#RivetingReviews: West Camel reviews JOURNEY AND FLOWERS by Mercè Rodoreda

With this curious collection of tales and impressionistic pieces, Rodoreda is on the same territory as in her late novels War, So Much War and Death in Spring – in which she leaves behind the social realism of her earlier work and favours a form of magical realism that verges on fable.

Divided into two sections, the first, Journeys, in part recalls the picaresque adventures undertaken by the deserter protagonist of War, So Much War. However, whereas Adriá travelled through a recognisable Civil War-torn Spain, here, an unnamed narrator encounters village after village, each of which is characterised by a specific behaviour of its inhabitants: among others, a village populated by knitting grandmothers; a village in which the inhabitants cry for those who started wars, for the murdered, for all the injustices; a village that is in fact a wood in which are trapped ‘lost girls’ who have come looking for flowers.

If these tales are strongly allegorical, in the second part, True Flowers, Rodoreda abandons any kind of narrative for paragraph-length descriptions of various plants, reminiscent of a florilegium. Each flower is female, her colour, petal shape and habit briefly described; but the botanical description ends there, and instead strange and recondite behaviours and qualities are attributed to the plant:

at night, when the grass is cold and snakes drink milk, on every taut petal appears a drop of black blood: smooth and hard like the seeds of a water-melon. Damp. It’s the sickness. Better not touch her.

This passage exemplifies the overarching sensation I had while reading this collection: there is something either malevolent or sad about these blooms; and there is something inescapable about the villages in Journeys. The ‘Crazy Flower’ is very sticky and very dangerous; the ‘Sweet-Toothed Flower’ eats you alive; whereas the ‘Shy Flower’ does not want to be a flower. She does not want to be drawn. In the ‘Village of Hanged Men’, every man goes mad from all from all the births and deaths he has had had to witness and hangs himself. Even in the apparently joyous ‘Village of the Rainbow’ the presence on almost every object of rainbow colours in this village that always, always had the rainbow above it feels sinister, imprisoning.

In these pieces, Rodoreda is at the height of her powers. The prose, beautifully rendered in English by Nick Caistor and Gala Sicart Olavide, is both archaic and modern. There is humour, there is lyricism and there is terse power. Yet the message this volume sends seems overwhelmingly grim: be it beautiful or bleak, the world we live in is a sad and threatening place – and we’re locked into lives from which we cannot escape.

We’re told in the Translators’ Note that Rodoreda gave her reason for writing these idiosyncratic pieces to her editor, Joan Sales:

I’m tired to the depths of my soul of revolutions, coups, civil wars, great wars, concentration camps, napalm bombings, torture, kidnappings, social struggles …

My hope is that she in some way purged herself of this despair through writing this volume, and perhaps her passion for flower-growing, which we learn about in Helen Oyeyemi’s fulsome introduction, provided her with some solace.

Reviewed by West Camel

JORNEYS AND FLOWERS

Written by Mercè Rodoreda

Translated by Nick Caistor and Gala Sicart Olavide

Published by Daunt Books (2024)

December 2024 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

West Camel is a writer, reviewer and editor. He edited Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction 2015 and is currently working for Orenda Books. He has written two novels, Attend and Fall. He is the editor of the Riveter magazine and the #RivetingReviews for the European Literature Network.

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