Merce Rodoreda's final novel is a meditation on the consequences of moral degradation and the inescapable presence of evil.
Despite its title, there is little of war and much of the fantastic in this coming-of-age story, which was the last novel Merce Rodoreda published during her lifetime.
We first meet its young protagonist, Adria Guinart, as he is leaving Barcelona out of boredom and a thirst for freedom, embarking on a long journey through the backwaters of a rural land that one can only suppose is Catalonia, accompanied by the interminable, distant rumblings of an indefinable war. In vignette-like chapters and with a narrative style imbued with the fantastic, Guinart meets with numerous adventures and peculiar characters who offer him a composite, if surrealistic, view of an impoverished, war-ravaged society and shape his perception of his place in the world.
As in Rodoreda's Death in Spring (Open Letter, 2015), nature and death play a fundamental role in a narrative that often takes on a phantasmagorical quality and seems to be a meditation on the consequences of moral degradation and the inescapable presence of evil.
