Colm Tóibín: "I have returned to Barcelona to make a confession about Mercè Rodoreda"

BarcelonaColm Tóibín (Enniscorthy, 1955), to be able to say his piece about Mercè Rodoreda –an author he has been reading for decades–, has found a gap in his extremely tight schedule and has crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Los Angeles. The author of novels such as Brooklyn and The Magician –both in Catalan from the Amsterdam publishing house– has been the last guest of the exhibitionRodoreda, a forest, which closed its doors a few days ago at the CCCB. 81,880 people have visited it since December, a milestone that has made it the seventh most visited exhibition in the history of the Barcelona venue and the most successful one focused on literature, surpassing those programmed for Claudio Magris, Salvador Espriu and W.G. Sebald.

In the text he dedicates to the catalogue of Rodoreda, a forest he writes that "many passages of The Time of the Doves have the same sense of sobriety, isolation, introspection, and observation that we find in the early stories of Joyce's Dubliners". Was The Time of the Doves Rodoreda's first novel he read?

— It was the first one I heard about. It must have been around 1976 or 1977.

He had come to live in Barcelona in 1975, an experience that many years later he collected in a book, Homage to Barcelona [1990; in Catalan by Ara Llibres]. There he wrote more about the impact that art and architecture had on him than about literature.

— I reached Rodoreda through a then very well-known character, who was at the edge of my circle of Barcelonian friends, and who was called David Rosenthal. We met once or twice, without ever having any conversation, and someone let me know that David had made an important discovery.

Rosenthal was the first translator of The Time of the Doves. His version, titled The time of the doves, was first published in New York in 1980.

— I didn't read it until the nineties, when I had already published my first books. If I had read Rodoreda before, it would have helped me to find a less cumbersome way of expressing myself literarily, which I eventually arrived at later on.

Now she has come to Barcelona to talk about Rodoreda's work, who for years has been the most translated Catalan author in history.

— I have returned to Barcelona to make a confession about Mercè Rodoreda.

I hope it's not that he has changed his mind about the value of his work. It would break our hearts... and earn him the enmity of the Rodoredians.

— No, on the contrary. Rodoreda is a brilliant author. Shortly before leaving Los Angeles, I was very anxious and went to see a priest to confess a sin related to Mercè Rodoreda: although I had read and written about La plaça del Diamant [1962], La mort i la primavera [1986], Viatges i flors [1980] and other books of hers, until now I had not opened my copy of El carrer de les Camèlies [1966] which I had owned for years. And I must admit that it has become my favorite novel by Rodoreda.

Why?

— It is an incredibly ingenious novel, wonderfully written, a very political work that, at the same time, connects with a peculiar comic literary tradition that has its roots in Don Quixote, and which consists of telling a story with an apparently innocent voice, which takes things seriously, even though it knows that behind it there may be a humorous reading. It is not that the narrator is not trustworthy, but rather that he is ambiguous.

The narrator and protagonist is Cecília Ce, an orphaned girl who does not reach emotional maturity until she has suffered at the hands of various men in post-war Barcelona.

— There are masterful scenes, like the one at the Liceu where Cecilia attends an opera for the first time where her lover goes. Cecilia is, at that moment, the kept woman of that bourgeois man, and although she values the aesthetic experience of being at the Liceu, she cannot stop looking at the man, accompanied by his wife, a beautiful, elegant, and radiant woman. If you want to study political repression in a dictatorship, what you have to do, instead of examining imprisonments and human rights violations, is to look at the sexual freedom people have. In the Barcelona of El carrer de les Camèlies, Cecilia lives in a situation of absolute repression. She can only aspire to be the lover of a whole series of men whom she has to wait for in the apartment they have rented for her. It seems like a normal situation to her, but it is terrible. Women and homosexuals are the most affected in situations of political repression. Just look at Trump's America or Putin's Russia. Although El carrer de les Camèlies is not directly a novel about the Franco regime, Rodoreda speaks to us about it in a deeper way, from the protagonist's apparently normal life.

Camèlies Street is also a novel about who holds power in Barcelona in the immediate post-war period.

— It is a novel about power written by a woman who has none at all. Cecilia is constantly supervised and controlled, and yet she cannot help but recount her terrible life experience with touches of comedy. Take a look at these two sentences: “I had to live until I died. A life is many days”. It is impossible to write better.

One of the aspects of Rodoreda's The Time of the Doves that you appreciate most is the false simplicity of Colometa's voice.

