El cant de la joventut

by Montserrat Roig

Entre la poesia i la ironia, aquestes vuit narracions ens parlen de la joventut perduda, del sexe i de la mort, de la memòria i de l’oblit; de la importància, en fi, del llenguatge. La veu singular de l’autora es revela en cada una de les narracions i, per sota de les diferències temàtiques, els dóna unitat. El cant de la joventut ens fascina per l’estil i l’atmosfera tan característics de Roig, i l’acrediten com una de les veus més personals de la novel·lística catalana contemporània.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

158 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1990

About the author

Montserrat Roig i Fransitorra (Barcelona, 13 de juny de 1946 - 10 de novembre de 1991) fou una escriptora en català de novel·les, contes, assaig, reportatges i articles periodístics. Va presentar i dirigir diversos programes de televisió, mitjà en el qual va excel·lir com a entrevistadora a escriptors de generacions precedents.

Novel·la
Ramona, adéu! (1972)
El temps de les cireres (1977)
L'hora violeta (1980)
L'òpera quotidiana (1985)
La veu melodiosa (1987)

No ficció
Els catalans als camps nazis (1977)
L'agulla daurada (1985)
L'autèntica història de Catalunya (1990)
Digues que m'estimes encara que sigui mentida (1991)
Un pensament de sal, un pessic de pebre : dietari obert (1992)

Reviews

[Henk · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting bundle full of reminiscing on youth, love or health lost, against the backdrop of a Spain still processing its Civil War
For that one year I wasn’t just the person I am, but the person I believe I have the potential to be.

Mar, the first longer story of the bundle, was for me definitely the highlight, and made me wish to read more long form work of Montserrat Roig. It is definitely interesting to read something of a Catalan author, even though the shortness of most stories make an emotional impact or full appreciation of the authors storytelling harder.

The Song of Youth
Reminiscence of a love and health lost. Very short, and The Song of Youth as a bundle isn't really long already.

Love and ashes
A woman and man reinvigorate their relationship with a safari. The ending got me looking at my bath bombs with some worry.

Free from war and wave
A sparse but effective tale of the impact of the Spanish Civil War

Mar
When I revealed this to her later on she told me that I classified things instead of seeing them, that I only get excited before beauty or mystery if I was expecting to be excited by it.
I prepared myself too much, she said, as if, before tasting excitement, I had to rehearse it first.

Very good portrait of two women loving each other (platonically?), struggling in the world and the magic of love and death. Really a near perfect short story.

They lay on the sand in silence but the dead are never silent, Norma. Never.

Division
I lacked clarity on who is the narrator of this story, with a senator and his wife just popping up. Seems like someone died but why and how remains unclear.

I don’t understand salmon
A woman commemorating the falling Republicans in a French cemetery, while reflecting on her affair with a man. Would have been stronger when it would have been more long.

The chosen apple
A woman saying goodbye of her dying husband. Again more would have been more in this story.

Before I deserve oblivion
After all, what is a story if not a parody of life?

Another longer story, but less powerful or clear as Mar.
It features at its heart a very Turgenev First Love plot, with a circus girl being lusted over by a young boy, and apparently explaining this boy, now almost retired teacher, later behavior.

Uninterrupted order in a story is disingenuous is mentioned in this story, and there are indeed just so many words for a censor turned literature teacher who has a breakdown involving spying on little girls and tries to make a sort of acceptable narrative about the event.
Constantin Cavafy his poetry seems alluded to as a trigger, but the level of veiled language and the meandering way the story is told, make it hard to say anything very clearly about it.

The quotes in the story however are quite nice and make me long to read a novel by the author:

They were laughing because they both knew that one day they would die.

I am what others want me to be, in exchange for them not hunting me down.

I sincerely believe there is no greater enemy of words than a literature teacher

The whole class was one giant, synchronized yawn.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Montserrat Roig is belatedly having a moment, which is really quite lovely. This collection includes the excellent story Mar, a vibrant feminist ode to independence, although the rest of the collection is less exciting. Kudos to Fum D’Estampa Press and tr. Tiago Miller for bringing this Catalan work into English.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize

The book is published by the UK Fum d’Estampa Press, founded in 2019 with the aim to bring “award-winning Catalan language poetry, fiction and essays to English translation”

The author is the late Montserrat Roig – 1946 to 1991 -(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montser...) was an award winning writer (of novels and short stories) and journalist, feminist, Catalanist and left-wing activist (particularly in the Franco era). This collection of short stories dates from the very end of her career - published in Catalan in 1989 when she had (from what I can find in her researches) moved to a more literary, reflective and lyrical style in her fiction without losing (but perhaps no longer dominated by) her activist themes.

