souls who venture into its treacherous depths, all while reinforcing the cruel capriciousness of people, even as they grow estranged from each other. Rodoreda’s characters are often cruel and distant from one another, as in the case of their treatment of prisoners as caged animals to be tortured before they are killed. One character, referred to by the narrator simply as “Senyor,” is sentenced to die by having cement poured down his gullet until he suffocates. This concrete metaphor for the silencing of dissenters echoes “The Salamander”’s treatment of foreigners/outsiders as nefarious agents who must die by fire. Zealotry and irrational fear, Rodoreda reminds us, often leads to human loss and suffering, while also dehumanizing those who perpetuate such inhumane treatment upon other human beings.
In Rodoreda’s fictions, the weird is not just something inexplicable that occurs within a narrative, but also a commentary on human relations. We see in Death in Spring a girl who munches on bees, followed shortly by a young boy who, after venturing into the treacherous waters underneath the village bridge, is mutilated by the waters as the villagers watch on, some with apparent glee. “The Salamander” focuses on a shapeshifter, one who suffers at the hands of villagers, who in turn cannot condone a “witch” yet also cannot comprehend why the fire alters her. In these tales, Rodoreda portrays that sense of alienation, of being extrany, while utilizing strange, weird imagery to act as symbols of this separation of humans from communion with one another. In doing so, she creates narratives that operate on several thematic levels, with each interpretation complementing another, leading to poignant stories that are powerful precisely because they stimulate both our senses and our minds. - Larry Nolen
I can’t remember the first time I read Mercè Rodoreda’s The Time of the Doves. It might have been when I was 13, living with my family in the high-rise suburbs of Madrid. It might have been when I was 17, back in Madrid with my mother for a few weeks in a sweltering rented room. Or it might have been when I was 19, on my own in the city, sharing an apartment near the train station with four South American girls. In any case, I read it in Spanish, under the title La plaza del diamante (the original Catalan title is La plaça del diamant). And I read it at about the same time as I read Nada, by Carmen Laforet. These were the first serious books I read in Spanish, and I’ve never forgotten them.
Certainly, few books have been as gorgeously sad. On a personal list of misery-inducing favorites including Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, The Time of the Doves ranks near the top. Set in Barcelona around the time of the Spanish Civil War, it’s tragic simply as a function of its setting, but Rodoreda plumbs a sadness that reaches beyond historic circumstances, a sadness born of helplessness, an almost voluptuous vulnerability. This condition will be familiar to readers of Rhys’s novels, to which Rodoreda’s novels bear a certain resemblance. Rodoreda’s women are notable for their almost pathological lack of volition, but also for their acute sensitivity, a nearly painful awareness of beauty. This, of course, is what made them so appealing to my moody adolescent self. In the midst of great upheaval, Rodoreda’s characters–and Laforet’s–lead cloistered, almost solipsistic lives, oblivious of politics and warmaking. Natalia, of The Time of the Doves, is an unworldly girl swept off her feet by Quimet, a charmer with a cruel streak who joins the Republican army and leaves her with two small children and a roof full of doves. Andrea, of Nada, comes to Barcelona just after the war to study at the university and moves into a crumbling Gothic apartment that houses three generations of her troubled family. Both women are immersed in the squalid details of domestic life, as famished for a glimpse of beauty as they are for a decent meal. With their senses sharpened by hunger, they’re almost overwhelmed by the intensity of daily existence. Though I didn’t realize it back then, The Time of the Doves and Nada are part of a small canon of coming-of-age novels by Catalan women published in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. This was a remarkable flowering of talent and a bounty yet to be fully appreciated by English-language readers. If anyone has heard of Rodoreda, it’s probably because of the award-winning 1982 film adaptation of The Time of the Doves, by the Catalan director Francesc Betriu, though even that has mostly faded from memory by now. The Time of the Doves and a collection, My Christina and Other Stories, are still in print, both in translations by David Rosenthal published by Graywolf Press in the 1980s, but Rosenthal’s translation of Rodoreda’s novel Camellia Street is out of print. Laforet has fared better, with an excellent new translation of Nada by Edith Grossman, recently issued by the Modern Library. This brought Laforet some well-deserved attention, but the sense persists that she is part of a generation lost to American readers.