— It is a novel written from exile by an author who does not know if her language will have any future. The voice of the story is that of a girl who tells us her experiences and disappointments as she matures. I see echoes of the Ireland that James Joyce tells us about in James Joyce in Dubliners, of the Iceland of Gudbergur Bergsson in The Swan and of some poems by Elizabeth Bishop where she recalls her childhood in Nova Scotia. The point that unites them is the plain diction of the voice. There is not much stylistic ornamentation –an excess of adjectives or adverbs– nor great grammatical complication. She writes with the need to explain her truth, without being entirely conscious of it or analyzing it.

What do you say about the Barcelona that appears in the novel? It must be very different from the one you knew in the mid-70s.

— It is very different. Rodoreda tells us about a very personal Barcelona in La plaça del Diamant. She does not want to give a topographical image of the city or create a global atmosphere. It has to do with the perception of the voice that tells us the story, Natàlia. Thanks to this, what we receive as readers is her individual perspective, which is very good at dealing with pain, absence, loss... and also war. In La plaça del Diamant, Rodoreda refuses to make any kind of judgment or take a moral stance: she tells us what, according to the character, happened, and that is enough. In El carrer de les Camèlies, Rodoreda does want to give an image of the city: she tells us about the Liceu, about the people who spy on the balcony opposite in narrow streets, about what it means to go to the port...

The exhibition Rodoreda, a forest, instead of offering a journey through the author's life, seeks to place the richness and complexity of her work back at the center of the discourse. Do you agree?

— signed the books and poems with the pseudonym Armand Obiols

Joan Prat, although hesigned the books and poems under the pseudonym Armand Obiols.

— We see him through some photos and also through the letters he sent from that German labor camp in Bordeaux during World War II.

Prat ended up holding a prominent position.

— It's powerful, all of it. The exhibition doesn't hide it, but prefers to focus on the creative and dreamlike side of Rodoreda. It's unusual for this to happen, and I find it intelligent. If an exhibition were made now about Sylvia Plath, Doris Lessing or Nadine Gordimer, I would be surprised if their work were taken so seriously, and not because they don't deserve it. Furthermore, Rodoreda, un bosc has dismantled the cliché that youthful work is simple and features unique characters in recognizable landscapes, in contrast to an experimental and strange mature work. While in Geneva, in the late 50s, Rodoreda's heroic five years begin, during which she writes La plaça del Diamant, the first version of La mort i la primavera, some stories from La meva Cristina i altres contes and El carrer de les Camèlies.

When Rodoreda had the first version of La mort i la primavera, she submitted it to the Sant Jordi prize and did not win. It was 1961. Armand Obiols encouraged her to continue working on it, but for Joan Sales, her editor, the book did not appeal to him. Instead of trying his luck with the allegorical fable, he believed she should continue down the realistic path of La plaça del Diamant.

— Ezra Pound thought the same of Joyce while writing "Ulysses". He told him to stop making parody and symbol of everything. I can understand that his editor believed that readers who had fallen in love with "The Diamond Square", a central novel in Rodoreda's work, would find "The Death and the Spring" strange. In fact, it is very strange. It reminds me of a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro" about a pianist who travels through an abstract landscape. He wrote it just after "The Remains of the Day" (1989), and it is called "The Unconsoled (1995). When he published it, everyone told him it was a mistake and that he had lost his mind. He lost many readers, in any case.

Rodoreda worked on the first version of La mort i la primavera after presenting herself at Sant Jordi in 1960 with La plaça del Diamant. She didn't win it either. She hadn't published a novel for more than twenty years, perhaps that's why she dared to write such a different book.

— She wrote with absolute freedom. She must have thought that readers were not expecting her, and in part she was right, because Catalan was just beginning to be reborn as a literary language. From Geneva, Rodoreda could reinvent herself continuously because she had no pressure nor did she have to satisfy any expectations. When Joyce began to work on the most experimental episode of Ulysses, that of Circe and the brothel, he had no expectation that it could ever be published, because its serialized publication had already been interrupted. As you read that episode, you have a similar idea of freedom to Rodoreda's when writing La mort i la primavera.

The first edition of this novel did not appear until after the author's death, in 1986.

— This element adds a special mystery to it.

Even so, Rodoreda wrote that, among her books, the one she "would want to save from a fire" was Travels and Flowers (1980). Why do you think she chose this one and not any other?

— It is a book that is very close to poetry. It depends more on the images and the rhythm, although as you read the texts you realize that there is a very marked voice and sensitivity. Just like in The Death and the Spring, it is a book created without any intention of satisfying the reader: it only aims to follow a hermetic and increasingly dark path. It only emerges from time to time, winking at surrealism.