The collection has been translated by Tiago Miller – a London born and raised translator now living in Lleida.

The collection for me fits into two very distinctive parts – six really quite short stories and two lengthier stories and I must admit my strong preference (and for me the real literary merit of the collection) lies in the longer stories.

“The Song of Youth” (the first story, which gives the book its title ) is about an elderly woman in a hospital ward where many of the other patients are dying of old age, and reflecting on a love affair in her youth.
“Love and Ashes” is a rather quirky story about a poor married couple who save up for a safari – the husband’s obsession with Giraffe’s being literally his downfall but liberating his wife (the story can be read here https://static1.squarespace.com/stati...).
“Free From War and Wave” is a tale heavy in literary references about a son of a tavern-owner and man-entertainer who later is caught up in the Civil War.
“Division” is about a married couple visited by a flirtatious senator (who can advance the husband’s interest) and his wife.
“I Don’t Understand Salmon” is a story about Republicans reminiscing (returning metaphorically to their spawning grounds) many year after their Civil War defeat.
“The Chosen Apple” is about a woman who marries to the disapprocal of her mother in law.

All of these are enjoyable and contain some interesting elements and also build a theme of female independence, particularly later in life – a theme I can also see could be allegorical for post-Franco Catalonia. None however are for me either particularly successful, memorable or innovative as short stories – I wonder also if a temporal as well as linguistic/cultural distance has impeded my full appreciation.

Since the publication of Anna Karenina, or perhaps even before, it has become customary for humanity to believe that happy people have no stories to tell, something I now know to be false, for if there are any stories really worth recounting, it’s those of people who have known happiness. And that is exactly what I was next to Mar: a happy person. Those moments, despite their stillness, are far from dead: they are silent when I want, voluble when I choose, rising up in me as seemingly profitless fragments of memory united by pain or converging in joy to challenge my belief that the youth I’d regained thanks to Mar, was lost forever.

“Mar” (at some 30 pages) is the highlight of the book, a much more involved and memorable tale by a female narrator looking back on an intense, almost obsessive, life defining and societal convention-defying relationship with another woman – Mar – who suffered a catastrophic (and possibly non-accidental) car accident in her jeep-style vehicle two years before the narration. The narrator’s fierce but one might say theoretical feminism is challenged by Mar’s determination for independence on her own, unconventional terms.

Subordinate clauses always sound good at night. But in narrative terms, the kaleidoscope and its harmonised images shattering just as they take shape is far more alluring. In the daytime, subordinate clauses shatter all by themselves. In the daytime, the world demands simple sentences, subject-verb-object, full stop, new paragraph, while adjectives are to be austere, precise and to efficiently complement the verb. As the terse prose of day takes over, nocturnal rhetoric begins to feel inhibited and awkward. At night, anyone who dreams can be a poet but during the day only a few are writers who write. Prose, then, admits no excuses: this is not about an old man not yet tired enough to die but a bad literature teacher spying on schoolgirls as they get undressed. The precise adjective is ‘ridiculous’.

“Before I Deserve Oblivion” is the other longer story (at some 40 pages) – it begins with a rather clumsy metafictional conceit of a narrator sent at third hand a largely “autobiographical” and “ponderous” text, by a near-retired Spanish literature high school teacher seeking to justify (albeit in a way he admits lacks coherency) his discovery as a voyeur on his female pupils, with the vast majority of the story the actual text. The Spanish teacher was for many years a censor and his censorship increasingly moved away from the political as desired by the authorities to a more personal obsession with removing sexual imagery. Roig is at pains to set up the story in advance (as my comments imply) as self-consciously ponderous, incoherent and rambling – but once that is accepted there are fascinating ruminations in the text on both what it means to write, what it means to read and what it means to censor as well as how all interact with life and ageing.

Overall a worthwhile if uneven read – perhaps best approached as an insight into a literature (Catalan) which is, I suspect, almost entirely unknown to English readers.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize
Translation longlisted for the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize

My experience of from-the-Catalan literature is relatively limited, indeed I can think only of Bel Olid, Eva Baltasar, Mercè Rodoreda and Jesús Moncada as authors I've read in translation. Max Besora, Josep Pla, Albert Sánchez Piñol, Quim Monzó and Jaume Cabré would all count as 'on my literary radar', but not actually authors ones I have read (there's a longer list here: https://lletra.uoc.edu/en/authors). So it is wonderful to have a newish press Fum d’Estampa introducing us to this world, and indeed a Prize that draws attention and brings funding to such presses:

Brought to fruition in 2019, Fum d’Estampa Press brings award-winning Catalan language poetry, fiction and essays to English translation. We work with some of the most exciting and well-known translators to bring English-language readers the very best in European translated literature in books that are beautiful to both read and hold.

