War, So Much War
Language: English
Pages: 220
ISBN: 1940953227
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"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.
heir. And he shouted: A bottle! And glasses! One of the men pointed to the floor. There are no glasses. The man in charge looked at the old man. Instead of parading about with that stuffed animal that’s already given you everything it had, you’d be better off if you came with us and cleaned our rifles, that goes for you too, kid! The barrel of my rifle is always hot and I wouldn’t want it cooling off before this war is won. The cat man laughed so hard he seemed about to break, and everyone
stopped drinking to stare at him, and then the cat man said that none of them were their father’s sons. A scrawny man wearing a blue shirt and a red scarf around his neck lunged toward him, brandishing a bottle, threatening to smash it over his head if he repeated such nonsense. It’s not me, it’s that boy who said so; according to him, parents merely create a child’s flesh and bones and with its first cry, the infant is infused with a soul that has been waiting for that moment. The tallest man in
the shadows of dusk. As I climbed down from the tree I scared off a clutch of sparrows that were pecking at the bread crumbs around the table. The dogs were eating by the portal; this time they didn’t chase after me, perhaps because after seeing me talking to the moon-shaped man they counted me as one of their own. I raised my head, baa . . . baa . . . baa . . . those sheep cries intrigued me; I had to see for myself what was happening. Behind the farmhouse, near the vegetable garden, three
the ants scurried about like mad trying to find a way to maneuver it inside. I tripped on another piece of rope. The first scrap I had cut was in my pocket. My sole possessions were my father’s knife and that bit of rope. A sloping path ran across the carriage way. Standing between the road and the path, I chose the latter because it was narrow, the weeds around it tall. One final cannon shot rang out, even farther away than the second one, and at that moment I heard a man’s voice giving orders:
eyes, same as his hair . . . perhaps you met him . . . She looked me straight in the eyes and I felt an unbearable rush of shame. Shame at having run away from the war the way some flee the plague, alone, always alone with myself; shame at not having defended something, without knowing exactly what that thing was, which I should have defended as countless others had . . . all of me imprisoned inside my own sad skin, withered from hunger, just as the woman with the dead baby with his head against