Anys de barbàrie

The scholar Carme Arnau addresses in this essay the impact of the war on the life and work of Mercè Rodoreda. On the one hand, the traumatic reality of the Spanish Civil War, the exile in France and the Second World War in Limoges and Bordeaux, a city occupied by the Germans, where his colleague Obiols is locked up in a Nazi labor camp. On the other, the timeless myth of war, of violent and armed conflict between humans. When, at the end of the seventies of the last century, Rodoreda returned to Catalonia, specifically to Romanyà, in the middle of the Gavarres, a landscape that attracted him so much, he carried the wars very vividly in his privacy, forging his vision of the world In this sense, let's remember that the last novel he published, so to speak of testament, is Quanta, quanta guerra..., with a rather explicit title.