The Song of Youth is Tiago Miller's (a writer and translator from Catalan, based in Lleida) English rendition of Montserrat Roig's original El cant de la joventut (1989), one of her last works, as she died in 1991, aged just 45. A writer and journalist, her journalistic work focused on forging a creative feminist tradition, and on recovering the country’s political history. Her novels take similar stances, reflecting on the need to liberate women who were silenced by history, per the publisher.

In this interview with the translator where he describes Roig's style as "so suggestive, subtle to the point of hypnotic, yet both universal and distinctly Catalan ... a year later I reread the book and it was clear to me that it was a masterpiece of European writing, not just because of her prose but also because she discusses so many of the topics that we are still grappling with today, such as sexuality, gender, identity, left-wing politics and feminism."

This review at The Monthly Booking captures the intent and affect of the collection well, and features an apposite quote from the collection: Uninterrupted order in a story is disingenuous.

The Song of Youth is a collection of 8 stories over 108 pages, but with two of the stories, "Mar" (31pp) and "Before I Deserve Oblivion" (37pp) taking up the majority of the pages, and the other's much shorter (5-9pp).

The collection takes its name from the first story, a powerful one narrated by a dying, but defiant, woman in a hospital bed, the sight of the doctor bringing back memories of a youthful fling with a soldier on short-term leave, just before her wedding.

All of the stories begin with literary epigraphs, and references abound to both international literature (e.g. Woolf) but also Catalan (e.g. Josep Carner and Joan Maragall), and Love and Ashes takes its from Sylvia Plath's Childless Woman:

Spiderlike, I spin mirrors,
Loyal to my image.

The story begins:

Maria wasn’t aware she had dreams until Marta spoke of hers. Maria was what they call a ‘happy’ woman and everyone found her to be kind-hearted; her dreams, however, were like the lizards snoozing under the stones in the summer. Marta observed Maria with a certain pity, unsure of how to tell her that there was a whole world out there, just waiting. Each summer, Marta and her husband would travel to countries with strange-sounding names and return with an armful of slides, which they showed to friends on Sunday afternoons. Maria – who Marta never failed to invite over – associated those early evenings with the taste of chocolate.

Maria couldn’t stand chocolate. It reminded her of the prolonged penitence of First Communion. She much preferred the tickle of champagne, served in tall glasses, the ones that clink when you say ‘chin chin’.

But when Maria's husband suggests a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Samburu nature reserve in Kenya to see the reticulated giraffes (a visit I've made myself and highly recommended) the trip goes rather farcically and fatally wrong for him, and Maria discovers an unexpected form of liberation.

Free From War and Wave is a story of a boy growing up a a young man fighting and dying in the Civil War, told by one character to another on a sleepless night: "For there are stories that are so old that they become like lullabies. That's why I am telling it to you now. You who live free from war and wave," a line taken from The Odyssey.

Mar is narrated by one woman, an "intellectual giving talks on women's liberation" about her relationship, passionate but not sexual, with Mar (she kindled the beginnings of a new woman in me, something no man had been capable of doing.).

Mar is a free spirit - despite a string of what her friend would regard as relationships where the man had let her down, Mar has no regrets, living for the moments of passion at their centre. Her greatest pleasure is driving the narrator on mountain roads in her beaten-up Citreon Mehari, their children bouncing along in the back, her life, perhaps inevitably ending when she, for once alone, drove it (deliberately? accidentally?) off the road after her ex-husband sued successfully for custody of the children,



The longest, and final, story, Before I Deserve Oblivion, is the oddest and very interesting. The main part of the text is a letter from an elderly secondary school teacher, disgraced after being caught spying on the girls in their changing room, explaining, if not justifying, his actions by his former life as a state censor of letters and literature:

I'm lying, because between the brackets of oblivion are K's poems, as well as my thick red lines and blue Latin and Greek crosses made with my double-sided pencil: my lines and red crosses through the words and the phrases of others. charged with exterminating them.