It was a generation lost to itself, too. When the Spanish Civil War ended in 1939, many of Spain’s writers (and publishers and critics) fled into exile or were intimidated into silence. Most had supported the short-lived Republic, and their prospects were dismal under the new fascist regime. Literary organizations were shut down or co-opted, fiction was expected to cleave to the fascist cause and even the greats of Spanish literature were tossed on the trash heap of history. In 1942 one young journalist wrote that Spaniards should no longer look to Don Quixote as a model, because he represented decadence and defeat; better to look to Hernán Cortés, conquistador and man of action. Barcelona, of course, was the capital of Republican Spain, and the situation of Catalan writers was particularly bleak. Catalan language and culture had been undergoing a revival since the nineteenth century, but when Franco came to power, regional languages were banned. A generation of children grew up in schools where Castilian was the only language taught, and writers who wrote in Catalan (a language most closely related to the French dialect of Provençal) were marooned in the past, their future uncertain. Mercè Rodoreda, born in 1908, never considered writing in any language but Catalan. Her grandfather was a writer for La Renaixença, the journal of the Catalanist movement, and her father loved to read aloud from the works of the Catalan poets, especially Jacint Verdaguer. Despite the family’s literary inclinations, Rodoreda was sent to school for only three years, until she was 10, because it was assumed that she would marry. Her mother’s brother, a successful businessman recently returned from Argentina, was a suitor close at hand, and when she was 20 they were wed. They had a son, but Rodoreda, eager for independence, began to write and sought entry into literary circles. After self-publishing a novel and writing short stories for various newspapers, Rodoreda managed to establish herself as a regular contributor of political articles to the Catalanist journal Clarisme. A few more novels were published (which she would later repudiate), and she began to get to know other writers and journalists, notably Andreu Nin, a translator of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, who would become her lover. Then came the war, in 1936. Rodoreda never said much about her life in Barcelona during the war years, but The Time of the Doves stands as testament to the hardships endured by those living in the city in the late ’30s. Nin was killed in 1937, and Rodoreda separated from her husband. In 1938, remarkably, she had her first real literary success, with the autobiographical novel Aloma. When Barcelona fell in early 1939, Rodoreda went into exile, but she expected to return soon. She and a group of fellow writers left the city in a bus belonging to the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes, as if on some grim field trip. They took up residence in a castle designated for refugees in the town of Roissy, near Paris. There, Rodoreda began an affair with the married writer Joan Prat, who went by the pseudonym Armand Obiols. Their romance caused the group of writers to break up, and when war came to France, Rodoreda and Obiols fled to Limoges and later Bordeaux, where Rodoreda supported herself by sewing. After the war, they moved to Paris, and in 1954 they settled in Geneva, where Obiols worked as a translator for UNESCO. The fate of refugees from Franco’s Spain was cruel. War followed upon war with just a few months of respite, and those who had barely survived the destruction of their country were ill equipped to piece together an existence in war-torn France. During World War II, as during the civil war, Rodoreda often went hungry. Few writers have written as starkly and convincingly about hunger as she does in The Time of the Doves. One night, lying in bed with her two starving children, Natalia decides to kill them rather than watch them slowly die. Not only is there no food, but she’s lost the strength to go looking for it. “What’s a crust of bread when you’re starving?” she asks. “Even to eat grass you’ve got to have the strength to go out searching for it.” In the early 1950s, at perhaps the low point of her career, Rodoreda mysteriously lost the use of her right arm and was unable to write much but poetry. She took up painting instead, until a collection of her stories won a prize and she was encouraged enough to write what would be her masterpiece, The Time of the Doves. It was published in Catalan in 1962 and translated into Spanish in 1965. Like Nada (published in 1942), it was a popular and critical success. Around the same time, she wrote La mort i la primavera, a very different book, which didn’t find a publisher until 1986 and has only just now been translated into English, as