Featured on NPR's "You Must Read This":
http://www.npr.org/2012/02/14/140035974/bold-beautiful-violence-in-a-strange-savage-town
Favorite book of John Darnielle, the man behind The Mountain Goats
Mercè Rodoreda is widely regarded as the most important Catalan
writer of the twentieth century. Exiled to France during the
Spanish Civil War, and only able to return to Catalonia in the
mid-1960s, she wrote a number of highly praised works, including
The Time of the Doves and Death in Spring.
Martha Tennent was born in the U.S, but has lived most of her life
in Barcelona where she served as founding dean of the School of
Translation and Interpreting at the University of Vic. She
translates from Spanish and Catalan, and received an NEA
Translation Fellowship for her work on Rodoreda.
"Rodoreda infuses surreal elements into her novel in a similar
fashion to her Spanish-language, magical-realist counterparts,
using the fantastic to draw out the strangeness of quotidian
reality, but perhaps due to its brevity (Death in Spring comes in
at only 150 pages) the magical seems far more saturated than in,
say, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and serves to further the sense
that the story takes place in a world impossibly close to but
distinctly alien from ours."Hannah Manshel, The Front Table
"The bleakness of Rodoreda's outlook stands in dramatic contrast to
the gorgeous lyricism of her prose. In Martha Tennent's
translation, her sentences are richly luxuriant, embodying the
fecund beauty of spring in bloom while also admitting the imminence
of death and decay. Throughout Death in Spring, horror often creeps
in right on beauty's heels."Ryan Michael Williams, Rain Taxi
"Tradition is a strange and curious thing. "Death in Spring,"is a
novel from Catalan author Merce Rodoreda, expertly translated by
Martha Tennent. Focusing on a small town and its strande customs,
"Death in Spring" is a very special and highly recommended
read."The Midwest Book Review
"The novel is suspenseful, pushing the reader through the images,
memories, and voices that flow within the protagonist's often
confused mind as he develops into manhood. Just as the unnamed
protagonist must navigate a world of contradictions, the novel
reflects Rodoreda's own political, social, and literary exile while
speaking of a tyranny that feels almost uncanny in its
incantation."Katherine Elaine Sanders, Bomb Magazine
"This novel is just one boy's account of living life; it is an
example that tells us a story: a beautiful and evocative and
viscerally bloody story about life and death."Patrick Gage Kelley,
The Tartan
"Death in Spring is very different from any other story I've read.
It's strange and unsettling but still compelling, and has stayed
with me for many weeks as I try to work out its meaning. The
obvious conclusion is that it is about the corruption of what is
natural, as is death in the season of new life and
rebirth."Charlotte Simpson, Belletrista
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