Mercè Rodoreda, Death in Spring, translated by Martha Tennent (Open Letter Books, 2009)«Considered by many to be the grand achievement of her later period, Death in Spring is one of Mercè 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 (or 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.»
"The greatest contemporary Catalan novelist and possibly the best Mediterranean woman author since Sappho." — David H. Rosenthal
«What have we been doing without this book? (Well, those of us who don’t read Catalan.)
In her obsessive final novel (published posthumously in 1986, and translated now for the first time into English), the residents of an unnamed mountain village eke out a miserable existence by brutalizing nature, and by being themselves brutalized. The narrator poetically details the villagers’ violently arcane customs: how they bury their dead and dying inside trees; how they slaughter horses, eating the flesh raw (“chopped up and mixed with herbs”), and shaping the fat into balls that they hang in their houses; how the Senyor who lives above them hires men to cut back the ivy that would otherwise shatter his mansion. Pregnant women wear blindfolds lest their unborn children adopt other men’s appearances. Young children drown; other children stomp bees that are busy gorging themselves on honey. Black birds (“mourners”) are driven from their nests by vicious white birds, but return three days later to kill those birds. And every year men must swim the underground river beneath the village, to clear it of obstructions; their faces are torn away in the process, for which they are shunned.
The novel is harsh, and often gruesome, but it is never gratuitous; it is instead boldly earnest as it lays out a perverse logic by which nature and civilizations function. What I find particularly brilliant is the balance Rodoreda strikes between realism and fantasy: I often found it impossible to tell which customs might be true (or based in truth), and which (if any) were invented. The world is, after all, extremely strange, and it is a great and rare thing when an author is skilled enough to reflect this strangeness in her writing.
And to make it so fascinating. The short chapters and utterly hypnotic prose of Death in Spring make it a compulsive read—mysterious, tense, and repeatedly cathartic:
In front of me lay the forest, where the elderly went from time to time, and when they did, they locked us children inside wooden cupboards in the kitchen. We could only breathe through the stars on the cupboard walls, empty stars, like windows in the shape of a star. Once I asked a boy from a nearby house if he was sometimes locked inside the kitchen cupboard, and he said he was. I asked him if the door had two panels with an empty star on each side. He said, there’s an empty star, but it’s not large enough to allow much air in, and if the elders are long in returning, we start to feel ill, like we’re suffocating. He said he watched through the star as the elderly people set off, and after that he could see only walls and ashes. Everything conveyed a sense of loneliness and sadness. Even the walls grew sad and old when the elderly left them alone and all the children were locked in cupboards like animals. And what he told me about things was true: alone, they grew old quickly, but in the company of people they grew old more slowly and in a different way; instead of becoming ugly, they became pretty.
The narrator returns repeatedly to eccentric customs and observations, and our impression of the village and its inhabitants accumulates gradually, elliptically. Both grow more familiar, but never become any less mysterious, never any less sad or troubled (or troubling). The result is such that by the last page (and the ending is absolutely devastating) we feel as though we, too, have spent a lifetime there.
As I read (and I read this book repeatedly, over and over—to myself, to others, silently, aloud), I was reminded of a handful of melancholy films (Rodoreda’s writing is extremely descriptive). In particular, I thought of films that depict what it is like to be a child, and to live in the world and to observe it closely, but to not understand it. More than once I pictured John and Pearl floating downstream, orphaned and menaced by Robert Mitchum in Charles Laughton’s immortal Night of the Hunter (1955). Elsewhere, I thought of the little girls who arrive at their boarding school inside coffins in Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s instant-classic Innocence (2004). (The stars on those coffins strengthens this odd resonance.)
Death in Spring is the equal of those two great films; it is, without any exaggeration, one of the finest books I’ve read.» - A D Jameson
«In the oppressive world of the village, the dead are stuffed with pink cement and then entombed in trees. Children are locked in cupboards, and young men are sacrificed to the all-powerful river, which inexplicably runs beneath the village. Despite this strangeness, Death in Spring is not an experiment in fantasy or surrealism but, rather, an exploration of a meticulously-rendered alternate reality. The village’s bridges are specifically named, landmarks are pinpointed, and paths are described in detail, as are directions for getting from one place to another. Ultimately, however, this order is illusory. The village is precariously balanced on top of a swiftly moving river, and no amount of topographical precision will protect this troubled society from self-destruction.
