Merce Rodoreda Research Articles

THEMATIC AND STRUCTURAL PARALLELS OF UKRAINIAN AND CATALYTIC PROSE

The typical and recurring structural components of the prose of Merce Rodoroda, the classic of the Catalan literature of the XX century, are considered. Their role in creating the national coloring of the novel is determined. A comparative analysis of the poetic peculiarities of Merce Rodoreda’s prose with the structure of some works of Ukrainian prose is carried out. The comparative aspect of the new Ukrainian and Catalan prose, which has in-depth general features, is by now unexplored. The problem of the ratio of universal and original in art is developed over considerable time in a different genre and methodological planes. And if, for example, the Irish component in the British literature has been studied quite thoroughly, then the national peculiarities of Ukrainian and Catalan literatures have been studied less than the mentioned one. At the same time, a comparative analysis of the differences between literature in Ukrainian and Russian and in Catalan and Castilian can be indicative. Historically, the literature was developed in very similar conditions: both sought to merge with the European context, and both experienced a strong gravitation (and often political opposition) of the Russian and Castilian states. The discovery of separate laws of interaction between Catalan and Castilian literatures will allow a better understanding of the laws of the national literature development. The article shows peculiar structural components of the prose, which with a great deal of probability will form the national originality of any European novel.

UN SANTORAL LAIC DE REFERÈNCIA. LES SÈRIES D’ENTREVISTES A FIGURES CULTURALS EN EL TARDOFRANQUISME

Following the path of Josep Pla with Homenots, in the 1960s and 1970s several series of interviews with cultural figures happened at the same time in Catalonia. Baltasar Porcel published interviews in Serra d’Or, Robert Saladrigas in Destino, Lluis Busquets in El Correo Catalan and Montserrat Roig and Joaquim M. Puyal had popular TV interview programs (Personatges and Voste pregunta) on the Catalan channel of Television Espanola. Salvador Espriu, Josep Pla and Merce Rodoreda also appeared in the Spanish TV program A fondo and Antoni Ribas produced the film Catalans universals. This article aims to map all these initiatives as a form of “laybook of saints” for a culture that, having survived the toughest years of the dictatorship, at that point needed new reference names to face a time of profound renewal towards a hypothetical normalization.

Bodies of Evidence, Resistance and Protest: Embodying the Spanish Civil War on the Contemporary Spanish Stage

AbstractThis article explores ways in which the Spanish Civil War has been represented and performed on contemporary Spanish stages, focusing analysis on three productions: Àlex Rigola’s 2015 adaptation of Incerta glòria by Joan Sales; Joan Ollé’s 2014 adaptation of Mercè Rodoreda La plaza del Diamante; and Carme Portaceli’s 2015 adaptation of Carmen Domingo’s Només són dones/ Solo son mujeres. I use one of the most emblematic plays to construct and explore a space for memory of the Spanish Civil War, José Sanchis Sinisterra’s ¡Ay, Carmela! (1987), to investigate a shift in emphasis from the urge to create a space for memory to concern with how the often traumatic memories of the war and its aftermath are inscribed corporeally. I argue that in the context of contemporary discursive practice about the Spanish Civil War, the direction theatrical explorations are taking presents an opportunity for innovative reflection on the way we look at bodies in relation to events of collective violence and trauma, centring not only on the search for the bodies of the dead but also on ways in which living bodies continue to be marked by and transmit the impact of these events into the future.ResumenEn este artículo se propone explorar la manera en que se ha representado la Guerra Civil Española en el escenario, centrándonos en tres espectáculos: Incerta glòria de Joan Sales (adapt. y dir. Àlex Rigola, 2015); La plaza del Diamante de Mercè Rodoreda (adapt. y dir. Joan Ollé, 2014–2015); y Només són dones/ Solo son mujeres de Carmen Domingo (adapt. y dir. Carme Portaceli, 2015–2016). Volviendo a uno de las obras más emblemáticas relacionadas con la construcción y exploración de un espacio para la memoria de la Guerra Civil, ¡Ay, Carmela! (1987), escrita por José Sanchis Sinisterra, se investigará la manera en que ésta nos ayuda a identificar y vislumbrar un cambio de paradigma en el tratamiento teatral de la memoria histórica desde el deseo de crear un espacio para la memoria al interés en los procesos por los cuales las experiencias traumáticas de la guerra y el franquismo son corporeizadas e inscritas en el cuerpo. Se propondrá que el énfasis escénico en los cuerpos de la Guerra Civil representa una oportunidad para reflexionar sobre las pautas utilizadas para estudiar el impacto corporal de la violencia y el trauma colectivos, y considerar cómo los cuerpos vivos y vivientes incorporan y transmiten las huellas de este impacto hacia el futuro.

