#merce rodoreda

[goldenrecord]

death in spring, mercé rodoreda

[skiddo-xy]

i don't know if i've ever mentioned this but i LOVE the book "Death In Spring" by Mercè Rodoreda. it's beautiful. this, is LITERATURE at its finest. everyone should read this book in their lifetime.

[miistical]

week six - west europe

The readings this week honestly caught me in my emotions. Though this week is less depressing than Eastern Europe was, that's not exactly a high bar to clear. Instead of the intimacy of death, this week is all about loneliness - of the self, relationships, and even the life the narrator has created for themself.

This week's stories were: Ingeborg Bachmann's "Everything" Albert Camus' "The Adulterous Woman" Isak Dinesen's "The Cloak" Mercè Rodoreda's "Rain"

Loneliness is a potent emotion that can seep unnoticed into us. Whether or not you're consciously aware of it, it has the ability to warp our perceptions and cloud our minds to our own emotions. How can you cope with loneliness? With knowing that your life is not fulfilled? And how do you come back to your life when you finally realize it is not a life you want?

Ingeborg Bachmann is most known for her works on existentialism and personal boundaries, both of which feature prominently in "Everything". The narrator purposefully separates himself from pretty much everything earnest in his life, including his wife and you son. Though he's not a sympathetic narrator by any means, he is certainly pitiable. He is so emotionally unavailable, so sure that there is no one in the world who could truly understand him, that he alienates himself from any good experiences that he could have. While it is good to be introspective on how you view the world, letting it encompass your life to the point of not caring if your child dies because you gave up hope that he could be raised as you want? Just go to therapy at that point.

Speaking of therapy, we have Janine from Albert Camus' "The Adulterous Woman". As a philosopher, Camus had interesting views on the meaning of life, especially due to his preference for absurdism. This shows itself well in Janine, who is the adulterous woman in question. However, Janine doesn't actually commit adultery - at least, not in the way we're used to. She so desperately craves for a life different than the one she knows; for something beyond the complacency of her life and the second she finds something that actually makes her feel anything worthwhile, she chases it ever in the middle of the night. But like most of us would be, she's afraid of giving up the life she knows for the one she wants. It's heartbreaking to read as Janine comes back to her room and her husband, sobbing, knowing that she will never truly be happy.

"The Cloak" by Isak Dinesen (who was actually Baroness Karen Blixen) is less depressing, but not by much. The narrator finds his loneliness in both his master and his master's (as well as his own) lover. Angelo does love both of them, but when he finds himself alone, he goes mad—in his mind, he can't exist without the love of his master or his lover. Living for someone is fine and can even be a benefit, but "The Cloak" shows how Angelo was using the love of one to soothe the heartbreak of the other. If he could not have his master, he could have his lover and vice versa; it is without either of them that we see how loneliness seeped its way inside his mind. He's visited by bouts of visions, paranoia, and intense rage for hours. Though that behavior might seen strange at first, it makes sense when you realize that Angelo's loneliness makes it so that if he didn't have someone in his life to love, he just wouldn't live at all.

This kind of behavior is noted in the contemporary Spanish author Mercè Rodoreda's "Rain". The narrator, Marta, is hyper focused on her past and uncertain on her future. She is abysmally alone even though she swears her life is good; she's well off financially, she does have friends, and the story is about a date she has coming over. However, it's easy to brush these aside as platitudes for herself. Money cannot grant her happiness, her friends are distant and unobtrusive in her life, and she spends the story avoiding the date she had been getting ready for. She's so afraid of her loneliness, of being confined to it that she walks out in the rain for hours, actively steering clear of her apartment even when her date would have left hours ago.

It was incredibly sad finishing this week's stories. None of the narrators had anyone to lean on, yet none of them are alone. They each have family, friends, or lovers—and yet they feel completely divorced from the people in their life. While each story does properly capture the true essence of what being lonely can do to a person, each one also showed that in order to be actually happy with yourself and your life, you have to live for you. Whether or not that idea is frightening, sometimes you have to be alone to no longer by lonely.

[johnprine69]

went to perpignan yesterday and it was so so beautiful, my love for catalonia/catalunya/catalogne grows. i found a catalan bookstore with many many mercè rodoreda books in french, which i could have tried to read, but i'm going to keep looking for english translations so i can properly enjoy/appreciate them

[quatregats]

I was tagged by @res--publica to post my Receiptify for the past month, here you go <3

They're literally all just songs from playlists I was making about Stephen Maturin, in case you were wondering how we're doing on that front dshfjsdkhf

I'm going to be catching up with tag games so if you want to do this just go for it, would love to see what all of your recent favorite songs have been!

