Death in Spring by Merce Rodoreda

Rich with motifs and symbols intensified by years in exile

Penguin's new reissue of Merce Rodereda's 1986 novel Death in Spring includes a beautifully crafted introduction from Colm Toibin who praises both Rodereda's prose style and her adept storytelling. Rodoreda is regarded as the most important Catalan writer of the post war period and with this reissue is destined to be discovered by a new generation of readers. 

Death in Spring is a later work when Merce Rodoreda, having spent much of her life in France and Switzerland in exile, looks back on the Catalonia of her youth. The prose is rich with motifs and symbols as if intensified to the hyper-real by her years in exile. Colours, as depicted in the cover art, are vivid and deep from the pink of the paint applied annually to houses in the villages to the crimson stains of death in the community. 

The story concerns a 14 year old boy who grows up experiencing the bizarre customs of a small Catalonian town. The most profound traditions include the ritualistic burial of the dead in tree trunks which Rodereda's protagonist experiences at first hand when his own father dies. These disturbing scenes are played out against more comforting observations as the seasons change and the flood waters rise and fall.

Death in Spring is brutal, harsh and steeped in a sense of the Catalan experience during and after the Spanish civil war.  Rodereda's acclaim is surely in part down to her ability to articulate the social reality of a life on the wrong side of the political mainstream.

Death in Spring by Merce Rodereda and translated by Martha Tennant published by Penguin, 150 pages

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