EL COS ENTRE NÉIXER, DESNÉIXER I MORIR A MERCÈ RODOREDA, MARIA-MERCÈ MARÇAL I IMMA MONSÓ

This article brings together the first chapter of La placa del Diamant by Merce Rodoreda; the poems which deal with the mother figure in Maria-Merce Marcal’s posthumous collection Rao del cos; and a key part of Imma Monso’s novel Un home de paraula, in which the narrator’s beloved husband suddenly dies in front of her eyes. The three texts are analyzed through meaningful intertextual connections regarding the representation of the body and the problematic space for the maternal in Western culture. Moreover, they are identified as narratives of mourning in a way that problematizes the Freudian distinction between the supposedly healthy process of mourning and the allegedly pathological process of melancholia.

WAR, TRAUMA AND THE FANTASTIC IN MERCÈ RODOREDA’S QUANTA, QUANTA GUERRA…

Merce Rodoreda’s bleak novel on war, Quanta, quanta guerra… (1980), has inspired multiple readings that have sought coherence in a work that resists logic. Contributing to the text’s rich indeterminacy is its confounding of gender norms and literary genres, which many studies have pinpointed but not linked to Rodoreda’s subject of war. An initial objective in this article is to explore the implications of these ambiguities for the dynamics of conflict. A second, related purpose is to analyze the presence in the work of the fantastic and the uncanny with regard to trauma, an aspect that scholars have not yet developed. I will argue that the fantastic endows unspeakable experiences with tangible shape and raises issues around remembering and disremembering traumatic pasts. The narrative not only abounds in elements derived from the fantastic and the uncanny, such as doubles and reflections, but also privileges important motifs of trauma present in Sigmund Freud’s works, with which Rodoreda was well-acquaint...

