War, So Much War was the last of Mercé Rodoreda's novels published in her lifetime, shortly before her death in 1983. Unlike the intense psychological realism of The Time of the Doves, this newly translated capstone to her writing career chronicles the picaresque adventures of a 15-year-old boy, Adrià Guinart. He hurtles with youthful energy from one encounter to another in a surreal landscape of perpetual war. Though no specific country or battle is ever named, he seems to be making his way through the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, which the author herself survived.
Rodoreda's literary technique is to keep actual combat offstage. She depicts men rushing into battle. She depicts glassy-eyed survivors emerging from battle. Corpses are everywhere in the landscape, amid bombed buildings and destroyed homes. The river is clogged with bodies. Gunshots are heard but never witnessed. Executed civilians are found in the street. The atmosphere of human slaughter, without ever being center stage, permeates the narrative. Throughout War's 43 episodes, some linked, some with recurring characters, Rodoreda compiles one testimony after another from the people Adrià encounters in his wanderings.
Her descriptions are spare. Most characters are unnamed. The and-then-and-then plot races forward like a Bildungsroman on speed, as one character after another imparts to Adrià their advice for survival. His boyhood pal, the son of the junkman, convinces him to sign up for the war. He rescues a hanged man who is attempting suicide. He encounters the miller's naked daughter in the river. He befriends the farmer's mistreated dog.
Religious medallions, lanterns and umbrellas, a mirror and a canary seem to have other meanings, and a disproportionate number of women are named Isabel, none of which Rodoreda explains. "And a mystery must struggle--that is its principal reason for being--so that its great beauty will not be stripped from it." The characters include an heiress with skinned knees from constantly kneeling in prayer, the nightmarish Cat Man (so desirous of his neighbor's cat that he learns taxidermy so that he can possess and sleep with it forever) and a saintly hermit with a lantern around his neck who haunts the city's sewer lines.
Rodoreda can be a compelling writer, dropping occasional jewels, like "those who allow their souls to be populated by terror see things that do not exist." And her images are unforgettable. Her prose is frequently more poetry than narrative, more surreal visions than storytelling, but for all that it has the fascination of a trek across an infernal Hieronymus Bosch landscape, far-fetched enough to be artistic, realistic enough to be painfully true. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle, Wash.
Shelf Talker: The last published novel of the Catalan writer Mercé Rodoreda follows a 15-year-old--and his surreal encounters--across a war-torn Spanish landscape.