But I wasn't the executioner, merely his assistant. The words of others arrived on my desk woven into a story like so many others and perhaps even as old as the origins of the world. Those who murdered people came before me. My job was to massacre words, a crime that goes unpunished given it's not recognised by any legal system or criminal code. Not that I ever considered myself a criminal, nor was there anything mysterious about my mission. If anything it was prosaic and repetitive. Words don't cry out or suffer like people. They are incapable of lamenting. No one has ever described their agony, nor have words ever written about their own pain. My job was to obliterate stories conceived by other minds, words written by individuals who obstinately insisted on continuing to weave them into stories. In my eyes, these faceless strangers were guilty of deluding their readers, of making them believe they could access another, imaginary, universe. They were guilty of striving to make real the invisible universe of the written word.

'K' here is the Alexandrian poet Constantinos P. Cavafy (1863-1933) whose poem Longings, in Edmund Keeley and Phillip Sherrard's translation, was the one work that shattered the censor's defences and which he later, as a teacher, reads to his pupils, to their indifference, prompting his career-ending act:

Like the beautiful bodies of those who died before growing old,
sadly shut away in sumpttuous mausoleum,
roses by the head, jasmine at the feet -
so appear the longings that have passed
without being satisfied, not one of the granted
a single night of pleasure, or one of its radiant mornings.

3.5 stars - an interesting but uneven collection but a worthy inclusion on the Republic of Consciousness longlist.

[Hugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2022

My ninth book from the Republic of Consciousness list is another surprising inclusion, since the Catalan writer has been dead since 1991. This is a collection of eight short stories, of which six are under 10 pages long, and the other two almost short novellas.

I am struggling to recall the shorter stories. The longer two are more interesting and surprising. Overall, I don't really feel qualified to write a detailed review.

Since the book lacks a list of contents, I will include one here:
7 The Song of Youth
16 Love and Ashes
21 Free From War and Wave
29 Mar
60 Division
67 I Don't Understand Salmon
72 The Chosen Apple
78 Before I Deserve Oblivion

[Alan (the Lone Librarian rides again) Teder · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Song of Roig
Review of the Fum d'Estampa paperback edition (October 2021) translated by Tiago Miller from the Catalan language original El cant de la joventut (October 1989)

[Average 3.635, rounded up as a strong 4]
Longlisted and now Shortlisted for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize.

Montserrat Roig (1946-1991) grew up in Barcelona during the years of the Franco regime. Her work as a Catalan writer and journalist is often in reaction to the repression and censorship of those years. The Song of Youth appears to be her first major English language translation, although a translation of her theatre work Reivindicació de la Senyora Clito Mestres (1990) (The Vindication of Senyora Clito Mestres) played in various theatres in North America in 2012.


Author Montserrat Roig. Image sourced from La Vanguardia.

The short stories in The Song of Youth are not all dated, but do appear to be mostly from the 1980s. The older protagonists often look back on the years of the Spanish Civil War and the years of the resulting Franco regime after the Republicans fought a losing struggle against the Fascist uprising (who were armed and supported by Nazi Germany). Six of the eight stories are quite short, about 5 to 10 pages. I enjoyed the two longer stories the most, especially #4 Mar with a woman's elegy / reminiscence of a lost friend whom she had bonded with. My favourite quote was in the old regime censor's confession in #8:

It was the same sentiment I'd go on to recognise in the texts it was my job to silence. I didn't cross out words with a sense of religious righteousness. No, that would have been far too easy: I assailed them with my pencil because I was envious. And what I envied was the creative act in its purest state. - excerpt from Before I Deserve Oblivion.

1. The Song of Youth **** An elderly woman awaiting death in a hospital banters with the doctor and nurses while having memories of her soldier fiancé/husband.
2. Love and Ashes *** A woman and her husband go on an African safari with fatal consequences.
3. Free From War and Wave *** A woman tells a tragic story of a conscripted teenage recruit in the Spanish Civil War which she had heard from her grandfather.

There are stories so old that they become like lullabies in times of peace. That's why I'm telling it to you now. You who live free from war and wave.*

4. Mar ***** [September 1980/Revised September 1988] A woman reminisces about her girl-friend Mar, two years after the latter died in an automobile accident.
5. Division *** A woman and her husband entertain a Senator and his wife at their country home. The husband appears to be encouraging the wife to be receptive of the Senator's attention to her, and she resents him for it.
6. I Don't Understand Salmon **** [1980] The anonymous dead from the Republican army were buried with only numbers as markers. There is a metaphor drawn to migrating salmon dying on the way back home to their birth grounds.
7. The Chosen Apple *** In old age, a woman looks back on her life with her husband whom she kept celibate for 7 days after their marriage (which the mother-in-law had tried to discourage).
8. Before I Deserve Oblivion **** [May 1988] A former censor of the Franco regime, later a schoolteacher until dismissed for peeping, tells his life story via his own 'fictional' short story.

