Join us at Book Beat for our next reading group as we discuss Camellia Street, the haunting novel by Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda.We will meet Wednesday, December 2, at 7 pm at Book Beat | Oak Park, Michigan. Meetings are in person and available online via Zoom. Log on links are mailed the morning or afternoon of each meeting. The reading group is free and books are discounted 15% instore. Copies are now available.
Camellia Street, published in 1966, is the starkest of all Rodoreda’s works. It chronicles the life and, obliquely, the times of Cecília C., a street-corner prostitute and later a kept woman in numb, exhausted postwar Barcelona. Cecília, a foundling whose name is written on a scrap of paper pinned to her bib, never takes to her adoptive parents. She flees their stifling attentions and obsessive chatter about her origins as soon as she can—first in search of her father, who has appeared to her in a vision, and then more definitively with her first lover, Eusebi. From this point on her life is, in her own words, “spent searching for lost things and burying dead loves.” Incapable of either emotional attachment or shared sensual pleasure, Cecília lives frozen in her own narcissism and anomie. [. . .] Though not as much of a victim as Jean Rhys’s heroines, Cecília resembles them in her helpless, bitter drift through a world of lovers who either quickly bore her or whom she never liked in the first place.
Translated from the Catalan by David Rosenthal
Introduction by Sandra Cisnerosidentity in a world that offers women few choices.
“Mercè Rodoreda, with Camellia Street, reminds us that even if prayer seems to have failed, stories have not.”
—James Carroll, Ploughshares
“It is a total mystery to me why [Rodoreda] isn’t widely worshipped. . . . Tremendous, tremendous writer.”
—John Darnielle, The Mountain Goats
”When you read this book, read it for its beauty, for the way it will surprise and subvert your desires, and as a testament to the human spirit in the face of brutality and willful inhumanity.”
—Jesmyn Ward, NPR
About the Author
Mercè Rodoreda (1908–1983) is widely regarded as one of the greatest Catalan writers of the twentieth century. Forced into exile following the Spanish Civil War, she spent years in France and Switzerland before returning to Catalonia. Her best-known novel, The Time of the Doves, established her international reputation. Her fiction combines psychological insight, lyrical prose, and an unflinching view of the lives of women.
Pick up a copy soon and join us for a conversation about this remarkable novel.