Rodoreda Merce Livres

Collected here are thirty of Mercè Rodoreda's most moving and inventive stories, presented in chronological order of their publication from three of Rodoreda's most beloved short-story collections; Twenty-Two Stories, It Seemed Like Silk and Other Stories, and My Christina and Other Stories. These short fictions capture Rodoreda's full range of expression, from quiet literary realism to fragmentary impressionism to dark symbolism. Few writers have captured so clearly, or explored so deeply, the lives of women who are stuck somewhere between senseless modernity and suffocating tradition-Rodoreda's "women are notable for their almost pathological lack of volition, but also for their acute sensitivity, a nearly painful awareness of beauty" (Natasha Wimmer).

Lushly surreal, Rodoreda's masterpiece is a mythological depiction of a city ruled by rituals, almost like Franco's Spain. Death In Spring tells the story of the bizarre and destructive customs of a nameless town - burying the dead in trees after filling their mouths with cement to prevent their soul from escaping, or sending a man to swim in the river that courses underneath the town - through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy who must come to terms with the rhyme and reason of this ritual violence, and with his wild, child-like and teenaged stepmother.

A haunting classic of modern Catalan literature from one of Spain's most prestigious writers. Extending from the prosperous Barcelona of the 1870s to the advent of the Franco dictatorship and the Spanish Civil War, A Broken Mirror traces three generations of a burgeoning aristocratic family at the turn of the 19th century. When Salvador Valldaura first meets Teresa Goday he is seduced by her velvety eyes and contagious laughter. Valldaura, a wealthy diplomat, and Teresa, a widowed fishmonger's daughter, marry and move into a grand, sprawling villa on the outskirts of Barcelona. In that house, their family flourishes and fractures across a century of change: from Teresa's second husband and her secret, illegitimate son Masdéu, to daughter Sofia and Sofia's playboy husband Eladi, and son, Ramon, tormented by a heinous act from his childhood and unknowingly in love with his half-sister, as well as several generations of servants, ghosts and even a rodent. Through a kaleidoscope of perspectives and turning upon events both intimate and historic, A Broken Mirror tells the story of a splintering matriarchal dynasty founded on love, lies, secrets, and betrayals. Translated by Josep Miquel Sobrer

Adri Guinart 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 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.