I read The Song of Youth due to my interest in the Republic of Consciousness Prize for small independent publishers. I am a supporter of Prize through my subscription to the RoC Book of the Month (BotM) club.

* This line was rather a stark reminder of the current situation for most us while looking on at current events in the Russian attack on Ukraine.

[anna cabrespina · Rating 4 out of 5]

epa, m'ha agradat molt! dels vuit relats, la majoria són molt curts i només un parell són més extensos. els curts, alguns no els he entès crec, i d'altres m'han semblat bonics però tant efímers que costa connectar-hi. El meu preferit ha estat Mar, m'ha semblat tant tendre i genuí, i al ser dels llargs arribes a estimar les protagonistes. <3
"I aviat vaig pensar que havia vingut d'una altra galàxia. No podia entendre, si no, com vivia, sense projectes, sense demà, sense cap teoria, sense refelxionar sobre la repressió dels nostres anys joves, de com ens havien estafat, només enraonant de com n'havia estat, de feliç, quan era una nena"

sap greu, ja m'he acabat l'únic llibre de literatura catalana que m'havia endut d'erasmus :/
amigues, quan em vingueu a veure porteu-me'n algun altre... merci

[Neil · Rating 2 out of 5]

For about two years in the lead up to my retirement from work, my boss was a proud citizen of Catalonia. Sadly, that working relationship, which did involve several meals together and time in Catalan bars, never got as far as a discussion of Catalan literature (I don’t think my boss was a great reader). And my experience of Catalan literature is very limited, so this book is valuable to me if for no other reason than giving me experience of a different literature tradition.

That said, I have to acknowledge that I struggled a bit to read this collection of short stories. It consists of six very short stories and two longer ones. The shorter ones are interesting to read but none of them really grabbed me. Indeed, I found that sleeping on them meant I lost most of my memories of them. The longer ones, especially “Mar” fit better with my reading tastes. The other longer story (“Before I Deserve Oblivion”) is a strange story to read because it is deliberately set up as being the transcription of the “ponderous” writing of a third party. And setting out to deliberately write a ponderous story, with ponderous meaning “dull or laborious”, seems a strange approach!

So, I find myself in a similar position as with the last book I read from the same long list. That (“After the Sun”) was also a collection of short stories and, in both cases, I found one story that I liked a lot and couldn’t really get into the others. I am, unfortunately, not having a great experience with the short story collections in the running for this year’s RoC Prize. I think this book is probably a lot cleverer, a lot more nuanced and significantly more meaningful than I am giving it credit for, but my struggle to engage with the writing style (I assume it is the writing rather than the translation, but it could be either) means it has passed me by to a large extent.

[Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Longlisted for the 2022 best UK/Irish small press award presented by the Republic of Consciousness. Writer, feminist, and Catalan activist Montserrat Roig’s final work before her early death at 45, published in 1989 and now translated into English, is a collection of short stories showcasing Roig’s feminist and anti-Francoist activism. Though it would be another year before she was diagnosed with aggressive cancer that would all too quickly kill her, every one of these eight stories features dying and death, as if she knew what was coming, giving this book a bit of a haunting effect.

My two favorite stories are linked through their general outline of a deathbed scene intermingling with memory. “Song of Youth” presents the character of an old woman in hospital, recently moved into an area for patients expected to die soon, resisting the meek dutifulness expected of her by the ill-mannered staff. Her sensory inputs in this setting meld with recalled sensations from a passionate encounter when she was a young woman, the strong back of the doctor clothed in white becoming the strong back of the white-shirted stranger and lover met in the cafe. In both places in time her rebelliously independent spirit shines forth strongly, contrasting with the change to her body: her hand, “protruding bones, riddled with swollen blue rivers cut through by clods of earth coloured stains,” was once otherwise - “The skin was still elastic then. There was fat underneath it.” It’s an effective story of the spirit defying the decline of the body.

A later story, “The Chosen Apple”, comes at it differently, and is a sensitive little gem of a story. Here it is an old married couple, the man dying at home with his wife caring for him. She remembers defying his mother who told her she was not smart enough for her intellectual son, but it is the essentialness of the person that matters more. A memory of being told, “It’s no use hoping you’ll be happy with him. You won’t understand each other. He was still just a small boy and we were already speaking in Latin together,” is immediately followed by the real time, “Now he wants me to bring him a hot-water bottle. There is cold in his bones, he tells me. I check his pulse and feel the slow beats. ‘Nadiejda,’ he says, ‘I’m still holding on.’ I kiss his forehead and my lips turn ice cold.” I mean, that gets you, does it not. And again, the body withers, but the spirit does not.

