War, So Much War
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Featured on Jeff VanderMeer's "Epic List of Favorite Books Read in 2015"
"Rodoreda had bedazzled me by the sensuality with which she reveals things within the atmosphere of her novels."—Gabriel García Marquez
"Rodoreda plumbs a sadness that reaches beyond historic circumstances . . . an almost voluptuous vulnerability."—Natasha Wimmer, The Nation
"It is a total mystery to me why [Rodoreda] isn't widely worshipped; along with Willa Cather, she's on my list of authors whose works I intend to have read all of before I die. Tremendous, tremendous writer."—John Darnielle, The Mountain Goats
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 that one can only suppose is Catalonia, accompanied by the interminable, distant rumblings of an indefinable war. In vignette-like chapters and with a narrative style imbued with the fantastic, Guinart meets with numerous adventures and peculiar characters who offer him a composite, if surrealistic, view of an impoverished, war-ravaged society and shape his perception of his place in the world.
As in Rodoreda's Death in Spring, nature and death play an fundamental role in a narrative that often takes on a phantasmagoric quality and seems to be a meditation on the consequences of moral degradation and the inescapable presence of evil.
Mercè Rodoreda (1908–1983) is widely regarded as the most important Catalan writer of the twentieth century. Exiled in France and Switzerland following the Spanish Civil War, Rodoreda began writing the novels and short stories—Twenty-Two Short Stories, The Time of the Doves, Camellia Street, Garden by the Sea—that would eventually make her internationally famous.
Maruxa Relaño is a journalist and translator based in Barcelona. She has worked as a translator for The Wall Street Journal, a writer for NY1, and wrote articles for the New York Daily News, Newsday, and New York magazine, among other publications.
Martha Tennent was born in the U.S, but has lived most of her life in Barcelona where she served as founding dean of the School of Translation and Interpreting at the University of Vic. She translates from Spanish and Catalan, and received an NEA Translation Fellowship for her work on Rodoreda.
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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, Adri Guinart runs away with a friend to become a soldier. However, the pair is quickly separated, and an attack on the soldier camp leaves Adri 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, Adri 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. Adri '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 Rela o and Tennent's remarkable translation. A significant entry among the works in the Catalan language.