Death in Spring Book

This posthumously published (1986) slim masterpiece by Catalonian Mercè Rodoreda (1908-1983) will appeal to dedicated readers who don't require plot or concrete realism, and are willing to give up control for a visceral experience. Although it is challenging to inhabit the surreal and anthropomorphic narrative, the best way to read this is to let go and allow the lyrical juxtapositions to open up your senses. The book's poetic but brutally beautiful passages are delicately spun and dream-like. Rodoreda's eerie brand of magical realism vanquishes the literal world while permeating it with resounding effect. Again, I can't stress enough that you must be willing to capitulate to Rodoreda and curb any tendency to gain dominion over the narrative.

As you open to the first page, you are introduced to the fourteen-year-old narrator--who, by the way, is neither coy nor child-like, who becomes an adult at the end of Part Two (of Four). He's trying to reconcile his community's savagery with his limited and insulated worldview. The cloistered village of Maraldina he lives in is suspended perilously over craggy rocks that span over a river, whose current both cleanses and destroys. Annually, by lottery, a young man is chosen to swim the dark length of river under the village, which results in death or mutilation.

Legend has it that this fable-like town was born out of desire, at the river where two shadows joined at the mouth. Now, the townspeople must root out ardent longing with ruthless, barbaric practices, the most inhumane customs imaginable. When you die, you are entombed in a tree. During your last breaths, your mouth is filled with cement to prevent your soul from flying out. There's a prisoner, forced to neigh like a horse, who is also a source of wisdom that the citizens both clamor to hear and yet defile. Pregnant women are blindfolded, so that their sons will look like their fathers. The liturgy of violence is relentless, the bleak mood underscored and yet transcended by Rodoreda's exquisite prose.

Early on it is apparent that the novel is a metaphor for oppression. Comparisons to THE LOTTERY are the most obvious at first, but the style and focus and depth are completely different. Jackson's citizens pay blind obedience to tradition--the power of the crowd subverts the individual. Rodoreda's novel illustrates allegiance to a town's customs of ritualized violence, too, but the citizens possess an individual, smug moral certainty. Sanctioned violence is executed with self-righteous authority.

Death and decay entwine with the natural bloom and symmetry of the environment, a pulchritude that twists around its tragedies. The winding wisteria is potently aromatic, and grows to wrench up houses; bees have a menacing consciousness; soap bubbles morph to glass.

"I stopped by the edge of the river and covered my ears with my open hands so I would not hear the quiet. I crossed the river again, swimming underwater because the bee was following me: I would have killed it if I could. I wanted it to be lost and alone in the dog roses where spiders lay in wait for it. On the other side of the river, I left behind the odor of caterpillar-engorged leaves and encountered the fragrance of wisteria and the stench of manure. Death in spring."

What a terrifying, disorienting, horrible, elegant story of exile, hope, and despair. Rodoreda's story has its genesis in her own experience, living as a Catalonian under the Fascist rule of Franco and later as an exile in France. Other writers, such as Carolina de Robertis, Junot Diaz, and Milan Kundera, have drawn from their personal experiences as citizens under regimes of terror. However, Rodoerda is largely unrecognized in the English speaking community. Martha Tennent exquisitely translated this book into English in 2009. Unforgettable and utterly bewitching, DEATH IN SPRING is alive with devastating and furious beauty--a mad, inflamed, yet crushingly nuanced allegory of atrocity, told with astonishing humanity.