Death in Spring, by Martha Tennent. For those who’ve only read The Time of the Doves, Death in Spring will come as a surprise. In it, Rodoreda works in an entirely different register, heavily symbolic and fable-like. Signs of this tendency are visible in a number of her short stories, some of which are collected in My Christina and Other Stories. In this collection, Rodoreda’s full range of expression is on display, from the almost banal realism of a later novel, A Broken Mirror, through the exquisite impressionism of The Time of the Doves and Camellia Street, to the garish symbolism of Death in Spring. In Rodoreda’s more symbolic fictions, nature comes to the fore and humans mimic animals or morph into them, as in the short story “The Salamander,” in which a woman who sleeps with a married man is burned to death and turns into a salamander, returning to live under her lover’s bed. The use of symbolism is a form of sublimation, in the same way that the ruthless elision and economy of Rodoreda’s writing in The Time of the Doves is a form of sublimation. In both cases, Rodoreda heightens and transforms the brutal reality of existence in a world of endless war. The artfulness of the latter method, however, stands in contrast to the often garbled mythmaking of some of the short stories and Death in Spring. Like “The Salamander,” Death in Spring is set in a village that’s part medieval, part contemporary and part infernal. A river runs beneath it, through a rocky passage, and every year one man must swim it to make sure the village isn’t about to be washed away. Most emerge near death, their faces torn by the rocks, but even this is benign compared with the village’s rituals of death, in which living villagers are stuffed full of pink cement and entombed upright in trees.
These savage customs are related by a young man who watches his father try in vain to escape the death ritual, and then marries his 16-year-old stepmother, a dwarflike girl who gnaws on balls of horse fat. They have a daughter, who’s born deformed and who transfers her affections from her father to the nihilistic son of the village blacksmith. From this point on, the protagonist’s fortunes (such as they are) decline, and he loses everything he loves before finding himself chosen to swim under the village. In outline (and in full), this reads like a nightmare, but it lacks the inexorable logic of dreams. Without this logic, the novel disintegrates into disjointed scenes, sometimes terrifying and sometimes simply risible. The Time of the Doves is to Death in Spring what a Vermeer is to a clumsy expressionist painting. Natalia’s voice is a creation of genius: naïve, stubborn, unself-consciously lyrical. Upon her first appearance, she says: “I was dressed all in white, my dress and petticoats starched, my shoes like two drops of milk, my earrings white enamel, three hoop bracelets that matched the earrings, and a white purse Julieta said was made of vinyl with a snap shaped like a gold shellfish.” Unlike Rodoreda, she is unsophisticated, a clerk in a pastry shop until she marries a man named Quimet. Her world is her apartment, her block, the nearby plazas, the little stand where her friend Senyora Enriqueta sells chestnuts and peanuts. When the war comes, she refers to it only obliquely. Quimet is involved in mysterious activities, and there’s no more cooking gas. All the passion that might have been roused by the war is expressed in her battle with the milling pigeons that Quimet raises on the roof. Rodoreda’s novel is distinctly and defiantly antiheroic. There’s nothing gallant or stirring about the war as she sees it. In fact, the war is barely visible except in its effect on those behind the lines. When Quimet is killed and Natalia is left alone with her starving children, she struggles for a long time (“that night for supper the three of us shared a sardine and a rotten tomato”) but finally creeps to the grocer’s to beg for hydrochloric acid, which she plans to funnel into her children’s mouths while they’re asleep. Even her rescue at the last minute is by a markedly unheroic character, the grocer who spots the desperation in her eyes and offers her a job–and, ultimately, marriage. If there’s heroism in the novel, it’s all Rodoreda’s. This was a heroic novel to write at a time when Spain clamored for a Cortés, not a Don Quixote. It was a heroic novel to write in Catalan, when it was unclear whether the language would survive the next few decades. It was a heroic novel–a feat of the imagination–to write from the antiseptic safe haven of Geneva. Rodoreda seems to have indulged fatalism in her fiction in a way that she wouldn’t allow herself in life, most notably in the bleak novel Camellia Street, about an orphan, Cecília, who becomes a prostitute and then a kept woman, the willing agent of her own degradation. The novel bears