War So Much War. This item is unavailable.War So Much War

CATALONIAN COMING-OF-AGE

Merce Rodoreda's final novel is a meditation on the consequences of moral degradation and the inescapable presence of evil.

Despite its title, there is little of war and much of the fantastic in this coming-of-age story, which was the last novel Merce Rodoreda published during her lifetime.

We first meet its young protagonist, Adria Guinart, as he is leaving Barcelona out of boredom and a thirst for freedom, embarking on a long journey through the backwaters of a rural land that one can only suppose is Catalonia, accompanied by the interminable, distant rumblings of an indefinable war. In vignette-like chapters and with a narrative style imbued with the fantastic, Guinart meets with numerous adventures and peculiar characters who offer him a composite, if surrealistic, view of an impoverished, war-ravaged society and shape his perception of his place in the world.

As in Rodoreda's Death in Spring (Open Letter, 2015), nature and death play a fundamental role in a narrative that often takes on a phantasmagorical quality and seems to be a meditation on the consequences of moral degradation and the inescapable presence of evil.

Mercè Rodoreda is widely regarded as the most important Catalan writer of the 20th century. Exiled to France during the Spanish Civil War, and only able to return to Catalonia in the mid-1960s, she wrote a number of highly praised works, including The Time of the Doves (Arrow Books, 2986) and Death in Spring (Open Letter, 2009). Maruxa Relano is a journalist and translator based in Barcelona. She has worked as a translator for The Wall Street Journal, a writer for NY1, and wrote articles for the New York Daily News, Newsday and New York magazine, among other publications. Martha Tennent was born in the US, but has lived most of her life in Barcelona where she served as founding dean of the School of Translation and Interpreting at the University of Vic. She translates from Spanish and Catalan, and received an NEA Translation Fellowship for her work on Rodoreda.