{"id":3913,"date":"2013-03-08T09:08:42","date_gmt":"2013-03-08T09:08:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=3913"},"modified":"2013-03-21T10:38:03","modified_gmt":"2013-03-21T10:38:03","slug":"in-diamond-square-by-merce-rodoreda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=3913","title":{"rendered":"In Diamond Square by Merce Rodoreda"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Translated by Peter Bush<\/strong><\/p>\n

Published by Virago 7 March 2013<\/strong><\/p>\n

224pp, hardback, \u00a314.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Catherine Jones<\/strong><\/p>\n

Living in Barcelona in the early 1930s, shop girl Natalia meets a determined young man at a fiesta in Diamond Square and Joe \u2013 with \u2018little monkey eyes\u2019 and \u2018little medal-like ears\u2019 \u2013 tells her she will become his wife within a year.<\/p>\n

Written in 1960 and translated into more than 20 languages, this compelling tale of life before, during and after the Spanish Civil War, is narrated by a woman as intense as she is passive.<\/p>\n

Joe, a carpenter, and Natalia do indeed marry and have a son and daughter. Joe breeds pigeons \u2013\u00a0 ten pairs turn into many more \u2013 which live in the loft space and peck away at Natalia, with their appetites, their stench, their comings and goings.\u00a0 When the war erupts, Joe leaves to fight the Fascists and Natalia remains in Barcelona, struggling to feed the children.<\/p>\n

In the prologue to the book\u2019s 1962 publication, Rodoreda wrote that In Diamond Square<\/em> is \u2018a novel about love, as someone has said that it isn\u2019t\u2019 noting the central character has only one thing in common with her – \u2018 namely the fact she feels at a loss in the midst of the world\u2019.<\/p>\n

Like a Jean Rhys character, small woes weigh heavily on Natalia from the off – her fingertips ache from tying gilded raffia around cake boxes at work, and the elastic holding up her petticoat \u2018sliced’ into her. \u2018My father always said I was a prickly so-and-so\u2026\u2019 she remarks. \u2018On the other hand, I really did feel that I didn\u2019t know what I was doing on this planet.\u2019<\/p>\n

There is a growing sense of playful menace about motorbike-riding Joe, with his sermons about men and women and their respective rights. He taps his wife sharply on the knee, pinches her under her arm, pours a handful of birdseed down the back of her blouse, and makes her kneel down in the street to beg forgiveness in a row he has manufactured about her going for a walk with her former fianc\u00e9, Pete. \u2018My mother had never told me about men,\u2019 says Natalia, whose parents\u2019 marriage was summed up by \u2018Sunday afternoons sitting in the dining room not saying a word to each other\u2019.<\/p>\n

Rodoreda denied feminist intent but it\u2019s easy to interpret the novel – and its symbolism of a set of scales etched onto the stairs to the couple\u2019s flat with \u2018one of the scales set slightly below the other\u2019 – as a study of a woman\u2019s lot, as much as a comment on the unequal human existence (not least in a war setting, with the hunger, poverty and shaven heads of children, the city\u2019s lights painted blue, and the death of fighters).<\/p>\n

The kaleidoscope of evocative images is constant – Joe\u2019s tricky mother with her house of ribbons and a \u2018cream eiderdown patterned with red roses and a frilly red border\u2019 and Father John\u2019s watery black clothes \u2018as if he was made from the wings of a fly\u2019. There are smells of grain and potatoes and spirit of salts in the grocer\u2019s, the boom\u2026boom sound from a conch shell, the flutter of white paper roses at a wedding and a guest wearing earrings with lilac-coloured gems.<\/p>\n

Wonderfully vivid and intense, In Diamond Square<\/em> has a pervasive sense of hope and yearning with an emotional jolt around every corner as well as the occasional flash of humour \u2013 Natalia and Joe\u2019s marriage party is gate-crashed by half-a-dozen men in their forties celebrating a successful appendicitis operation endured by the fellow dancing with a deaf-aid hanging from his ear.<\/p>\n

Gabriel Garcia Marquez has called In Diamond Square<\/em> \u2018the most beautiful novel published in Spain since the Civil War\u2019 and this translation from Catalan by Peter Bush deftly captures the rich intricacy of Rodoreda\u2019s lingering prose, the mix of want and sadness, and the tenacity of the human spirit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Catherine Jones<\/p>\n

Wonderfully vivid and intense, In Diamond Square<\/em> has a pervasive sense of hope and yearning with an emotional jolt around every corner as well as the occasional flash of humour \u2013 Natalia and Joe\u2019s marriage party is gate-crashed by half-a-dozen men in their forties celebrating a successful appendicitis operation endured by the fellow dancing with a deaf-aid hanging from his ear.[…] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":527,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-notable-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/527"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3913"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3913\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4022,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3913\/revisions\/4022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}