a striking resemblance to Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark, with its furnished rooms, miscarriages and abortions. A long sequence in which Cecília is virtually kept prisoner, drugged and spied upon by a couple of ostensible protectors, is one of the most perfectly pitched and devastating descriptions of victimhood ever written. It’s curious that Rodoreda is so esteemed by feminists (she’s the frequent subject of academic papers), when her novels revolve around the abdication of control by women and their subsequent humiliation. And yet there’s something steely and thoroughly modern about the way Rodoreda acknowledges the unsentimental deal-making that masquerades as love. In the novel Aloma, Aloma’s brother explains his marriage to his sister: “Let’s not fool ourselves: I was never in love with Anna. She was just the kind of woman I could bring home.” When Natalia marries the grocer, who is unfailingly kind but nothing like Quimet, she falls into a black mood. “Nothing pleased me: not the shop, or the hallway like a dark intestine.” She did love Quimet, but she was afraid of him, too, and though she knows he’s dead, the fear that he’ll come back and catch her with the grocer haunts her for years. Love, often withheld from human beings, is lavished on places and things, on flowers and shades of light and coffee pots. Rodoreda has a particular fondness for household objects, much-handled and familiar: the grocer’s bedspread is “all crocheted with roses on top and a fringe of crocheted curls you could wash and iron and either they wouldn’t come uncurled at all or they’d immediately curl up again like they had a mind of their own.” On the grocer’s bureau, between two bell jars full of flowers, there’s a seashell. “That shell with all the sea’s moaning inside it was more to me than a person. No person could live with all those waves coming and going inside them. And whenever I dusted it I’d always pick it up and listen to it for a minute.” Rodoreda is a domestic existentialist, a brilliant composer of interiors, both physical and mental. Only The Time of the Doves and, to a lesser degree, Camellia Street are fully realized expressions of her skill, but those two books–like Natalia’s children, as she realizes at a moment when she is suddenly able to see them objectively–are two flowers. When a book in translation doesn’t catch on the first time around, it seldom gets a second reading. And yet at a cultural moment when the recycling of past greats has become commonplace (John Travolta, say, or the rescued classics issued by New York Review Books), the smaller masterpieces of the past are more accessible. Recognition fifty years late is different from recognition in the historic moment. The names Rodoreda and Laforet may never occupy a place in the American consciousness like that of García Márquez or even Vargas Llosa (all four authors were first published in the United States at more or less the same time, in the mid-1960s to early ’70s; incidentally, García Márquez was one of Rodoreda’s early champions, and Vargas Llosa wrote the introduction to the Modern Library edition of Nada).
But there is room for a resurgence, even a resurrection. Rodoreda lived until 1983, beloved by readers around the world and a role model for writers in Spain and Catalonia, where she finally returned. Since The Time of the Doves, many thousands of books have been written about the experience of the Spanish Civil War, but none has equaled it. Rodoreda’s novel deserves a place in literature as the homefront equivalent of All Quiet on the Western Front, and perhaps someday it will be granted it.
- Natasha Wimmer Literary Journeys through Catalonia: Searching for Mercè Rodoreda’s Barcelona:
By Azareen Van der Vliet & Leonardo Francalanci
With Mercè Rodoreda's novel La Placa del Diamant (translated as The Time of the Doves) in hand, we took a lulling hour-and-a-half train ride from Girona to the sprawling, modernist city of Barcelona. The distance between Girona, the capital of the rural province of Gironès to Barcelona, the birth city of post-Spanish Civil War author Mercè Rodoreda is not great: an estimated ninety kilometers separates the two regional capitals. The train cuts through farmland, rolling hills, and mist-covered valleys. On humid days the fog gets caught between the silver plàtans: the trees, typical of Girona, are carefully planted in rows, and appear elongated and skeletal against the movement of the train. Eventually the landscape gives way to towns, and the towns to suburbs, apartment complexes crowd up against the tracks and the train cuts through them, dipping in and out of tunnels. As we settled into the ride, browsed through Rodoreda's novel. The epigraph reads, “My dear, these things are life,” it reads. The sentence flashed at us as the train cut in and out of the light.
