Overview

A traveller embarks on a search for what lies beneath reality and finds villages where the dead walk at solstice, silkworm-like women live in cocoons, and a thousand men in gleaming armour play at being soldiers. Thirty-eight stories of invented flowers follow: absurd, lush and dreamlike, they capture different truths of humanity. Merc Rodoreda, in these beguiling, uncanny stories, fragments of beauty and darkness, combines inventive force and lyrical power in a poetic voice of indelible magnetism, and confirms herself as one of the greatest Catalan writers of the twentieth century.

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9781914198960

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'Rodoreda had bedazzled me by the sensuality with which she reveals things within the atmosphere of her novels.' - Gabriel Garca Marquez 'Rodoreda is often called the most influential Catalan writer of the last century-as well as a vital, vivid, existential novel about war. The un-selfconscious beauty and the phantasmagoric pain in her work add up to a kind of sharp, transportive pleasure.' - Jia Tolentino

Author Information

Merc Rodereda was born in Barcelona in 1908 and published five novels between 1932 and 1937, and then fled into exile at the end of the Spanish Civil War, when the Catalan culture was brutally suppressed. She did not publish again until 1959. Afterwards, she regularly produced novels and collections of short stories and became a fixture on Catalan bestseller lists. When Franco died, most restrictions on the use of Catalan were lifted, and Rodereda returned to Barcelona, where she died of cancer in 1983.

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