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Novel set in 1930s BARCELONA

7th October 2022

In Diamond Square by Mercè Rodoreda, novel set in 1930s Barcelona.

Translated by: Peter Bush

Novel set in 1930s BARCELONA

Young Natalia attends the festival in Diamond Square, hoping to win something in the raffle and to have fun with her friends. She gets more than she expected when she accepts a dance with Joe, who quickly insinuates himself into her life and turns everything on its head. She’s young girl who is starved of affection at home and whose future – an escape? – is planned out as the wife of a pastry chef, but Joe dances her round and round and suddenly she is totally bowled over by his determination that he will marry her “within a year”. He even declares as they walk the deserted streets of the city at dawn that her name will henceforth be Pidgey.

The book is a first-person narrative, narrated by Pidgey, and set in Barcelona around the time of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. It was written in the 1960s, so the author relates the terrible effects of wartime deprivation on ordinary people in the city from first-hand experience. We follow Pidgey and Joe as he volunteers to fight for the Republicans against the fascist Nationalists. There’s some irony in his imposing his will at home and fighting to preserve freedom for his country.

There are some very modern themes: today we would say that Joe gaslights his young wife and her stoicism in accepting what life offers her is remarkable. Some of this can, of course, be attributed to the period in which the book is set, when women’s lives were much more likely to be subject to the wishes of their fathers and husbands. Natalia is expected to comply with her husband’s every wish, including when he goes speeding around with their newborn son in a box tied to the back of his motorbike.

In her prologue, the author said that she wanted the book to be about love, with elements of Kafka and Ulysses. The reader will judge whether she achieved those aims, but certainly the Kafkaesque painting in Madam Enrique’s apartment and the stream of consciousness style of the narrative point to that conclusion. This style is a little odd at first, but you grow accustomed to the lack of speech marks and other punctuation, and it quickly becomes an endearing quirk of the book – a way of following Pidgey’s thinking. Pidgey perhaps believes that what she experiences when she meets Joe is love – certainly she seems to hope that it is – and she sticks by him, despite stirrings of feelings for other men and despite the emotional and physical violence that is part of their relationship from the start. At first Joe supports Pidgey and their family, but his work as a carpenter craftsman begins to dry up and volunteering for the war eventually seems more appealing. He pays no heed to how Pidgey will cope, and she is forced to abandon their children in order to take paid work outside the home as a cleaner for a rich family. Pidgey makes no excuses for Joe but neither does she condemn him; she appears to see her situation as her lot in life and does her best. The reader won’t judge him so kindly.

The narrator describes her surroundings in the Gràcia barrio of Barcelona in such detail that they are easy to picture and if you’re lucky enough to visit the city you might recognise some of the places and buildings mentioned. There’s an explanation for the building of Parc Guëll and one of the characters mocks the style of the ambitious Sagrada Familia church project, which was already fifty years under construction at that time. In summary: if you’re off to Barcelona, I’d definitely recommend this depiction of the city’s history.

Sue for the TripFiction Team

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