David Uclés is on his way to becoming the great champion of Rodoro's work. Elisenda Solsona is no slouch either. Within the framework of the CCCB exhibition on Mercè RodoredaHer talk this Monday before the more than four hundred people who filled the Hall, an enthusiastic audience, has become a festival of unrestrained praise. Rodoreda as a precursor of European magical realism (earlier and harsher than its Latin American counterpart), as an eternally innocent yet malevolent child, as an author of the everyday and terror, as a dreamlike and symbolic master. How could she be a not-so-good witch? It seems that in most of her texts, witches of all kinds and conditions appear...

Just two years ago, David Uclés (Úbeda, 1990) led a nomadic life, outside the formal workforce. He spent his summers playing the accordion in front of the Santiago de Compostela Cathedral, and with what he earned during those months he got by for the rest of the year. "If I'm short of money, I paint a picture and sell it," he said. he said shortly after publishing The peninsula of empty houses (Siruela, 2024), when that novel about the Civil War was beginning to become a phenomenon thanks to word of mouth and the author's charisma, who speaks as readily about his literary idols as about the housing crisis or the beret he's worn for almost two decades.

Anna Ortiz is passionate about Mercè Rodoreda's novels. She's read quite a few. Not all of them, though. "After seeing the Mercè Rodoreda exhibition at the CCCB, I'm really looking forward to reading the ones I haven't read yet," she says. Anna attended the exhibition with about twenty subscribers. ARA Award, on the guided tour of this exhibition, which delves into the creative universe ofauthor of The Diamond Square, Prize of Honor for Catalan Letters in 1980. Rodoreda, a forestCurated by Neus Penalba, the exhibition brings into dialogue the work of the great novelist with plastic and audiovisual works by artists from different eras, and also incorporates original documents from the Mercè Rodoreda Foundation collection and numerous photographs.

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… 

One of the most pleasant surprises you can have as you get older is that life still grants you the ability to make new friends. Friendships born in middle age are—I would say—less tender, less sentimental, more serenely chosen, and perhaps for that reason, freer.

"What grace and what freshness, what naturalness, in her stories!", he wrote in 1958, in Mercè Rodoreda, an almost nonagenarian Victor Catalan, the pseudonym under which Caterina Albert (l'Escala, 1869-1966) signed all her books. The author of Loneliness had been impressed by Twenty-two stories, which Rodoreda had published after a two-decade hiatus in publishing. "Too often, some who claim to write in Catalan use such a fantastical vocabulary and construction that, when I come across language as natural and authentic as yours, it feels like a major celebration," he insists. "How charming and fresh your stories are!" he said.

Maria Verger was stigmatized for being free and a leftist. Teresa Pàmies, Mercè Rodoreda, Aurora Bertrana, and Teresa Juvé survived exile by working as domestic servants. Dolors Orriols was denied a press card because, according to the regime, she had to care for her son and husband. Assumpció Soler's life was made impossible for her being a single mother. Joana Raspall was expelled from the library corps. Elvira Augusta Lewi disappeared.

"For many decades, the adolescent ritual has been to read Rodoreda. I read Broken mirrorI loved it, but I didn't understand a thing. And at school they told me about the author's life, which doesn't help with understanding. Broken mirror"Laments essayist, literary critic, and professor Neus Penalba (Tarragona, 1982). For years, the work of one of the great authors of Catalan literature has been read in a partial and biased way. Mercè Rodoreda's literary magnitude has been conditioned by factors external to her work, by the endearing photograph of a grandmother obsessed with plants, by the need to canonize her as a literary icon from the 1980s onward. "There is a double substitution: one is the idea that Rodoreda is Colometa, perhaps thinking that our grandmothers didn't have enough imagination to create characters, and the other is that she is supplanted." The Diamond Squarewhich softens the blow and recreates characters that are far less strange. If those adults who think they've read Rodoreda reread The Diamond Square "Now, tell me if it's corny!" Penalba challenges.

The exhibition Mercè Rodoreda, a forestThe exhibition, which will be on view at the CCCB from December 5, 2025, to May 25, 2026, has been curated by professor and essayist Neus Penalba. Conceived as an exploration of the writer's imagination, the exhibition transforms the museum space into a forest that represents and analyzes Rodoreda's universe. According to Penalba, visitors wander and discover "the literary and personal roots and the experience of uprooting caused by exile; the trunks of the experience of war; the branches that reach out to the great names of Western culture—writers, painters, and filmmakers; the canopies that shelter the bird, germinating and bearing fruit" in so many contemporary creators. In this report, we will reconstruct the biography and imagination of the author of The Diamond Square, also walking through a forest. Specifically, the forest of the houses where he lived and the houses that most iconically mark his narrative.

