![]() ![]() She worked as a journalist, wrote poetry, plays, stories and novels, and aspired to make a living through writing, making the most of the enormous freedom within her reach. ![]() Rodoreda, daughter of an educated, relatively well-off family, lived through the cultural blossoming of pre-war Barcelona. Her life is the most crystalline explanation for this ruined world. If Rodoreda is the most important Catalan woman writer of the last century, it is because she transfers a world that only exists in her memory into her books, as often happens in the work of the greatest writers. There are Catalans disorientated by a twentieth century that has ridden roughshod over them and destroyed their city, Barcelona, which is the epicentre of some of the author’s novels. In Rodoreda’s world, there are no decadent aristocrats or bankrupt southerners. Rodoreda is one of those discoveries that changes the reader’s perspective, because she invites them into a literary world as distinct and sophisticated as Proust’s Paris or William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha. Marcel Proust wrote that the world was not created once, but rather is created again every time a new, original artist emerges: the result looks entirely different from the old world, but perfectly clear. It is no surprise that with every translation published of the work of Mercè Rodoreda (1908–1983), more readers declare to have made a literary discovery. ![]()
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