War, So Much War

September 21, 2015
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.

September 1, 2015
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 Adria Guinart, a 15-year-old who leaves "the prison of [his] home" with his friend Rossend. They become separated, and Adria 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 Marquez. 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. Adria is taken into a house where Senyor Ardevol 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 Ardevol's being consumed by an old mirror in the hallway where he sees disembodied eyes next to his own reflection. Adria reads the papers left to him after Ardevol'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 Adria 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.

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December 1, 2015

Writing the gold standard of 20th-century Catalan literature, Rodoreda (1908-83) lived in exile in France and Switzerland following the Spanish Civil War and began writing fiction while working as a seamstress. This 1980 novel, the last the author published in her lifetime, is the coming-of-age story of Adria Guinart, who abandons a boring life in Barcelona to join the war effort (which war is not stated) but gets lost and roams the countryside, encountering a wide array of surreal characters. None is unscarred by the larger war, from the girl who swims in the river and prods the dead bodies of floating soldiers so they won't get stuck among the rushes and rot to the bricklayer forced to gaze upon the bombed-out masonry of his former home. Nature, hunger (Adria lives on pine nuts and blackberries), and death all contrive to drive home for us the ubiquity of evil. VERDICT Rodoreda's clear, clean prose, rendered so capably into English by Relano and Tennent, creates a mood of desperation that will engage the contemplative reader more than the casual one.--Jack Shreve, Chicago

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