Death Springs Eternal, But Not Much Else

While reading “Death in Spring,” Mercè Rodoreda’s final work, it is easy to forget how unlikely the publication of the book is. In Francisco Franco’s anti-Catalan Spain, Rodoreda faced not only suppression and exile but the extinction of her native language. Under Franco, Catalan’s very existence was threatened, banned outright in the public sphere and severely curtailed in the private sphere. In this context, while translations of Spanish language novels achieved worldwide fame and renown in the 1970s and 1980s, Catalan writers remained obscure, even after Franco’s death in 1975, when the ban on Catalan was lifted. With her translation of “Death in Spring,” Martha Tennent hopes to begin to redress this historic injustice.

How deeply unfortunate, then, that the novel itself cannot live up to the promise of a hidden classic. A brief work of only 150 pages, told in dense four-page episodes, “Death in Spring” creates a world at once strange and familiar: a nameless town characterized by brutal, gratuitous violence and the prevalence of the bizarre, narrated through an unusual set of eyes—those of a teenage boy. Rodoreda’s narrator is a remarkably dispassionate protagonist, remarking in turns on the macabre and the surreal with unflinching ambivalence.

Comparison is impossible to resist, as Rodoreda chooses to pitch her tent so deliberately close to that of other writers. The allegory of Rodoreda’s novel is glaringly reminiscent of its more renowned contemporary, J.M. Coetzee’s “Waiting for the Barbarians.” Whereas Coetzee uses myth to provide an account of nobility in the midst of brutality—itself a critique of South African apartheid—Rodoreda’s rootless fantasy world communicates comparatively little of Coetzee’s allegorical power.

Through the unnamed narrator, Rodoreda implements an emotionally stripped style as a stand-in for wanton horror: “The blacksmith did not want me to entomb my child in the tree. He said he would use the ring for some other dead person. I left home, carrying my child, who had turned wooden, like the table.” As originally conceived, this device is supposed to amplify an effect by presenting it in an unusual or grotesque way. The offhand presentation of violence and brutality certainly constitutes a form of defamiliarization, but the effect, conversely, is to sap the book of any real emotional power. Such descriptions abound in the novel in a flat, monotonous way, and the purely grotesque, after intense repetition, has neither comic nor dramatic value.

Thus even those scenes which ought to be most powerful have little impact, as with the death of Senyor, a character of focus for some odd pages: “The blacksmith gave the word for the cement man to commence; they forced open Senyor’s mouth and began to fill it. Senyor’s eyes were bulging; his chest rose twice as he retched.” This would be gruesome enough if such descriptions did not exist in virtually every passage of the novel. What comes next is more unusual. One old woman, refusing to spit on and insult Senyor on his death bed, instead closes the dying man’s eyes so that he does not witness his own humiliation. This ought to be a moment of profound pathos. But in the midst of the barrage of grotesque images, its matter-of-fact account scarcely registers.

Perhaps the novel’s greatest weakness is its inability to truly create characters. Leave aside the enigmatic narrator; the other characters in the book exist only as prose descriptions, devoid of any psychological complexity or, even, thought. This is not typically a genre convention of the mythic allegory, and it greatly hampers Rodoreda’s attempt at the creation of a satisfying fictional universe.

Whether the novel’s emotional gap is a result of Tennent’s translation or Rodoreda original work, other aspects of the novel are simply inaccessible to readers outside the Catalan culture. Recurring images and motifs are, for the same reason, often mysterious. What is the significance of “wisteria” to the author? We are treated to images of wisteria flowers after wisteria flowers, even a “wisteria-laden night,” but any particular import this image may have had in Catalan is sadly incomprehensible to the English reader.

And this is just one of several ways in which “Death in Spring” is a deeply frustrating book. It works so well in theory: an allegorical representation of Franco’s Spain, a kind of literary “Pan’s Labyrinth,” complete with maniacal teenaged stepmothers and vicious town rituals, not to mention the dimension created by the book’s publishing history. But coming out of such an intriguing background, this is a thin novel in every sense of the word.