Screening El cuarto de atrás : Carmen Martín Gaite’s Hollywood Escritor Negro

HOLLYWOOD cinema is carmen Martin Gaite's constant source of reference for her 1987 essay usos amorosos de la postguerra espanola as the model for a modernity the Spanish Post-Civil War generation was eager to access from a society in ruins and isolated by a dictatorial government. As a consequence, 1940s and 1950s Spain was a nation that had more cinema seats per capita than any other European country as a society of film addicts immersed in the culture of evasion from the rigors and oppression of that dictatorship (Carr 164). Hollywood films were favored by this Spanish public of cinema addicts over national, mostly folkloric films, for their understated social criticism even though some were subject to rigorous censorship with many banned from release. Still, American movies were preferred for their emphasis on entertainment over controversy or critique, in contrast to the more social and politically conscious cinemas of Italy, France, and Great Britain (Vernon 2). Generation-of-1898 writer, Jose Martinez Ruiz (Azorin), reiterated this preference in Spain for Hollywood films in the introduction to his book on cinema, El cine y el momento, when he said that he preferred foreign movies and, in particular, American movies (5). This preference was also the result of the unavailability of national films in a post-war economy in which the few films released were folkloric musicals and religious dramas. Moreover, since the 1920s generations of movie enthusiasts were subjected to a high exposure of Hollywood that made them eager for the modernity, economic progress, and independent women these films promoted. For example, in 1931, out of the five hundred films released that year in Madrid, 260 were American, 43 were American dubbed in Spanish, and only three were Spanish productions (Gubern 127). Still, the Republican government of the 1930s, more liberal in every aspect of society in contrast to previous governments, particularly as regards to women's rights, curbed and censored modern patterns of behavior in Hollywood films as well in spite of the progressive ideology of its policies. The dictatorial regime of Francisco Franco that followed heightened even further the extent of this censorship. Censorship, however, did not prevent Hollywood films from having a great impact in the Spanish screens. Edited Marlene Dietrich movies, for instance, affected greatly the desires of the adolescent Catalan protagonist of Merce Rodoreda's 1938 novel Aloma. In this novel, Aloma fantasized she was una Dietrich d'estar per casa when she saw her reflection in one of the windows of a subway car (18). And films were indeed an influence Rodoreda stressed in her introduction to her 1974 novel Mirall trencat when she said that a fragment of a good movie could be the source of inspiration for a novel (9). Although the bibliography and references on the subject of the influences of Hollywood on Spanish literature, cinema, and society are numerous, few address extensively specific Hollywood films targeted in Spanish literature for an influence in plot or character. Examples of articles that reference Hollywood appear in Women's Narrative and Film in Twentieth-Century Spain, edited by Ofelia Ferran and Kathleen M. Glenn. Another interesting collection of articles is Refiguring Spain: Cinema/Media/Representation, edited by Marsha Kinder. However, neither of these collections offer specific examples of direct influences or source of inspiration in plot outline or character development. References to Hollywood stars are frequent as well in Carmen Martin Gaite's novels, particularly in the 1978 autobiographical and metafictional El cuarto de atras. These references do not reveal influences in plot or an explicit source of inspiration but they lead to a hidden path Belen Gopegui revealed in the prologue to Martin Gaite's posthumously published novel Los parentescos. Gopegui writes that Carmen Martin Gaite always avoided speaking about her novels during the writing process, opting instead to refer to a movie to express her views. …

The Spanish Civil War in Catalan narrative

The first part of this article presents the literary output on the subject of the Spanish Civil War written during the war and immediately after it, between 1936 and 1939. What stand out from this time are brief, non-fictional narrative forms which were often meant for the press, such as chronicles from both the battlefront (where Pere Calders excels) and the home front. Among the fictional genres, short stories prevailed during the war, while the novel, a genre which requires the slow assimilation of experience, found its maximum expression in the post-war period in two canonical works by Joan Sales and Merce Rodoreda, which shall be analysed in the second part of this article.

Between the Abject and the Sublime: Excessive Bodies in Mercè Rodoreda's El Carrer de Les Camèlies and Mirall Trencat

This article traces vestiges of Noucentista iconography in the construction of the female body in Merce Rodoreda's El carrer de les Camelies and Mirall trencat. It argues that an analysis of Noucentista representations of the female form in the plastic arts provides an invaluable insight into the political, social, and aesthetic principles that underpin the movement, thus ultimately informing the reading of Rodoreda's formulation of the female body of contextual as well as intertextual detail. Eugeni d'Ors's concept-novel La Ben Plantada featured a mythic female character of classical attributes and proportions. This literary figure had a sculptural quality that conformed to the concepts of form, volume, and structure applied by Noucentista plastic artists in their representations of the female nude. However, whereas Noucentista sculpture best expressed the ideology's investment in notions of measure, balance, and order, it also betrayed a concern with bodily limits and the problems of the body's containm...

Un viatge a l'infern: «Nit i boira» de Mercè Rodoreda

The story «Nit i boira» by Merce Rodoreda is one of the first literary texts written after the liberation of the German concentration camps. The author, who did not experience the camps first hand, is able to capture their essential characteristics using two “fundamental” paradigms: death and hell, as Paul Celan and Primo Levi did during the same era.