[balladofthe101st]

the journals of slyvia plath by sylvia plath // diary of a wave outside the sea by dunya mikhail // the unabridged journals of sylvia plath by sylvia plath // fortesa latifi // death in spring by merce rodoreda // litany in which certain things are crossed out by richard siken // wandering: notes and sketches by herman hesse

[hakkiest]

rereading mirrall trencat by merce rodoreda for the 4th time like its going to fix me. It will

[octavianacidicbreastmilk]

As the blacksmith was preparing to swing the axe a second time, the old man who had walked beside him seized him by the arm, and he told the blacksmith that the tree should not be opened with an axe—it had already been breached—and the axe blows could kill whoever was inside, if he was still alive. Then the blacksmith sent for a large branch and, with some help, shoved it as best he could into the tree, through the middle of the cross. Carefully, through the hole made by the branch, he pulled, cut, and unsealed the tree. Four men grasped each end of the bark and yanked furiously. The blacksmith spun round, his face worn and pasty, and announced that the tree was resisting; it didn’t want the dead person that belonged to it removed. His mouth a square hole, his eyes glassy, my father appeared to be watching. The tips of his fingers were embedded in the sides of the trunk, and I am not sure if I saw it . . . his hair drawn upwards by the tree’s colorless blood. The branch that had been wedged inside the tree was pinning him backwards, piercing his stomach.

They started to shout. They shouted at my father who had little remaining breath and was clearly near his end. He was still alive, but only his own death kept him alive. They dragged him from the tree, laid him on the ground, and began beating him. The last blows made no sound. Don’t kill him, shouted the cement man. The mortar trough, filled with rose-colored cement, lay at his feet. Don’t kill him before he has been filled. They pried his mouth partially open, and the cement man began to fill it. First with watery cement so it would slide far down inside him, then with thick cement. When he was well cemented, they stood him up and put him back inside the tree.

Death in Spring by Merce Rodoreda (tr. by Martha Tennent)

[saneperhaps]

Only the sorrow of going to sleep and waking up, feeling life without knowing where it comes from, aware that it will flee without knowing why it was given to you, why it is taken from you.

Here you are: there is THIS and THIS and this.

~Merce Rodoreda, Death in spring

[kemikkadin]

Bu yıl okumaktan keyif aldığım kitapların bir listesi.

.

1. Kiracı - Roland Topor

2. Sindrella Kompleksi : Çağdaş Kadının Bağımsızlık Korkusu - Colette Dawling

3. Satıcının Ölümü - Arthur Miller

4. Theo'ya Mektuplar - Vincent Van Gogh

5. Ölüm ve Bahar - Merce Rodoreda

6. Abélard ve Héloïse - Ronald Duncan

7. Edebiyat Terapi - Mine Özgüzel

8. Kırmızı Kazak - Meltem Gürle

9. Kendimi Kaybettiğim Yerde Buldum - Veronique Maciejak

10. Alma ve Yedi Canavar - Selene M. Pasenal

11. Palyatif Toplum, Günümüzde Acı - Byung-Chun Han

.

#newyear #booklist #book #kitap #kitaptavsiyesi #neokudum #neokuyorum #kitapönerisi #kitapyorumu #bookblogger #bookgeek #kitapkahve #kitapsever

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CmbdQaXBQy6/?igshid=NDdhMjNiZDg=

[literaturavive]

Mercè Rodoreda i Gurguí

Merce Rodoreda va ser una escriptora catalana més influent de la seva època. Va néixer a Barcelona el 10 d'octubre del 1908 i va morir a Girona el 13 d'abril del 1983.

El 1931, Mercè Rodoreda va començar a rebre classes per millorar el seu coneixement de la llengua. Delfín Dalmau va ser una persona que va influir molt la Rodoreda. Ella ensenyava allò que escrivia a Dalmau, i ell la va animar a fer públics aquests primers textos. L'any 1932, es va publicar la primera novel·la de Mercè Rodoreda, a l'editorial Catalonia, titulada Sóc una dona honrada? - i també alguns contes per a diversos diaris.

