"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.