The Red Notebook by Arantxa Urretabizkaia, Kristin Addis

are earth's plague, rotten. The earth would be calmer if it were green less,without thisfury,thisblindwill that consumes everything but craves more...." This beautifullywritten, deeply disturbing vision has precedents in Merce Rodoreda's earlier fiction, and Tennent's translation will inter est readers takenwith The Time of theDoves. Death in Springwill also intrigue those who appreciate sur realist or experimental art, for the plasticity of itsdescriptions evokes comparisons to visual artists who were contemporaries of Rodoreda, such as Frida Kahlo, Louise Bour geois, Georgia O'Keefe, orRemedios Varo. The book itself is a pleasure to (be)hold. Open Letter has pro vided a beautiful setting fora trans lation so successful that one scarcely recalls that thenovel was written in another language. [Editorialnote:For more fictionby Rodoreda, see the short storyon page 57 of this issue.] GeraldineC. Nichols UniversityofFlorida Teresa Solana. A Not So Perfect Crime. Peter Bush, tr. London. Bitter Lemon (Consortium, distr.).2009 (?2008). 286 pages. $14.95. isbn978-1-904738-34-3 After winning the 2007 Brigada 21 prize forbest crimenovel inCatalan and enjoying translated success, A Not So PerfectCrime sets the stage for a series of comic novels featur ing detectives Borja and his brother Eduard. Unfortunately, the title as translated invites the comment that thebook should be called "a not so perfect crime novel." Because the author's intent seems to be more to satirize Barcelona society than to create yet another mystery, it takes quite a while to get moving. We are 122 pages in before the body hits the floor and, even after that, TERESA SOLANA -r MURDER AND MAYHEM IN BARCELONA the background stories and digres sions regularly interrupt. Sometimes these are entertaining,but often they make one impatient to get on with the story. The unlikely private eyes are twinswho pretend not to be twins and conceal their lower-class ori gins. Borja has a married mistress and a dalliance with the narrator's sister-in-law. Eduard's relationship with his wife complicates almost every attempt at detecting because she does not know he and his broth er are detectives. Borja, a sort of Poirot with a shortage of graymat ter,seems tobe in thedetecting busi ness to tease money out of high-soci ety clients and enjoy the good life. He bumbles more than he deduces and with a lotof luck talkshimself out of various pickles. Eduard seems to be in the business because Borja talkedhim into it. None of this has anything to do with the crime. A prominent politician's wife is poisoned with a marron glace that arrives anony mously in a gift box on Christmas day. The politician has a mistress, of course, and ironically hired the E brothers to discover whether his E wife was having an affairwith a E Catalan painter who never actually E appears inperson in thebook. After E about 250 pages, the solution to the E crime pops up abruptly and eas- E ily.The killer confesses quickly and E conveniently. A reader with famil- E iaritywith themerry-go-round of E Catalan politics and societypresum- E ably finds numerous inside jokes, E but most of thesewould be lost on E outsiders. The book is not without E itsmoments, however. The dialogue E is often funny, the situations hilari- E ous, and the characters similar to E theexaggerated typeswe enjoy in a E Kaufman and Hart play. E /. Madison Davis E UniversityofOklahoma E Arantxa Urretabizkaia. The Red Note- E book. Kristin Addis, tr. Reno. Center for E Basque Studies, University of Nevada. E 2008. 126 pages. $19.95. isbn 978-1-| 877802-82-9 1 Itwill come as no surprise to any E reader familiar with the political E situation in the Basque Country to E learn that the theme of politics is E never far from the surface of con- E temporary Basque fiction.What is E trulystriking, however, is thedegree E of subtlety and nuance with which E the most able writers in Euskara E have dealt with such a vexing and E complex topic.While Arantxa Urre- E tabizkaia isperhaps lesswell known E outside the Basque Country than E her peers such as Bernardo Atxaga E...