I go up to Romanyà after rereadingDeath and Spring.Rodoreda wrote this novel in Geneva in the early sixties. In Romanyà, she only revised it before she died. "I hope that with the cold weather these ladylike desires [to write] will return and that in no time I'll finish a very chilling book," she wrote to Marta Pessarrodona in September 1981. (It makes one think of Kafka telling Felice that he has written a "rather terrifying" story. It is saidThe Metamorphosis"and it would terrify you.") "I finished twenty-five pages and got so tired that I started rewriting," he writes to her a month later.

The translator, teacher, and Mercè Rodoreda expert Anna Maria Saludes (Bayonne, France, 1939 - Santa Cristina d'Aro, 2025) has died at the age of 86, according to the Association of Catalan Language Writers (AELC). Saludes was the daughter of the painter and teacher Susina Amat (Barcelona, ​​1912-1983), one of Mercè Rodoreda's great friends along with Julieta Franquesa, and the Republican Ernest Saludes. The daughter of Republican parents, who worked for the Propaganda Commissariat of the Generalitat (Catalan Government), she was born in exile. When she was two years old, she returned to Catalonia, where she grew up surrounded by books and works of art. With a degree in Romance languages, she moved to Italy in 1974, where she lived for 40 years. There she dedicated herself to teaching Catalan language and literature, first at the University of Naples and then at the University of Florence.

What is the origin of the perennial success of Mercè RodoredaWith this difficult question to answer, the coordinator of ARA Leemos, Jordi Nopca, opened the debate held this Tuesday at the Institut d'Estudis Catalans (IEC) and which included the participation of essayist Montserrat Bacardí and writer and journalist Xavier Bosch. "There is no magic formula that answers this question," Bacardí stated at the event organized by the ARA and the IEC. The essayist suggested some possibilities: "She poses essential human conflicts based on small plots; she is not a realist writer, but the works take place in a specific space and time, and the more deeply rooted they are, the more they can be extrapolated; she has a narrative and stylistic complexity that is not noticeable; and there is always an underlying spirit of revolt."

The recent release of the adaptation that La Veronal has made of Death and Spring At the Venice Dance Biennale, it has rekindled interest in Mercè Rodoreda's most transgressive novel. The director of the Grec Festival, Leticia Martín (Granada, 1978), recommends going to see the production at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya with your homework done. "It's about preparing for the start of the season and celebrating the premiere of La Veronal in Venice, because Marcos Morau is an unquestionable creator of Catalan culture," says Martín. In fact, the show is a co-production with the TNC and can also be seen at the next edition of the Temporada Alta festival.

The link with the Venice Biennale is an example of the restless character of the company La Veronal, the troupe Led by choreographer Marcos Morau (Ontinyent, 1982), who has become a solid reference in Europe. Ten years ago, they participated in the Theatre Biennial, and this year they're in the Dance Biennial. And they're doing so with a highly anticipated show, an adaptation of Mercè Rodoreda's testamentary novel, Death and Spring, which after premiering in Venice this Friday and having a second performance on Saturday, The TNC season will open on September 24..

More war. Now Israel-Iran. How far will this spiral of global warfare go? Mercè Rodoreda wrote in the prologue to her novel. How much, how much war, the last one he wrote: "A war serves to make everyone lose." And then, sooner or later, another comes to avenge the dead. And so on and so forth. Violence generates hatred and violence. It is the tragic spiral of human history. There is also a happy, collaborative spiral, where life and death intertwine to continue generating life, as happens in nature. War is a failure of natural human life. The human condition, the awareness of being alive and searching for meaning in existence, is a double-edged sword: it makes us gods and demons, it gives us a power that is both fabulous and terrible. Love and war. Eros and Thanatos. How can we sublimate the self-destructive instinct? Politics, sports, art, money, religion... How many things have we invented that have often turned against us, recovering our bastard instincts?

Bees, drones and the occasional absent-minded fly fly over the flowers that can be seen in the garden dedicated to pollinating again, with delight. Mercè Rodoreda (1908-1983). This space of calm and bursting beauty has just reopened its doors at the Institut d'Estudis Catalans coinciding with the inauguration of a room also dedicated to the author of Diamond Square and Broken mirror, where you can see several of the author's typewriters, glasses, some of the enigmatic paintings he painted and even an orange blouse that the writer wore in a photo taken in the 1970s, when she was already an indispensable literary reference.