27 Feb / Garden by the Sea by Mercè Rodoreda, translated by Maruxa Relaño [in Booklist]
Set in 1920s Catalonia, the permeability of social classes – upstairs/downstairs style – gets played out in a Spanish seaside villa. The gardener, who has outlasted multiple “masters” over decades, narrates “six summers and one terrible winter” from when Barcelona almost-newlyweds take possession until the husband announces his intention to sell.
The seasonal residents bring an entourage of city servants, various friends, a caged lion one summer, a clever monkey during another. Their “gaiety and youth” enabled by “so much money” grow easily tainted by boredom and malaise. The construction of another villa next door introduces a wealthy stranger, whose arrival instigates an intimate, tragic intrusion.
Written over seven years (1959-1966) while Mercè Rodoreda – considered to be the most important 20th-century Catalan writer – lived in exile in Switzerland, Garden arrives stateside a half-century-plus later, Anglophoned by the Martha Tennent and Maruxa Relaño mother-daughter team; Tennent is already well-experienced, having translated three previous titles of Rodoreda’s. “I’ve always enjoyed knowing what happens to people,” the gardener admits to readers as he opens his “garden by the sea,” a fertile playground for assignations and other complicated relationships.
Review: “Fiction,” Booklist Online, February 11, 2020
Readers: Adult
Published: 1967 (Spain), 2020 (United States)