The Fate of Lisa Sperling

The Fate of Lisa Sperling A storyby Merce Rodoreda . . .HERE COME THE LOVERS . . .WHERE ARE THE LOVERS? Madame Letard picked up two saccharin tablets,put one inher cup, and was about toput theother inher subtenant Lisa Sperling's. "No!" She stopped thehand with an abrupt gesture. "Do you still have some sugar?" "There's a bit left." "Then I'll take sugar this evening." She picked up the steaming cup, said goodnight, and went intoher room. Closed thedoor and slowly turned the key. She set the cup on the littletable in frontof the window and stood awhile, not surewhere tostart all thework shewanted todo but perhaps wouldn't. I'll begin with the suitcase. She took itout fromunder thebed and put iton top. Letters, pictures. It's allmine, but itseems like italready belongs to someone else. She had thin,bitter lips. The corners of hermouth were pale, slightly purple in the center, and her teethwere yellow, with large spaces between them. It looks like themouth of a corpse, a friendof hers had once said. She picked up the letterfromher son and started reading it for the hundredth time. "Dearest mother, today we leave. Once we're settled inMinsk, you can come. I hope the trainswill soon be running properly. Idon't want you tohave to make such a long journey ifit'sgoing Barcelona-born Merce Rodoreda (1909-83) went into exile in 1939, when the Spanish CivilWar ended. She lived first in France and then inSwitzerland, returning to Spain in 1972. A prolificwriter of stories, she also published several novels, including La placa delDiamant (1962; Eng.The Time of the Doves, 1981), Mirall trencat (1974; Eng. A Broken Mirror, 2006), and La mort i la primavera, (1986; Eng. Deaf/7 in Spring, 2009; see review on page 66 of this issue). She is regarded as the most important Catalan fictionwriter of the twentieth century (see WLT, May 2007, 12-15). Martha Tennent isthe translator, most recently, of Merce Rodoreda's gothic fable Deaf/?inSpring(2009) and Emili Rosales's historical novelThe Invisible City (2009). tobe difficult foryou. Trustme." She folded the letterslowly and kissed it.But then thewar with Russia had begun, and she had stayed on alone, isolated, inLimoges, where she had settled after fleeingParis. She took out threephotos. One was her sister: "To my dear Lisa. Souvenir fromAnna Sperling. Odessa, 1916." One was her when she was eigh teen. She was wearing a gauze dress, white, with awide velvet belt. The white gauze dress with the red velvet belt. The bow, tied behind her, hung down over her skirt. Iwas blonder; shewas the one who was going to succeed. How far away that girl isnow, how very far!She put the two photos together.Anna had died young, TB. She'd lefta diary and a collection of verses. She, at least, hasn't suffered somuch. The thirdphoto was ofher as a bride. So many dreams then.The only thing I've got leftis my son's love.My husband, no, not him. If only the kisses he offered other women had been given tome. She put thephotos back in the suitcase and shut it. She stood in themiddle of the room. Now, what do I do? Ah, yes, the books. On the table layhalf a dozen. She picked themup one by one, looked at the spines, slowly running her hand across the covers.Where did I put thepaper and string?She found them in thedrawer of the little table and began packing. From thenext room she could hear the sound ofplates.Madame Letard was washing thedishes. A cat was meowing. On a piece ofpaper shewrote: Monsieur Jean Schuster, 148, Avenue Carnot, Limoges. This past winter I thought that... he was so attentive tome. He's alone too. Itwas just friend ship. I'm getting old. She put her hands on her cheeks; the skin was loose, full of pores, earth colored. Skin thathas lived. Clothes. She opened thewardrobe wide and began to remove piles of clothes. She selected themand put themon the chairs. The nightgowns forMaria: she needs them. These blouses for . . .and the dresses? She took out a fox furand looked at itforawhile. The coat Iwore how...