“The Chosen Apple” suggests a diminishment of intellectualism in favor of emotion and lived experience, which interestingly the intellectual Roig repeats in other stories as well. “Mar”, one of two longer stories, contrasts the characters of two women who develop a close relationship, one of whom is the stereotypical intellectual and the other of whom is the more earthy, carefree Mar. The narrator asks Mar, “why the attitude all the time towards intellectuals, and she immediately stopped laughing, abandoned her jocular tone and said: ‘Because you’re always trying to demonstrate what other people experience, as if you were all stone dead or something.’” And then in the story “Division”, we read that “After coffee was served, Glòria went out onto the veranda to sit in one of the wicker armchairs and devote herself to her favourite activity of all: not thinking about anything.”

The final and longest story, “Before I Deserve Oblivion”, centers a narrator who has abandoned both intellectualism and honestly lived emotion, resulting in a warped and rambling psyche mirrored by the form of the story. A Franco-era censor, now a bad literature teacher, he is haunted by a poem by Cavafy that unlike the rest of the words he censored, he remembers, as it convicts himself:

“Like the beautiful bodies of those who died before growing old,
sadly shut away in a sumptuous mausoleum,
roses by the head, jasmine at the feet –
so appear the longings that have passed
without being satisfied, not one of them granted
a single night of pleasure, or one of its radiant mornings.”

Regarding intellectualism and lived emotion, then, perhaps Roig would say, as another character in “Division” says, “The perfect [wo]man is a synthesis.”

3.5*

[rita camps homs · Rating 3 out of 5]

suposo que he de ser sincera i acceptar que no m'he llegit l'últim conte, però és que no m'està venint gens de gust acabar-lo perquè ara tinc mooooolts llibres interessantíssims a llegir 😋😋😋😋😋 la montserrat roig molt bé però crec que no m'acaba d'enganxar per la seva manera tant periodística d'explicar les coses. Ara, el conte "Mar" m'ha fet pensar en el que passa quan t'enamores de les teves amigues i suposo que m'ha agradat sentir que algú altre digués que existeix i és una altra forma d'estimar.

Sap greu les meves reviews perquè escric segons el que em passa pel cap i no les reescric! Sori

[Claire · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eight short stories that use language as a weapon against political and social "dismemory".

Eva Baltasar says:

The Song of Youth represents an array of lagoons in which Montserrat Roig's most extraordinary flowers lay their roots."

I feel like I'm sitting at the edge of one of those lagoons just appreciating the flowers, though not always seeing those roots.

I really enjoyed the first story, the title story Song of Youth, and reread it a few times as it had so many layers that aren't picked up immediately. It's about a woman in hospital, at the end of her life, observing the white coat and having flashbacks to her youth, a transgression.

The story MAR is the hardest hitting - about a woman befriended, a relationship, admiration, of two people who are unalike but drawn towards each other, who go their own ways and then a car accident changes everything.

...it never once occurred to me to give a name to that period of silence, madness and noise, to those moments when the hours would melt into timelessness and our intellectual friends, while watching us, would frown or raise an eyebrow.
"They've got some nerve," said their suspicious eyes while they stared, unaware of their own fear.

The time they are together changes the one telling the story, used to analysing everything and living in a world of opinions and judgments, something shifts. Her presence disturbed others, messing up the carefully compiled archives on their minds.

We hardly said a word, we certainly didn't reinvent anything, but it was only with her that I lost my fear, the fear of revealing who I believe myself to be, that little girl I keep hidden in the deep, damp depths of my inner self.

[Cristina Izquierdo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Em sap greu pq el principi de febrer per mi ha sigut com sol ser gener: llarguíssim i un caos. Portava molt bon ritme i estava super in a la història pero vaig fer paron, i sento que la última part m'ha quedat una mica difusa per això mateix. De totes maneres ha sigut una lectura molt entretinguda que m'ha fet pensar i tenir més ganes de llegir a la tati roig. Ho farem en breus !!!

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

These eight stories have been translated from Catalan into English for the first time. They were originally written in the early 1970s when Spain will still in the shadow of fascism and Franco.

The collection opens with a woman in the hospital who wakes up every morning wondering if it is going to be her last. She hears the laboured breathing of the woman next to her and knows as the screens are pulled over that then it will become a death rattle soon enough. The second story, Love and Ashes, is about a husband and wife who make the decision to travel to Africa so he can see the reticulated giraffes.

