War, So Much War

Writing the gold standard of 20th-century Catalan literature, Rodoreda (1908–83) lived in exile in France and Switzerland following the Spanish Civil War and began writing fiction while working as a seamstress. This 1980 novel, the last the author published in her lifetime, is the coming-of-age story of Adria Guinart, who abandons a boring life in Barcelona to join the war effort (which war is not stated) but gets lost and roams the countryside, encountering a wide array of surreal characters. None is unscarred by the larger war, from the girl who swims in the river and prods the dead bodies of floating soldiers so they won't get stuck among the rushes and rot to the bricklayer forced to gaze upon the bombed-out masonry of his former home. Nature, hunger (Adria lives on pine nuts and blackberries), and death all contrive to drive home for us the ubiquity of evil.