'So much, so much war...'

Rodoreda is made of such fine stuff... We also live in ideal times to understand her. At the opening of the exhibitionRodoreda, a forestAt the CCCB (not to be missed), Commissioner Neus Penalba said thatSo much, so much war…Rodoreda encapsulates everything, and this comment, coming from someone who has written an impressive study onDeath and Spring, has led me to rereadSo much, so much war… 

And it has dazzled me once again. I reread it as the novel that closes a literary cycle, just as Rodoreda closed a life cycle by returning to her country. Rodoreda is always autobiographical, her literature is visceral, but in the way Blanchot defined literature: "consciousness without me."

As if to settle accounts, Rodoreda returns to the civil war that forced her to flee and that fully transformed her into a writer. She sets the story during the agonizing Battle of the Ebro, but draws on her own experience of escaping Paris in 1940, when she participated in auslike the one in Troy, but Parisian: Némirovsky flees two years later and leavesFrench suiteCéline will flee in the opposite direction, and leaveFrom one castle to anotherandNorth.

There is a genealogy that goes from theOdysseyin the chivalric romance, passing through theAeneidand by Llull. Rodoreda makes this initiatory journey withDemianHesse under her arm, a novel that ended at the beginning of the war cycle, in 1919. Hesse was the first writer to be psychoanalyzed, and in recent years Rodoreda is so influenced by him that she and Manrubia use the nameThe signalin Romanyà's house. The dream ofSo much, so much war...It updates Català's Freudian dreamlike style: Rodoreda's follows Hitchcock's psychoanalytic cinema. What films would Lynch have made about Rodoreda?

The initiatory journey here is rustic and Gogolian, full of farmhouses and forests, angels and witches. It is the existential journey of a young man living in a state of war for the desire for freedom, which for Rodoreda is a necessity for justice. Adrià goes through the world shunning ties, as Rodoreda did, a learning process that, like all others, has a redemptive meaning. By saving himself, he saves everyone because "every man is the mirror of the universe." In Sartre's words, "there is nothing that can be good for us if it is not good for everyone." In Hesse's words, which Rodoreda had copied into a notebook: "And if the world outside were to disappear, any one of us would be capable of rebuilding it." With a new vision of the landscape, Rodoreda takes up the mantle from the Modernists: with the final piety of this book, she takes up the mantle in Carner.

I hope that Penalba will dedicate a book toSo much, so much war…