The stuff of life. Wars, famines, geological shifts, unexpected technological leaps, the reorganization of space according to the aesthetic values of a particular time period. In short: the simultaneity of infinitely diverse realities is the stuff of life. And those realities can come into contact with one another and give rise to innumerable events, destructive or life-affirming or both. “My dear, these things are life.” Which is to say anything is possible, anything at any moment is possible, and if one is open to life one is open to the unpredictability of its content. And Rodoreda's novel, set before, during, and after the Spanish Civil War in the region of Catalonia, demonstrates the burden of unpredictable historical events on one's quotidian survival with unquestioning force.
Colometa, little dove, is the name of Rodoreda's narrator—the name given to her by her impulsive and volatile husband, Quimet, who, in the first years of their marriage, fills their house in Barcelona's neighborhood of Gràcia with doves. He breeds the birds in order to supplement their income, but the money never makes its way home; Quimet gives away two out of every three birds. Years later, as the Civil War erupts, he takes off to fight on the side of the Republicans, against Franco's rising army, dies, and leaves Colometa widowed with two young children who, along with her, begin to suffer from poverty and extreme hunger as the novel progresses through the war. The book is narrated in first-person stream of consciousness, and there are no formal conversation markers: Colometa's internal and external worlds overlap with no boundaries. She drifts through the space of her neighborhood as it deteriorates. Everything happens to her, and the violence of the events are magnified by her lack of strength to push back against the world.
We closed the book, and as the train pulled into the station, we wondered: What did Colometa's world look like? What were its possibilities and limits? And has Rodoreda's Barcelona, which inspired the details of the novel, been preserved? With these questions in mind we got off and walked above ground and headed toward the neighborhood of Sant Gervasi where Mercè Rodoreda was born in 1908.
II.
The first point on the map we had diligently hand-copied from the Fundació Mercè Rodoreda Web site was a botiga: an old grocer’s shop on Carrer Saragossa, where Rodoreda used to go as a young child with her grandfather. We walked up and down the street a few times; the botiga was certainly marked on the Fundació map, but it was nowhere to be found. After a thorough search we decided to stop at a bar on the corner of Carrer Padua to ask for information. We relayed the purpose of our journey to the bar owner. We told her that we were taking a literary tour of Mercè Rodoreda’s childhood neighborhood, but she didn’t have any information about the shop, and she didn’t seem to know much about Rodoreda either. For a moment, she gazed at us in bewilderment, and then her face slipped back to its former state of resigned indifference. But a few minutes later she leaned over the counter to take a second peak at our map. She had grown curious, and began to share that they had emigrated to Barcelona from Soria, another region of Spain, about twenty years earlier. She pointed to the black-and-white pictures of rural Soria that were hanging from the walls, amid jamones and strings of garlic and dried red peppers. When they had arrived in the neighborhood, she said, there was still a lively, familial atmosphere. There were a lot of shops and local businesses that served the community: a pharmacy, a butchery, a grocery shop, a shoemaker, a place were you could buy home-baked beans of all kinds; there was even a vaqueria, a cow farm, that provided the neighborhood with fresh milk. In those days, Sant Gervasi was still on the outskirts of Barcelona. She told us that over the years the local residents had sold their old houses and businesses, and that their property had been torn down to make space for high-rise apartment buildings. Just then, outside, a young man walked by and everyone in the bar turned to look at him through the big glass windows: he was walking a pet pot-bellied pig on a leash. The bar owner looked at him in the same way she had received us moments before: momentarily surprised, but ultimately accepting; desensitized and indifferent. The neighborhood had become unrecognizable to her and there was nothing left to do about it.