Rodoreda’s prose is poetic without sacrificing any of its ferocity. Her powerful imagery often subverts expectations. In the world of this novel, “Spring is sad” and “plants and flowers are earth’s plague, rotten.” The greenness of Spring is “poisonous color." Life is irrelevant and destruction is happiness:
[Y]ou have to believe that it's all the same to have a face or have your forehead ripped away. It's all the same to live or die .... Learn to make fire by rubbing sticks together; learn to start a fire and you'll be happy. A fire that causes damage.
Death in Spring is an unforgettable book. It's purposefully strange in a way that’s not easily worked out. Because the book’s possible meanings are multiple and ever shifting, they will always be relevant. I expect I’ll be thinking about, and perhaps frustrated by, this book for a long time, and this haunting quality is the reason I’ve given this novel my highest rating. This challenging and bizarre novel will not appeal to everyone, but those up to the challenge, will be richly rewarded.» - Gwen Dawson
«Death in Spring can—and perhaps on one level, must—be read as an address to oppressive, authoritarian government, especially Franco's (Rodoreda spent twenty years in exile), but there is nothing provincial about it. As with Orwell's 1984, Zamyatin's We, or Kerenthy's Metropole, the critique—lifting itself with fantastic elements—transcends any specific target.
And Death in Spring is indeed bursting with fantastic images. Many of the images work to reveal a system of natural symbols that is at once suggestive, evocative, and deeply paradoxical—readers won't look at trees the same way. Other images, meanwhile, stem from the novel's nameless town and its overtly religious, often horrifically violent rituals. (The publisher's suggested comparison with Shirley Jackson's story The Lottery is somehow an injustice to the majesty of this town's cruelties.) Between these two systems, the natural and the ritualistic, is poised the novel's magic. In a typical novel, one system might overcome the other. But here, as in much of Garcia Marquez's work, time is the ultimate organizing force—and what a ruthlessly ambivalent force it is. Rodoreda braids antagonistic forces into a self-imploding folk tale about life and death, like a story Charon might relate to his passengers on the boatride between worlds.
The novel begins with transition and hesitation:
"I removed my clothes and dropped them at the foot of the hackberry tree, beside the madman's rock. Before entering the river, I stopped to observe the color left behind by the sky."
The narrator, a nameless boy of fourteen, on the cusp of manhood, simultaneously begins a journey and pauses. And while there is indeed a journey (years elapse, he marries, has children, participates in several rituals), it is also constantly forestalled (the boy's age is never mentioned again, and he never seems to age, he remains on that cusp). Starting, stopping: this is the narrative's basic modality and is so deeply reflected in the style that credit is due to Martha Tennant for providing the contradictory tug of stillness and of change, the constant oscillation revealing that the book's magnificent themes are alive and active at the level of the language, as well.
Of course, the pauses are only interludes; change is inevitable, things move forward (sort of): two more sentences, and we're in rushing water's cold embrace. The rest of the first chapter—the whole of it fizzing like a prose poem—comes at the reader in a rush of flashbacks interrupted by descriptions of landscape, interrupted by the recounting of certain rituals (including the dead-of-night excavating of red powder, with which the villagers repaint their houses), manifold, involuted, but poetic reflections that in turn are interrupted several times by a bee chasing the narrator to the far shore—a bee whose flightpath pretty accurately maps the narrative's loop-de-loop time and consciousness.
It's impossible to summarize all that unfolds. Death in Spring is as perfect and complete as a fugue, and one of those books (pace Flannery O'Connor) that would take every word of itself to paraphrase: the imagery is simply too integrated, the language too reverberant, the structure too exquisitely intricate.