On the island, I walked up to the sea and begged it to tell me its secret. But the sea would only answer to the wind.

Other stories concern the inhabitants of a graveyard, a censor who stopped the public from reading the erotic stories in books but had a number of flaws of his own. Another story concerns a child who knew by the shoes his mother was wearing, who she had been with and what her mood was going to be like. She tried to hide him when they were conscripting seventeen-year-olds, but they found him soon enough.  He had almost no training before being dispatched for war.

I thought that this was a reasonable set of short stories. Roig prose, whilst politically charged, does not lose its sensitivity. There is plenty of variety in each story, they feel dystopian without having a strong science fiction vibe to them and it is great that Fum D’Estampa are bringing this and other books to a wider audience.

Three Favourite Stories
Free from War and Wave
I Don’t Understand Salmon
Love and Ashes

[Roger Prat · Rating 2 out of 5]

Doncs no sé massa bé què pensar. M'ha agradat? No especialment. M'ha desagradat? Tampoc. Hi han hagut relats que m'han agradat més que d'altres, com sempre. Especialment "Escapats de la guerra i de l'ona" m'ha fet emocionar, sentir-me viu. En la resta de relats sempre hi ha alguna cosa amagada que treu el nas i deixa intuir una lliçó però la forma me n'allunya. La prosa és bona, això s'ha de reconèixer; no sé ben bé si dir-ne bonica, pròpia o peòtica, però no deixa indiferent.
En resum, tinc la sensació d'haver llegit moltes paraules desordenades dient: viu.

[Txe Polon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alguns dels relats que s'inclouenn (com el que dóna títol al volum) són suggerents i prometedors, però el darrer resulta molt llarg i feixuc, de manera que la impressió final se'n ressent força.

[Raül · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recull de relats de Montserrat Roig, estilísticament i argumentalment variats, encara que hi ha alguns temes que es repeteixen quasi en tots els contes: la guerra d’Espanya i la postguerra, la joventut i la vellesa i la mort. Roig és una autora amb un gran domini de la narrativa i de la llengua, bastant experimental alhora d’escriure. Això fa que demana al lector tota la seua atenció, però la recompensa val la pena. Hi ha fragments i reflexions absolutament memorables.

El cant de la joventut 4,5*
Amor i cendres 3,5*
Escapats de la guerra i de l’ona 4*
Mar 5*
La divisió 3*
Mare, no entenc els salmons 3*
La poma escollida 3*
Abans que no mereixi l'oblit 4,5*

"... forçada a viure, de nou, trenta vides, mare afectuosa sense complex de culpa, mare histèrica amb tots els complexos del món, intel·lectual que dóna conferències sobre la condició de la dona, femella que sap, teòricament, com donar satisfacció al mascle de torn, amiga i confident d'altres dones que se senten fracassades i que tenen la valentia de dir-ho, cosa que jo mai de la vida no faria".

"Ella, ho dic ara, havia desvetllat en mi brots d'una altra mena de dona, cosa que els homes mai no havien aconseguit. Brots d'una altra mena de dona, d'una altra mena de persona que he tornat a enterrar".

"Als meus ulls, tots aquests desconeguts eren culpables d'il·lusionar a la gent que llegeix, de fer-los creure que poden anar a un altre univers, al imaginari".

"No hi ha res més perillós que un creador que no se sent derrotat".

“…era l’ajudant del botxí. Un botxí no necessita tenir fe en allò que fa. Però el seu ajudant, sí”.

Prèstec de la biblioteca electrònica de la Generalitat Valenciana eBiblio.

[Gaia Llobera · Rating 5 out of 5]

últimament estic llegint a montserrat roig i entre la seva visió del món i les reflexions memorables s'ha convertit en una de les meves autores preferides. sempre hi ha hagut, però, alguna cosa o altra que ha fet que no li hagi arribat a posar cinc estrelles. aquest tampoc no és un llibre perfecte –de fet, al principi pensava que no m'estava agradant–, però s'ha acabat això de ser tan perepunyetes. ara sí, per fi, cinc estrelles a montserrat roig 💗 m'ha meravellat i se li ha de fer justícia

[Emilia Domagała · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mroczna, zaskakująca, zabawna, wzniosła, bezsensowna.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of short stories, originally written in Catalan and translated by Tiago Miller.

I had never heard of Montserrat Roig who died in 1991, although she was apparently a well known writer and feminist activist. The feminism is clear in the short stories as well as her anti-Francois stance. Spain was still coming to terms with the Franco years in the 1980s, and may still be struggling as far as I know.

