In an isolated village in the Catalan mountains, an adolescent boy goes for a dip in the local river, swimming downstream to the nearby forest. Here, in the leafy half-light, amidst an ominous clustering of butterflies and bees, he witnesses his father carve open a tree and fold himself into it, in anticipation of certain death. A highlight of the marvellous Penguin European Writers collection, Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda is a bildungsroman unlike any other, a surreal tale of oppression, ritual and exile, with a nod to the darkest folklore.
Often read as an allegory for Catalan life under the fascist rule of Franco, Rodoreda’s intense novel is told through the words of our unnamed teenager. Born and raised in this peculiarly out-of-time village, he knows only its customs and traditions, oblivious to how horrific they would seem to the outside world. This is a place where the elders lock their children into cupboards and troop out to the gloomy forest, where their dead are holed up in trees. Each arboreal tomb is marked by a named plaque. It is the accepted fate of every villager, their plaque made for them on the very day of their birth, by the resident blacksmith.
It is a place too, of curious feasts, deathly swimming challenges, and a fetishistic view of all things equine, surveyed by an elderly gentleman from his house high above the village, on an ‘ivy-covered cliff that on late summer afternoons looked like a wave of blood’.
Not for the faint-hearted, Death in Spring is a disquieting read, so cryptic that it often demands laser beam concentration. In his excellent introduction, Colm Tóibín tells us that Rodoreda wrote it while in exile from Franco’s regime, when her beloved Catalan language was effectively banned in her homeland. Viewed through this prism, the dystopian allegory is vivid, none more so than in its discordant depiction of nature.
In what one would imagine is a verdant landscape, decay and disruption are never far away. The fragrant wisteria that blooms throughout the village is destined to upwrench the houses, omnipresent bees begin to suck the bitterest of flowers, while clouds of pale butterflies harry and flap, a rotten odour emanating from the forest floor.
As the boy becomes a man, he looks to the future and sees only a replication of his father’s life. In one key scene, he is addressed by the village’s only prisoner (accused of theft and destined never to be free).
‘It’s fear. They want to be afraid. They want to believe, and they want to suffer, suffer, only suffer…’
Whether the narrator’s own instinct for survival will trump any potential acts of resistance is one of the questions considered by Rodoreda, in this simultaneously captivating and unnerving novel. It’s an undeniably challenging read but the pay-off delivers some beautiful writing and much food for thought.
Originally published in 1986, a few years after Rodoreda’s death, here it is translated from the original Catalan by Martha Tennent (2009).
Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda is published by Penguin, 160 pages.