Unveiling Disconcertment: "La Meva Cristina" and "El Batalló Perdut" as Literature of Exile

The end of Spanish Civil war marked beginning of a massive exodus that displaced a whole generation of Spaniards who still carry with them scars of exile. Many expatriates adapted to disconcertment of their new circumstances, and upon their return carried with them an amalgamation of who they were and what they had become, making their process of reintegration quite difficult. Taking into consideration—as per Frederic Jameson—that literature is a cultural product that textualizes Real through author's political unconscious, it is possible to offer a reading of Merce Rodoreda's La meva Cristina and Pere Calders's El batallo perdut as literature of exile. The use of fantastic elements and situations where disconcertment reigns can be seen as an articulation of bizarre experience of rootlessness. Through use of fantastic these stories contribute to representation of exile and translate sensations and emotions that history books can rarely capture. Their ultimate triumph is that of replicating the feel of rootlessness. This article looks at life circumstances of authors in order to help establish context of production of stories. Later it examines use of fantastic genre as a way of projecting ambiguity that arises from banishment. Finally, it unveils various elements within stories that point toward disconcertment of exile: identity crisis and status determination; acceptance and inertia; attempts at defining an incongruent space; pervasive wounds and scars; and reintegration and remembrance

Ghostly Presences and Blank Pages: Mirall Trencat, País Íntim , and La Meitat de L'ànima

Haunting, for Avery Gordon, describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for granted realities, and for Jo Labanyi ghosts are form in which the past lives on in the present. Ghosts and haunting play a major role in the narratives that are the subject of this essay—Merce Rodoreda's Mirall trencat, Maria Barbal's Pais intim, Carme Riera's La meitat de l'anima—and assume various forms. The Civil War is a ghostly presence in each of the books, there is a real ghost in Mirall trencat, and the specter of its author—the grande dame of contemporary Catalan literature—haunts the novel as well as some of Rodoreda's successors. Also important to this essay is the concept of the blank page, brilliantly illustrated in a tale by Isak Dinesen about the art of storytelling and the impact of silence. Both Rodoreda and Barbal, whose novels are characterized by textual lacunae and disruptions, employ a rhetoric of silence and frequently do not narrate important events. Riera too makes use of a discourse of silence in creating a work of sustained ambiguity. La meitat de l'ani ma is a text which does not reveal its secrets and which systematically casts doubt upon the explanations it sets forth

Gender, Class, and Nation: Merce Rodoreda and the Subjects of Modernism (review)

Gender, Class, and Nation: Merce Rodoreda and the Subjects of Modernism (review)

Catalan Women Writers and Artists: Revisionist Views from a Feminist Space

Through a close textual analyses of the work of Merce Rodoreda, Remedios Varo, Montserrat Roig, and Carme Riera, this study isolates that which defines a distinctly female narrative voice in Catalan art and literature. From the success of Catalan surrealism, through the destructive years of the Spanish Civil War and to the new beginnings of post-Franco liberation, these writers and artists represent the struggles of women throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

Vidas im/proprias: Transformaciones del sujeto femenino en la narrativa española contemporánea by María Pilar Rodríguez (review)