When we left the bar we headed toward Rodoreda's family house on Carrer de Manuel Angelon. We had diligently leafed through old photographs of her childhood home: we knew that her grandfather, Pere Gurguí, had built a fountain at the center of the garden in honor of his friend, the Catalan poet Jacint Verdaguer, and in the pictures we had seen Rodoreda as a child, dressed as a nymph, happily leaning against the enormous fountain. Soon we found ourselves at the upper end of a short, steep street flanked by an enclosed parking lot, restaurants, and gentlemen's clubs. We walked up and down the street looking for the torre, the tower-shaped
villa set in the center of a large garden, but found nothing. Eventually, walking up and down the street, we spotted a bronze plaque on the parking-lot façade honoring Rodoreda's birth place. Her childhood house, with its tower and beautiful garden that had inspired so many of her books, like the grocer’s shop and so many other local businesses, was no longer there: it had been torn down. As we stood there in disbelief, an elderly couple approached and offered to help us. As it turned out they had lived on Carrer Angelon for many years. In fact, Jordi, the gentleman, knew Mercè Rodoreda, or la senyora Mercè as he called her, personally. He was born and raised in the building next door to her and when he was little he used to play with her son. He could even remember the fountain dedicated to Verdaguer: his ball used to end up in it when he was playing on the street, and he used to call la senyora Mercè to get it back. He then suggested we try to find the porter of the building on Carrer Balmes, where Rodoreda had lived after she had sold her childhood home forty or fifty years back. He didn’t think there was anyone else left in the neighborhood who could tell us first-hand stories. He said that even the people at City Hall, who had decided to put up a plaque to commemorate the author’s birth place, did not know where her house stood originally; it had been torn down during the years of the Franco dictatorship. City Hall had gone to him for help, and nobody could believe that in the place of her house now stood a giant parking lot. Antonia, Jordi’s wife, on the other hand, used to live at the Plaça del Diamant before they married. She hadn’t read Rodoreda’s La Plaça del Diamant, or ever met her, but, as she said, she had lived the Civil War first-hand, and what’s more, right in the center of Gràcia. She didn’t need to read Rodoreda’s book to know what it felt like; she had her memories to rely on for that, she said.We parted ways and headed to Gràcia to complete our journey. We walked by Gràcia's fish and vegetable market and took Carrer Gran de Gràcia to find Cafè Monumental, where the characters in La Plaça del Diamant often gathered. We walked the street several times. There were chain stores, bakeries, donut, and ice cream shops, and a few bars. But once again, the site we were looking for belonged to the distant past. Cafè Monumental, as we were told by a local teller, no longer existed.
Slightly disillusioned, we headed for la plaça del Diamant, our last landmark. It was already dark when we arrived, and the plaza’s atmosphere was lively and relaxed. The surrounding cafes had set up tables outside, and people were happily sitting out drinking wine. We wandered around, trying to match the real space of the square with the literary space of the book: we imagined the neighborhood festivities represented at the novel’s opening scene, Quimet and Colometa’s wedding, the apartment building they lived in, the birth of their children, the doves, the war, the years after the war when Colometa moved away from the house she had lived in with Quimet and married again; all the fragments that composed the characters’ lives. At the close of the book, years after the war, Colometa revisits la plaça del Diamant in order to reconnect with her past. It is then that her silent living-out of the tragedies of her era, and the pain of having lived through the Spanish Civil War, manifests itself in a desperate, but cathartic scream. In a corner of the square, the statue by Catalan sculptor Xavier Medina-Campeny reproduces that exact moment: from a triangle of solid metal, Colometa emerges, screaming, holding her hands up to the air. Certain parts of Barcelona had been altogether lost to the Civil War and the subsequent Franco dictatorship, the space of the city no longer matched her memories, just as the Barcelona we had hoped to find had also vanished into the folds of time. “My dear,” we read again as we opened the book, “these things are life.”
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