But trust that with those first simple sentences, a dance of metaphorical action and traditional symbols is set in motion, a dance whose every step is choreographed with consummate artistic powers. The river, the madman's rock, the tree: all these core elements will grow exponentially in significance over the course of the novel. Supporting motifs mature and transform, beautifully weaving the larger images together (and weaving through them) with an almost-organic instinct: that bee in the opening chapter, for example, evolves into birds in the next chapter; and its bumbling flightpath gives way to fluttering butterflies. Glass balls—poof!—become soap bubbles, become balls of fat, become bird's eggs. Then, the bubbling of soap is "rhymed," as it were, with the bubbling of small butterflies, and their bubbling is rhymed with the bubbling of resin rising from the cross-shaped cut in a tree. On and on these symbol- and-image-systems go. Everything in this novel belongs, every living thing is a player in the struggle against the fear of death (and decay) emanating from the town, where the narrator flutters between childhood and adulthood.
As said before, neither nature, nor the town can win in any absolute sense. Paradox rules: metamorphosis—beginning with the stripping off of clothes in the opening sentence—is constantly interrupted by stasis; and in the universe of Death in Spring, some entrapments actually liberate.
From very early on, one wants badly to know: will the town's darkly violent rituals (rituals that steadily confuse oppressor and victim) liberate or destroy the narrator? But the story offers no easy answers; readers must plunge into the river of Rodoreda's metaphysics, where life and death penetrate each other inextricably, where a fantastic landscape mixes with beautiful language arranged in clockwork structures…and then, the answer does come, snapping perfectly into place, revealing the novel as an elegant and profound commentary on mysteries usually addressed only by religion.» - Hugh Ferrer
«I believe that Rodoreda is the great modernist Catalan author. From her earlier works, like Time of the Doves, through her later, even more ambitious and stylistically daring novels, like Death in Spring and A Broken Mirror, she created some of the most impressive literary works of the past century and she wrote the books that people will be reading a hundred years from now, still puzzling out her techniques and, especially in the case of Death in Spring, the meanings behind her words.
Rodoreda’s aesthetic evolution is one of the things that most impresses me about her writing. Time of the Doves is a very accomplished novel—a stream of consciousness novel about one woman’s life during the Spanish Civil War. It is very modernist in its conceits and concerns, and is stunningly beautiful. At the same time, today’s readers probably won’t find too many “new tricks” in this novel.
That’s not necessarily the case with A Broken Mirror and especially not with Death in Spring. A Broken Mirror is a family saga that progresses from a very Victorian opening to a very fragmented and postmodern conclusion. And aesthetically speaking, that’s where Death in Spring picks up.
There isn’t really an English-language equivalent to this masterpiece. A couple scenes call to mind Shirley Jackson, and the spooky atmosphere is sort of Poe-like, but both of those comparisons fall far short of what you’ll find here. This is a novel about an imagined village where life is organized around a series of baroque, almost medieval rituals. These rituals can be rather shocking—like the death ritual of filling a dying person’s mouth with cement to prevent his/her soul from escaping, or all of the routines involving the “prisoner”—but Rodoreda presents them through the eyes of an adolescent boy in such a naturalized, textured, lyrical fashion that the reader quickly comes to accept them as commonplace, or, as metaphors.
When they pulled the boy from the river, he was dead; they returned him to the river. Those who died in the water were returned to the water. The river carried them away and nothing was ever known of them again. But at night, at the spot where the bodies were thrown into the water, a shadow could be seen. Not every night. Not today or tomorrow, but on certain nights a shadow trembled. They said the shadow of the dead returned to the place where the man was born. They said that to die was to merge with the shadow. That summer, the shadow of the boy was clearly distinguishable. It was unmistakably him because he had been separated from one of his arms, and the shadow had but one arm. Struggling against the current, the shadow—which was only will, not body or voice—attempted to slip beneath the village. And as the shadow struggled, the prisoner neighed.
There’s a temptation to interpret this novel about a village ruled by a man living up on a hill as a political metaphor for life in Franco’s Spain, but I think that leads to an incomplete reading. This novel is richer than politics. (And just wait until you read the scene in which the protagonist interacts with the man on the hill! It’s touching, surprising, and almost funny.) The novel also has a strong elemental pull to it, as the four sections bring to mind the four seasons, and these bizarre rituals concerned with passing and renewal. It is Death in Spring after all.
Regardless of how one chooses to approach the book, I’m willing to guarantee that this is a one-of-a-kind experience.» - Chad W. Post
