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Original Essays | May 1, 2013
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More copies of this ISBNDeath in Springby Merce Rodoreda
Review-A-Day"Originally published posthumously in 1986, and now available in English translation for the first time, Death in Spring is the masterful and unsettling final novel by the acclaimed Catalan writer Merce Rodoreda. From the book's opening pages, Rodoreda immerses the reader in the strange, disorienting, and extremely disturbing culture of a village defined by the practice of gruesome rituals." Ryan Michael Williams (read the entire Rain Taxi review) Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:Considered by many to be the grand achievement of her later period, Death in Spring is one of Merce 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 for 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. Review:"Exiled after the Spanish Civil War, Rodoreda (1908 — 1993) worked on this marvelously disturbing novel over a 20-year period, and its first publication was posthumous. As macabre as a Grimm fairy tale, the novel portrays the cruel customs of an unnamed village as seen through the eyes of an unnamed 14-year-old boy. The narrator witnesses his father's horrible death, which, it becomes clear as the story progresses, happens according to local custom: to pour cement into the mouths of the dying in order to seal their souls within their bodies, then entomb them within a hollowed tree. The narrator also spends a good deal of time with the village prisoner, who for years has been confined to a too-small cage and now is only too happy to explain the bizarre village goings-on to the narrator and his friend, the son of the blacksmith who runs the town. The plot, though anemic, has its share of increasingly perverse twists, and the intense lyricism of Rodoreda's language, captured here by Tennent's gorgeous translation, makes her grotesque vision intoxicating and haunting." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
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