Death in Spring [Hardcover]

Merce Rodoreda (Author), Martha Tennent (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2009

Considered by many to be the grand achievement of her later period, Death in Spring is one of Merc

Editorial Reviews

From 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. (May)
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About the Author

Merc

Product Details

• Hardcover: 150 pages
• Publisher: Open Letter Books; Univ of Nebraska Press; 1 edition (May 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1934824119
• ISBN-13: 978-1934824115
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #461,252 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Too much symbolism!, April 22, 2009

By 

E. L. Fay (New York) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Death in Spring (Hardcover)

Widely considered the most important Catalan author of the post-war period, Mercè Rodoreda (1909-1983) wrote her most important works in exile during Francisco Franco's reign as dictator of Spain and heavy-handed censor of culture. Married at age 20 to an uncle seventeen years her senior, Rodoreda began her career as a novelist in the early 1930s with the publication of "Sóc una dona honrada?" ("Am I a Decent Woman?"), which precipitated her transformation into a fashionable and daring woman who went on to pen political articles for Catalan newspapers. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, however, forced Rodoreda to flee to France and later Switzerland. She would later state that "Writing in Catalan in a foreign country is like wanting flowers to bloom at the North Pole." Still, despite the difficulties of writing abroad in a small regional language, Rodoreda's seminal work "La mort i la primavera" ("Death in Spring") probably could not have come together without its author's experiences living in foreign lands.

According to Catalan Literature Online, Rodoreda's novels and short stories often contain "an extraordinary assortment of exiles, soldiers, and unprotected people who find expression in a no-man's-land." It is a sort of bittersweet freedom that is at its most contradictory in "Death in Spring," first published posthumously in 1986 and only just now appearing in English. On the one hand, its vague, otherworldly setting is a remote village reminiscent of the isolated dystopia depicted in Lois Lowry's "The Giver," while the grotesque behavior of its people recalls Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." At the same time, however, the social outsiders "Death in Spring" centers on possess an autonomy and insight denied to the conformists surrounding them. Although the publisher's summary describes the narrator as a fourteen-year-old boy, he actually ages at least four years throughout the story, and this progression in age is accompanied by a deeper, more profound psychological maturity.

The first quarter of "Death in Spring" is far more frightening than most conventional horror novels. It is surreal and so deeply disturbing that reading it became uncomfortable despite Rodoreda's lyrical prose. There is talk of men without faces because they were thrown into the underground river and ominous references to "the prisoner." The narrator witnesses his neighbors pour cement down his father's throat and then wall him into a hollowed-out tree. The reader soon learns that these are merely typical community rituals and everyone expects their life to end in this same manner. Both the novella's unspecified setting and the villagers' outlandish behavior lend an aura of timelessness to the story, and it is this sense of Time as an undying circle, forever flowing like the town's river, that becomes one Rodoreda's central themes:

"She told me she knew many things: far away the river was flowing; the dead were asleep; trees that held a dead person likewise died a bit; cement inside a dead person took a long time to dry. She said we knew many things about the light, about everything that transpires as it goes round, returning to us - neither too fast nor too slowly, like our shadows on the sundial hours. The same, always the same, no beginning, no ending, never tiring."

I was actually reminded of my favorite poem, T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," in which the primary speaker's voice comes from beyond the grave yet still echoes through the post-war detritus as he "pass[es] the stages of his age and youth / Entering the whirlpool." Rodoreda's unnamed narrator, however, is oddly detached, even as he describes events of great emotional significance. In short, I had long suspected what was going to happen in the end, even before a desire to break the proverbial cycle slowly became apparent.

As the protagonist plays with his wild teenaged stepmother and converses with the prisoner, he becomes increasingly aware of the constraints he lives under, as well as the subliminal methods of control exercised by the society in which he lives. Along with his four-year-old daughter (the stepmother later became the wife), he also becomes acquainted with the son of the blacksmith. The latter is a man with considerable authority who nevertheless starved and imprisoned his child so that he would be too weak to be thrown into the river. (Similarly, in "The Lottery," Tessie has always accepted the lottery and never objected to it until her name was chosen.) Although his father's ritual murder is what initially sparked the narrator's disillusionment, he does not begin to articulate his feelings until later, as events reveal that history has begun to repeat itself. If the world is too entrenched for us to bear, if the people around us are trapped lock-step in meaningless and dysfunctional customs, there still remains one thing in life we can choose for ourselves. "Man is made of water, lives with earth and air," says the prisoner. "He lives imprisoned. All men." So what is one of the few methods of protest left to the powerless?

"Death is Spring" is certainly a haunting and thought-provoking book, but it is not without its flaws. Told in the first person, it is strongly psychological and full of rambling stream-of-conscious internal monologues. Unfortunately, these frequently slow the story down in the second half of the novella and it often feels like Rodoreda is babbling on about nothing. I really wonder if an editor could have helped her cut some of it down, especially since "Death in Spring" is also one of those stories where everything is a symbol for something else and the reader never knows when, to borrow the words of Freud, "a cigar is only a cigar." You're either overanalyzing it or not looking deeply enough and it's hard to tell which. Reading can subsequently feel like a chore. The jacket copy also praises Rodoreda's "stunningly poetic language and lush descriptions," which I thought was overblown. Her writing is indeed quite impressive: smoothly flowing, occasionally musical, and highly effective at creating mood. Still, I felt a bit let-down - I don't think she was quite *that* good, though we must also keep in mind that this is a translation.

Despite these criticisms, I still feel that "Death in Spring" is a book worth reading, but not for pleasure under an umbrella at the beach. At 150 pages, it is very short, but definitely not *quick*. Its meandering passages demand serious thought and concentration. In fact, I believe that this is one of those books which must be read twice. Readers seeking something challenging should find "Death in Spring" satisfying, particularly for its unique portrayal of an oppressive society (I think North Korea is perhaps its closest real-life counterpart), as well as its status as a modern European classic. But "The Giver" and "The Lottery" are far more readable and share many of the same themes.

* Review copy *

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A strange and haunting Catalan classic, June 4, 2009

By 

Gwendolyn Dawson "Literary License" (Houston, Texas United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Death in Spring (Hardcover)

Mercè Rodoreda (1908-1983) is widely regarded as the most important Catalan writer of the twentieth century. Death in Spring, her final novel and perhaps her masterpiece, is now available for the first time in English. This strange and beautiful coming-of-age story unfolds in and around a small, isolated village with no apparent connections to the outside world. Because of this abstraction of location, combined with the frequent appearance of symbolic objects, images, and characters, Death in Spring reads more like an allegory than a novel.

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.

5.0 out of 5 stars A very special and highly recommended read, July 7, 2009

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Death in Spring (Hardcover)

Tradition is a strange and curious thing. "Death in Spring" is a novel from Catalan author Merce Rodoreda, expertly translated by Martha Tennent. Focusing on a small town and its strange customs, "Death in Spring" uses the eyes of a young man coming of age to grant light to the town's traditions, why they came to be, and why they may be sending the town to destruction. "Death in Spring" is a very special and highly recommended read.