Alguns premis que ha guanyat:

Premio Mercè Rodoreda de cuentos y narraciones - 1957

Premio Sant Jordi de Novela - 1965

Premio de Honor de las Letras Catalanas - 1980

“Jo hi crec una mica, en la inspiració, però vull dir que escrivint o pensant en la cosa que has d’escriure et vas exaltant, i és possible que la inspiració vingui escrivint.” - Merce Rodoreda

[virgilean]

Books Read In 2021: Death In Spring by Mercé Rodoreda

“The man cupped his hand in front of his lips, speaking to me out of the side of his mouth, so no one would hear – he told me that he enjoyed watching people die.”

[miguelalmagro]

[johnprine69]

"I told her I wished I could spend a night like the one she'd spent so much in love, but I had work to do cleaning and dusting offices and taking care of the kids, and all those lovely things in life like the wind and the living ivy and the cypresses piercing the air and the leaves in the garden blowing from side to side weren't for me. That everything was over for me and all I could expect was sadness and headaches."

-Mercè Rodoreda, La plaça del Diamant/The Time of the Doves

"Jeg hadde alltid savnet diskusjonene vi hadde, åpenheten mot verden og livet. Den var kanskje naiv, men det var også genuin. Den gangen trodde jeg at det var slik at livet ville bli. Vi ødslet med tiden og med tankene, og først da det var over, forstod jeg at det hadde vært unikt og aldri ville komme tilbake. Det er slik livet er, er det ikke -- som unge tror vi at det kommer mer, at dette bare er begynnelsen på noe, mens det i virkeligheten er alt, og at det vi uten å tenke på det har, snart blir det eneste vi hadde. [...] at livet var mer absolutt, betydde ikke bare at det var sannere, men også at det ikke var noen veier bort fra det. Ingenting stod lenger åpent, som det hadde gjort da vi var i begynnelsen av tjueårene."

"I had always missed the discussions we had, the openness towards the world and life. Maybe it was naive, but it was also genuine. Back then, I believed that this was how life would be. We squandered our time and our thoughts, and only when it was over did I understand that what we had was unique, and would never come back. This is how life is, isn't it -- as young people we believe that more is coming, that this is just the beginning of something, while in reality this is everything, and that thing which we had without appreciating soon becomes the only we ever had. [...] that life was more absolute meant not only that it was truer, but also that there were no ways away from it. Nothing remained open anymore, like it had been when we were in the beginning of our twenties."

-Karl Ove Knausgård, Morgenstjernen/The Morning Star

[whilereadingandwalking]

Mercè Rodoreda is a phenomenal writer. Garden by the Sea was translated from the Catalan by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent. In 1920s Spain, the gardener of a villa by the sea narrates the stories and dramas of the magical summers of Senyoret Francesc, Senyoreta Rosamaria, cook Quima, maid Miranda, and various other characters who pop up throughout. The novel is well-paced and the writing rich, and the characters feel vivid, while the gardener's hyper-focus on his plants and expertise, his soft spots and small ironies, root the novel.

[useless-catalanfacts]

“The greatest contemporary Catalan author and possibly the best Mediterranean woman author since Sappho.”

This is how the American author, poet and translator David H. Rosenthal described Mercè Rodoreda.

Mercè Rodoreda (1908-1983) is most famous for her novels (such as her masterpiece The Time of the Doves / In Diamond Square, which we talked about in this previous post) but she also wrote poetry, theatre, tales, and painted. Her work has been translated to over 30 languages.

She only went to school for two years (from 1915 to 1917), but her grandfather shower her the love for literature and the need to defend the Catalan language. When she was 23, she started attending classes again and soon she started to publish her stories.

During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), she worked as the corrector of Catalan language in the Department of Propaganda of the Government of Catalonia, which pubished all kinds of antifascist media. But the fascists won the war so in 1939, fearing for her life, Rodoreda, like many others, had to leave the country. She had never taken part in politics, but she had published in Catalan and had collaborated in some left-leaning literary magazines. She hid in a library bus and went on exile in France. Some years later, in France, she had to go away again because of the Nazi invasion.

In the last years of her life, she came back to Catalonia.

John Darnielle, from the band The Mountain Goats, said: “It is a total mystery to me why Rodoreda isn’t widely worshipped [...]. She’s on my list of authors whose works I intend to have read all of before I die.”