ioio Reviews and authors featured in Molero de la Iglesia's study, but had she taken a different analytical approach and discussed the novels under scrutiny with reference to theories of postmodernism, for example, her work could have proved far more coherent and valid. Royal Holloway, University of London Shelley Godsland Vidas im/proprias: Transformaciones del sujeto femenino en la narrativa espanola contempordnea . By Maria Pilar Rodriguez. (Purdue Studies in Romance Lit? eratures, 19) West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. 2000. xi + 222 pp. ?41-50. This book is an original contribution to research but rather difficultto figureout. The purpose ofthe study, as established in the preface, is to 'explorar las transformaciones del sujeto femenino en la narrativa espanola contemporanea en el periodo que va desde los comienzos de la posguerra hasta la actualidad' (p. ix). In this preface reference is made to the classic concept of Bildungsroman, but not much attention is paid to the possibility of a female Bildungsroman, which has been explored by other critics and would have been usefully employed when tackling the differenttexts studied here. Even though the analysis of the texts is original, the way in which the study is laid out is hard to understand. The focus is sometimes lost in the course of the chapters and the concentration on theories grounded in psychoanalysis is often off-putting. Maria Pilar Rodriguez chooses to concentrate on narrative fiction written in the decades followingthe establishment ofthe dictatorship in Spain to the 1990s: Carmen Laforet's Nada (1944), Elena Soriano's La playa de los locos (1955), Merce Rodoreda's La placa del Diamant (1962), Carme Riera's *Te deix, amor, la mar com a penyora' (1975) and 'Jopos per testimoni les gavines' (1977), Carmen Gomez Ojea's Losperros de Hecate (1985), and Luisa Etxenike's Efectos secundarios (1996). Apparently, the connection between the texts is that they all consist of first-person female narratives in which some type of development or transformation takes place. However, this con? cept of 'development/transformation' does not come across clearly in the study. The fact that the title ofthe book refers to transformations of the feminine subject would lead the reader to think that the author will employ theories of female Bildungsroman (following Labovitz and Hirsch), but these are only mentioned in the introduction and the bibliography, and are hardly referredto in the core of the book. The author's argument seems to respond to her personal perception, which is not clearly stated, rather than to any type of continuity or relationship between the texts studied. The analysis is developed by means of a psychoanalytical feminist approach in order to produce a Cultural Studies response finally,but the emphasis on the former makes evidence of the latter difficultto identify.The author gives only brief accounts (rather than a comprehensive and detailed examination) of women's situation in Spain in order to situate the texts within their respective socio-historical contexts. This prevents the reader from identifying a clear connection between the approach taken and the response produced in the conclusion as this link is neither clarified nor emphasized throughout the chapters. As regards structure, the book is laid out in chronological order but the chapters are uneven, especially towards the end. The last chapter, dealing with Etxenike's novel, is extremely short and rather weak. It could have been enriched by showing the relationship between Efectos secundarios and the other texts preceding it. There is also a misconception or misunderstanding of the meaning of female development, for the emphasis on psychological problems associated with the novel's protagonists negates the possibility of gendered identity and alternative forms of development. MLR, 97.4, 2002 1011 The chapters do not fittogether with respect to the main aspects of transformation studied. While Chapters 1-4 centre on youth, old age, and married life respectively, the others deal with pleasure as subversion, alternative homorelations, and disease. This diversity is not conducive to the sustained development of the argument of the book. Finally, there are some inconsistencies with translations. Quotations in languages outside the Peninsula (e.g. French) are not translated; and in the case of the works of Rodoreda and Riera, which are...

"Voices and Visions". The Words and Works of Merce Rodoreda

"Voices and Visions". The Words and Works of Merce Rodoreda

Voices and Visions: The Words and Works of Merce Rodoreda

The volume gives an excellent overall view of Rodoreda's poetry in the original and in translation, her short stories and novels. A completely annotated, cross-indexed bibliography of the critical work on Rodoreda, accompanied by an analysis of the current state of criticism on her work is included.

Voices and Visions: The Words and Works of Merce Rodoreda

Voices and Visions: The Words and Works of Merce Rodoreda

Working at a Discount: Class Consciousness in Merce Rodoreda's La Placa del Diamant

These words are laced with irony. The person uttering them is Natalia, the first-person narrator-protagonist of La pla(a del Diamant (1962), who is seeking employment as a domestic servant in a well-to-do household in Barcelona just before the outbreak of the Spanish civil war. That a pastiche of Marx's labor theory of value should be conveyed cynically to Natalia in the home of a Catalan property owner coping with a changing economy by bringing down her wages is emblematic of the dramatic irony of the most celebrated novel by Catalan writer, Merce Rodoreda (1908-1983). Indeed, as Rodoreda tells the story of a woman working at a discount, this property owner's house of privilege, along with the other work spaces