Blame the men

The majority of the Catalan novelist Mercè Rodoreda’s adult life was lived in exile. Born in Barcelona in 1908, she fled Spain when that city fell to Franco’s Nationalist troops in 1939 (having made herself conspicuous as a supporter of the Republican cause); she didn’t return for more than thirty years.

Rodoreda travelled first through France, fleeing Nazi troops and living in refugee camps; she later settled in Geneva, where she cultivated a beautiful garden, with flowers reminiscent of those she had known in her childhood. In between were many years of hardship and upheaval, as well as nostalgia for the country and culture she had left behind. The novels she produced during this period – foremost among them The Time of the Doves (also known as In Diamond Square; La plaça del Diamant, 1962) and A Broken Mirror (Mirall Trencat, 1974) – were psychologically astute family dramas that dealt with the shattering effects of the Spanish Civil War and mourned a way of life that seemed lost for ever.

Journeys and Flowers (Viatges i flors, 1980) is a radical departure. Translated into English for the first time, by Nick Caistor and Gala Sicart Olavide, it is split into two sections – “Journeys to Some Villages” and “True Flowers” – and spurns realism in favour of a more carefree, whimsical dreamworld. The first section follows an unnamed narrator as he travels from village to village (“The Village of Lost Girls”, “The Village of Lazy Men”), seeing ever-stranger sights; the second describes a series of fanciful, anthropomorphized flowers (“Crazy Flower”, “Fancy Dress Flower”), as if in parody of a Victorian botanist’s guidebook. These vignettes are planted thick with charm and eccentricity; but there is also a persistent seam of melancholy, and violence frequent erupts.

Rodoreda explained her change of style as emanating from an aversion to the endless catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century: “I’m tired to the depths of my soul of revolutions, coups, civil wars, great wars, concentration camps, napalm bombings”, she told her friend and editor Joan Sales, as reported in the translator’s note. Yet war remains a heavy presence throughout this collection. The first tale begins with the wandering narrator being forced from the road by a charging army: “I had to quickly step aside as around a thousand horses were coming towards me, a thousand soldiers carrying lances mounted on them”. They disappear in a cloud of dust, but return again and again. “It’s always the same”, remarks an old man wearily, “they play at being soldiers to gain respect.”

Elsewhere there are more visceral reminders of war: villages where hanged men dangle from the trees; villages where the inhabitants live in fear of who might be watching (“every leaf of every tree is an eye filled with power and intelligence”); villages where only the abandoned women remain (“the menfolk are desperate to go to war”). In general, it is the men who are to blame. In “The Village of Hanged Men” the narrator is told that “in this village all men are sinners”. They happily go about producing numberless children – “While the woman gives birth to the first ten children, the man dances” – before becoming depressed, putting on their finest outfits and walking into the woods to kill themselves.

As in Rodoreda’s earlier novels, the power dynamic between the sexes is central. While the narrator of the first section appears to be male, the flowers that star in the second section are mostly female. There is the “Ballerina Flower”, the “Sweet-Toothed Flower” and the “Happiness Flower”, which sends men to sleep with a beguiling song, leading them to the edge of a cliff where they plummet to their deaths. Every petal of the “Red Flower” is stained with a drop of “black blood”, a sign of “sickness”, a warning – “Better not touch her”. These flowers are vivacious and beautiful, able to make others dance to their tune, but they are also rooted helplessly in the soil and buffeted by violent winds.

The principal pleasure of this highly idiosyncratic collection is its surreal fairy-tale atmosphere. This is a world of talking rats and floating witches, where lost girls eat “young pigeons’ brains and dishes of custard”. It is also a world marked by cruelty, a dream that can at any moment turn into nightmare.

Christopher Shrimpton is a writer based in London

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