In February 1955, it is said that he met Albert Camus and René Char at a dinner in Paris. This “rope walker story” is invented for intimate reasons, as he confesses in a letter to Joan Puig i Ferrater, but the degree of fabulation of the anecdote is not as exaggerated as it may seem. Rodoreda, like Camus and Char but also like Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, Italo Calvino or Elsa Morante, ranks as one of the great European authors of the second half of the 20th century. Besides, the exhibition Rodoreda, a forest of the CCCB, curated by also emphasizes this issue.
Rodoreda’s literary and journalistic debut took place before the war in Spain, it is true, but the writer fattened up her artistic background during the years of exile in France. It is nourished by the intellectual upheaval experienced by Paris after the Second World War, when the city begins to cede, not without reluctance, the cultural capital to the United States. It is here that Rodoreda reads “about four hours a day” the ancient and modern classics, and cultivates himself in all imaginable genres and in all the languages he masters and, if he doesn’t master, he learns. In other words, the Catalan writer creates her work from the tragic heart of Europe.
As several critics have studied, he lived through the horrors of war and knew well about them lager Nazis and those of their collaborators, French and Spanish, which allowed him to write Night and fog (1947). This is one of the first samples of the concentration universe, published in Our Mexico Magazine before those of Primo Levi and Robert Antelme. Penalba exhibits it at the CCCB alongside engravings by Josep Bartolí and the documentary of the same name from (1956), with which he illustrates the barbarism of those years. The use of recreation and literary imagination to represent the atrocity of the camps and of the European war will be a problem that will emerge later, during the last decades of the century, and at the hands of writers such as Jorge Semprún or Marguerite Duras.
However, the fact that the writer extracts material from life to make literature does not mean that her works seek biography. Quite the opposite. For Rodoreda, literature is made of literature, and at the center of his creative project is the dialogue with the literary tradition. For this reason, Penalba has spread throughout the more than a thousand square meters of exhibition many of the names that influenced her and that, whether through tributes, parodies, encrypted quotations or updates, Rodoreda interpellates with her work. Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Katherine Mansfield, Marcel Proust, Voltaire, JV Foix, Dante Alighieri, Shakespeare, Ramon Llull, Dorothy Parker and so many others appear on the list of references, although we will never be able to “determine exactly what he read” because much of his library was lost.
He creates his work from the tragic heart of Europe and is nourished by the effervescence of post-World War II Paris
Many of these authority they are shared by “the most representative people of the time”, to say it with Rodoreda herself. A Diamond Square (1962), for example, the writer is worth the subject of Being and nothingness (1943) by Jean-Paul Sartre about “the final emptiness of all human life”, according to the words of Armand Obiols; and he had been reading it with enthusiasm since June 1943, when he recommended it to him The flies (1943). The final installation of the exhibition, the pool of water where birds, mud and sky mix, can also suggest this idea of emptiness and transcendence at the same time.
Like her contemporaries, Rodoreda is fascinated by the ancestral myths and urban legends that circulate. The story of “the stranger from the Seine”, a kind of modern Ophelia that Penalba reveals in a corner of the museum, must have inspired many of the suicides in his stories, just as it had fired the imagination of Rainer Maria Rilke, Céline, Louis Aragon, Man Ray or Santiago Rusiñol. Of the latter two, at the CCCB we find a bust and photographs of the subject of “the unknown”, which are accompanied by handwritten notes and unpublished texts in which Rodoreda talks about her “literary suicides” and her memories of Paris.
But there is a radical difference between her and these artists: Rodoreda usually gives subjectivity and past to her heroines, she does not condemn them to objects of contemplation and desire. And it goes even further, as Penalba explains: the writer “overturns cultural stereotypes about femininity: she complicates the ideals of beauty, she subverts the traditional simile between women and flowers, […] and redefines the common places associated with witches and prostitutes”. Let’s think of Cecília Ce fromCarrer de les Camèlies (1966), for example, which the curator connects very skilfully with the sculpture of a “Mother of Milk” from the 14th century.
As it is known, the Catalan novelist was also interested in painting and tried different procedures, techniques and styles, stimulated by the gross art of Jean Dubuffet and the primitiveism of Paul Klee, and then imitating Vassil Kandinski, Pablo Picasso or Joan Miró. Horse and knightone of his paintings exhibited at the CCCB, makes this clear. Rodoreda, however, did not limit this plastic thinking to the cornices of the canvas: a Death and spring (1986) —Penalba showed it in the essay Hunger in the eyes, cement in the mouth (2024)—, transfers the pictorial primitivism of the post-war avant-gardes to the narrative text in the wake of Henri Michaux, whose museum we can see a rubbing, Rest in misfortune (1945), exemplified by another tale, paralysis (1978). On the other hand, as illustrated by a magnificent video essay by Penalba on one of the walls of the CCCB, broken mirror (1974) transforms some scenes from mid-century French and American cinema, com Madam of… (1953) by Max Ophüls, from visual image to written word. In this sense, perhaps Chapter I of the novel could be considered among the first cinematic ekphrasis of all time.
Another proof of this dialogue with the literary and cultural tradition, Rodoreda gives us almost at the end of his life, when he portrays the war of 1936 in his last novel. (1980), which is intertextually based on the classics of the Spanish Golden Age. Through references to works by Cervantes, Quevedo and Velázquez, and still lifes and etchings by López Enguídanos and Goya, Penalba reveals how, with irony and expertise but also with admiration, it is they themselves who show us the absurdity, hunger and misery of Spanish fascism – and, incidentally, also of History.
The list of relationships, rewrites, updates and references is perhaps endless in every work that Rodoreda has bequeathed to us. Its universality has to do, therefore, with the direct and personal participation of the author in the intellectual debates of the moment, often with a “lucidity before the letter which makes it anticipate and interpellate the questions of ours”, Penalba tells me. Thanks to this, his literature does not lose its validity, it does not shrink when it is transported to other languages. “But this character of universal or classic, also and above all, has to do with his commitment to form”, adds the curator. “Like all great authors, Rodoreda knows that the first and last thing is the language, the style”. The language, Catalan, and his style: pure and unexpected like the eyes of the innocents that populate his literature and through which he “questions us about what makes us human”, both equal and different.Innocent eyes that, like Rodoreda, do not allow themselves to be corrupted or tamed.
Rodored, a forest. CCCB. Until May 25, 2026
