Death in Spring

The men in the Spanish village of Rodoreda’s final novel are, for the most part, wrecked. That’s a literal statement. As part of the bizarre, mystical rituals to which the town has subsumed its civic life, the men must swim the river that courses through its center and below its raised houses. Many of them veer off, crack their heads on the rocks along the riverbed, and are cast out to live in a sort of failure colony, deformed and disgraced. It’s one of these beaten men that the 14-year-old narrator witnesses commit suicide in the foreboding forest of the dead, to kick off the novel.

Would you believe us if we said this is one of the most beautiful novels we’ve read this year?

Flipping the grotesque into the gorgeous is no small trick, and Rodoreda has plenty up her sleeves. Perhaps the most acclaimed author to write in her native Catalan—in 1998 a fiction prize was named in her honor—Rodoreda chafed at societal pressures. At 20 she was married to an uncle 14 years her senior, and after the Spanish Civil War, she was exiled to France for her political views. She died of cancer in 1983, and Death in Spring was published posthumously in 1986. That insurrectionist’s spirit fills this strange, beautiful novel, about a boy struggling against the frightening rituals of his forebears. After his father dies, he forms a special bond with his young, slightly deranged stepmother, as they try to disappear into the shadows, away from the violence inherent in the town.

The landscape reflects the horror of the village’s way of life—there are hypersentient bees, creeping wisteria vines and that river that serves as judge. Credit the translator, Martha Tennent, for capturing the lyricism in Rodoreda’s final work. And credit Rodoreda for crafting such a captivating fable.— Jonathan Messinger

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