Death in Spring
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1.0 • 1 Rating
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
'Soaringly beautiful, urgent and disturbing... A masterpiece.' Colm Tóibín, from the introduction
'Dark and beautiful and brilliant' Sarah Moss, author of Ghost Wall
Death in Spring is a dark and dream-like tale of a teenage boy's coming of age in a remote village in the Catalan mountains; a place cut off from the outside world, where cruel customs are blindly followed, and attempts at rebellion swiftly crushed. When his father dies, he must navigate this oppressive society alone, and learn how to live in a place of crippling conformity.
Often seen as an allegory for life under a dictatorship, Death in Spring is a bewitching and unsettling novel about power, exile, and the hope that comes from even the smallest gestures of independence.
'Rodoreda has bedazzled me' Gabriel Garcia Marquez
'Rodoreda's artistry is of the highest order' Diana Athill
'Read it for its beauty, for the way it will surprise and subvert your desires, and as a testament to the human spirit in the face of brutality and willful inhumanity.' Jesmyn Ward, author of Sing, Unburied, Sing
'Utterly extraordinary' Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond
'Dark and beautiful and brilliant' Sarah Moss, author of The Tidal Zone
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