In any case, I enjoyed these quiet, yet powerful stories. They all seem to concern either dying or death, and although Roig seems to have been quite an intellectual, they all seem to favor emotion and action, over the intellect.

This collection consists of 8 stories, 6 very short and two much longer stories. The only one I had some trouble with was the short story "Division" since I couldn't keep the characters straight. The last story, "Before I Deserve Oblivion" was also a little difficult due to its main character--an old man accused to taking pictures of his female students in the dressing room of a gym--and its somewhat discursive style. In any case, I loved the title story about an old woman waiting to die, "Mar" one of the longer stories that is about two women, one of whom is injured and dies after an auto accident, and a truly lovely story "The Chosen Apple." This one about a woman caring for her dying husband.

Actually, they are all worth reading!

[SamB · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story at the centre of this collection, 'Mar', is one of the best short stories I've ever read - complex, compelling and absolutely devastating. Its examination of gender politics through the unconventional relationship of the two main characters is still relevant and thought-provoking today, and the way it gradually reveals what brought them to this point kept me fully engrossed, aching for it to end well even though I always knew it couldn't. I'm still thinking about Mar and the story's narrator now, days later.

The rest of the collection is a bit of a mixed bag. Some of the stories are perhaps overly complex: I loved the start of the last story of this collection, for example, but by the end I really wasn't sure what it was trying to say to me; there was another, 'I Don't Understand Salmon, which flips back and forth between an unnamed girl learning about migratory salmon from her mother and a woman named Norma (the same girl?) talking about concentration camps with a WW2 veteran in a way I could never connect.

But most of all I really enjoyed the language used. Everything is so beautifully described - often in ways that resonate simply because they're unconventional - and Roig shares a wonderful way of capturing the essence of people with some of the best authors I've read.

[valli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aquesta ha sigut l'obra escollida, sense cap mena de criteri, per endinsar-me al món de la Montserrat Roig. Més que jo endinsar-me al seu món, aquest m'ha captivat, fent-me'l llegir en tan sols dos dies. Sense cap mena de dubte, el meu relat preferit ha estat Mar. Per la forma tan delicada, i alhora intensa, en què Roig narra una història d'amor entre dues dones.

[Clara Palop · Rating 5 out of 5]

Per llibres com aquest llig

[Mar · Rating 2 out of 5]

La Montserrat Roig és molt mona però a mi em costen les historietes curtes i antigues. Algunes m’han agradat, altres no les he acabat d’entendre i altres m’han deixat mal cos.

[Paula Bassets · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5. Dolça, divertida, dura i sensible.

[Maria · Rating 3 out of 5]

"La poma escollida" se'n mereix 5.

[Marina Haro · Rating 3 out of 5]

Era el meu primer cop amb Roig i m'ha decebut una mica, potser perquè tenia unes expectatives que no s'han complert. Tot i això, alguns relats estan bé.

[Abril · Rating 5 out of 5]

Com sempre, la ment de Montserrat Roig, res més a dir

[Oriol Vallès López · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sí! Li poso cinc estrelles també per contrarrestar tots aquests ianquis i anglesos que no s'enteren de res.

[LindaJ^ · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my second book from the 2022 Republic of Consciousness prize long list. It is a short book of short stories. There are 8 stories - 6 are quite short and 2 are longer. The Kindle edition was quite annoying, with the quotes and title at the beginning of each story smushed together at the end of the preceding story. And, even more annoying, was the hyphenation of words that was not done between syllables. Luckily the book was short.

The six short stories and one of the longer ones concerned women in various scenarios. Of the six short, short stories the one I liked the best was the first. It concerned a querulous (or so it seemed to the unprofessional nurse) elderly woman who was soon to be the last woman alive in the 4-bed, sort of intensive care, room. I also liked the first long story about the woman named Mar who smashed her car and was being observed by her friend/female lover. The watching woman was sad and angry. Her self-reflection was interesting.

I thought the other short, short stories to be okay, but I really did not like the last longer story. It did have some good points but, as others note, it was ponderous and i just got tired of it and skimmed from interesting point to interesting point.

If you want a better description of the stories, see GY's review at https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Paulo Rodrigues · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compilation of short stories with a focus on remembrance. I’m usually not one for short stories but will happily read anything by Montserrat Roig translated to English. Mostly short visions of feminine perspectives except for two longer stories (one of them from a male perspective). I thoroughly enjoyed the tale about Mar. As always the Catalan setting is a big plus for me. Another recommended read from an author that sadly left us too soon!