Death in Spring
MERCE RODOREDA
(trans. Martha Tennent)
2009 (orig. published 1986 in Catalan)
150 pp.
Literary fiction
Summary
As a teenaged boy grows into a man, he struggles to come to grips with the strange, brutal rituals of his village and with his own increasingly marked sense of being an outsider. This dreamlike book explores love, desire, the individual's place in society, and the meaning of living.
Appeal characteristics
- Pacing/Frame?: emphasis on language over plot
- Pacing: plot moves very slowly
- Pacing?: patterns and recurring images appear but are not explicated
- Story line?: events themselves are often less important than what the narrator says about them?
- Characterization: characters' emotions rarely shown; their actions are generally described without delving into their motivations (this goes for the main character too)
- Frame?: heavy on metaphor and imagery
- Frame: worldbuilding -- author creates a society
- Frame: tone is heavy, serious; even somewhat depressing
- Frame: first-person narrator
- Frame?: most things are not laid out clearly for the reader; readers must be attentive, dig into the book, and think (and even then may not arrive at firm conclusions)
- Frame: individual vs. society themes
Other notes
- violence -- not particularly graphic, but often unusual and still disturbing
Similar titles/authors
- W, or The Memory of Childhood (Georges Perec): similar building of an increasingly menacing and violent world with strange rituals; similar exploration of the darker side of human societies; similarly is meant to provoke thought more than tell a story; Perec and Rodoreda seem to both be interested in language (though Perec more in wordplay, Rodoreda more in evocative prose?); more complex plotting (there are multiple stories and part of the book is how they interact (or don't); faster pacing?; there is no central character in the main storyline of W
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