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Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda, Martha Tennent

2009; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 83; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2009.0184

1945-8134

Geraldine Cleary Nichols,

Literature, Culture, and Aesthetics

u NN w 2 w w H D O iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiniiiii This toothsome first novel by Kallia Papadaki, O ichos touakalyptou (The back lot sound), moves precisely on those parameters, exploring the limits of space and?in a manner recallingVargas Llosa?the foraysof theunreal into the mundane coordi nates of the former. The "six common-usage-space stories" in Papadaki's volume are only tenuously linked together by the fact that the characters are all residents of the same block of flats, sharing the back lot space. Critics who have pointed at this as the novel's main weakness, however, do not acknowledge that this tenu ous connection is in factan allegory for a primary principle of urban existence: forced into asphyxiating cohabitation inside the mega-city environment, humanity rubbing off on one another's skin, we are led to become more duplicitous, more guarded, more aggressively vigilant of our private space, with our "com mon (back)lot" as the dirtiest and most unpleasant of all our surfaces. The neighborhood becomes a Sar treanhellwhere theothers exist only to bother (with their voices, their nosiness, their cigarette butts, their very presence) and proximity annuls theneighborly spirit. Papadaki's language reinforc es artfully this sense of asphyxia tion, with its fast-paced rhythms,its flowing syncopated syntax, and its naturalistic rawness, offered mostly through first-personnarratives that render thepersonal sense of jarring against the Other even more explicit. Each story centers around a case of thedeception of, and crime against, a fellow human citizen: a blind man abducted by the immigrantmafia, a cuckolded writer suspecting his American Facebook buddy of being a serial killer, a corrupt ambulance chaser's gopher procuring his next iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiini victim, two gossipy building super intendents falling prey to a con man, a former psychiatric patient scammed by theabusive guards that come back to haunt her, a former thiefhaunted by her past associates. At the same time, the stories tran scend, each separately and in their totality,the level of easy social ser monizing and can be read as allego riesof the fiction writer's profession: a blind person looking to clarify the mystery ofotherpeople, an imagina tivemind following links and con nections to theheart of darkness, a soul in tormentthirstingforcolorful, exotic dreams of another life, people reinventing themselves so often that the performative takes them over, a nosy presence intoother people's privacy, someone slightlycrazywho can nevertheless see truths others cannot. ChristinaDokou Universityof Athens,Greece Merce Rodoreda. Death in Spring. Martha Tennent, tr. Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2009. 150 pages. $14.95. isbn978-1-934824-11-5 The brilliant fiction of Catalan authorMerce Rodoreda (1908-83) is slowly becoming more widely avail able in English. Martha Tennent's fine translationof La mort i laprima vera (1986) joins David Rosenthal's translations of The Time of the Doves (1962; tr.1980),Camellia Street (1966; tr.1993), andMy Christina andOther Stories (1969; tr. 1984), as well as Josep Sobrer's translation of A Bro ken Mirror (1974; tr.2006). Many of the factors thatmade Rodoreda a distinctive writer in her native lan guage are evident in thisnovel: her startlingly original characters and elegant plots; her language, unusu ally colloquial for literaryCatalan and spare as a sun-bleached bone; iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii the recourse tohyperrealism to lend verisimilitude to events fantastic, transcendental, tragic, or mundane. Death inSpringdefies easy clas sification. It might be seen as specu lative fiction,political allegory, or a poetically drawn ethnography of an isolated community whose ritu alistic behavior ensures that no one lives happily, now or ever after. Published posthumously, the novel offersa profound meditation on life, its strifeand preordained end. The village's inhabitants live "consumed by the fear of desire. They want to suffer so they won't think about desire." The moribund are dragged intoa forest,forced to swallow fresh cement, and then entombed in liv ing trees. The entire community attends this ritual reaffirmationof the indissoluble link between life and death. The paradoxes of human existencemake itall but unbearable, as the elderly oligarch explains to the young protagonist: "Accompa nied by thewish to live, you have thewish to die; it'llbe like that till the end. Spring is sad, in spring all theworld...