War, So Much War

"Rodoreda had bedazzled me by the sensuality with which she reveals things within the atmosphere of her novels." — Gabriel García Marquez

"Rodoreda plumbs a sadness that reaches beyond historic circumstances. . an almost voluptuous vulnerability." — Natasha Wimmer,

"It is a total mystery to me why [Rodoreda] isn't widely worshipped; along with Willa Cather, she's on my list of authors whose works I intend to have read all of before I die. Tremendous, tremendous writer." — John Darnielle, The Mountain Goats

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

We first meet its young protagonist, Adrià 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 , nature and death play an fundamental role in a narrative that often takes on a phantasmagoric quality and seems to be a meditation on the consequences of moral degradation and the inescapable presence of evil.

Mercè Rodoreda Twenty-Two Short Stories, The Time of the Doves, Camellia Street, Garden by the Sea