Merce Rodoreda · 1962 · exile

Merce Rodoreda's 1962 novel, written in exile and often called the greatest Catalan novel ever written. Natalia is a shop girl in Gracia who is asked to dance at the festa in Diamond Square, marries the man who asks, and is renamed Colometa by him. The war takes her husband and very nearly everything else, and she never leaves the neighbourhood.

1. 1
   Placa del Diamant

   The festa major, the awning strung with paper flowers and lights, and a stranger called Quimet who asks her to dance, tells her she will be his wife within a year, and renames her Colometa - the dove - on the spot.

2. 2
   Placa del Sol

   A big lively square with terraces, a fountain and a clock that strikes the hours - the Gracia of small shops and neighbours that Rodoreda reconstructed from memory in Geneva twenty years after she had last seen it.

3. 3
   Sant Josep

   They marry at the church on Placa Lesseps, and the marriage is the beginning of a long quiet subtraction - her name, her work, her rooms and finally her food, taken one at a time and mostly without malice.

4. 4
   Carrer Montseny

   The flat they move into after the wedding, which Quimet gradually fills with doves - a loft in the attic, then the tiled gallery, then the whole place, and it is Natalia who feeds them and cleans up after them.

5. 5
   Mercat de la Llibertat

   The oldest market in Gracia, and the rows of tripe sellers Rodoreda describes exactly - and later, in the war, the same market with nothing in it, and Natalia queueing for what is not there.

6. 6
   Carrer Gran de Gracia

   The tram, the doll shop window and the oilcloth shop - and the street that separates the two halves of her life, the flat with the doves on one side and the grocer she will marry on the other.

7. 7
   Els Jardinets

   Where Colometa walks while she is expecting her first child, at the bottom of the Gran de Gracia - the small gardens Rodoreda herself walked down every afternoon with her mother as a girl.

8. 8
   Park Guell

   Above the neighbourhood, where the city is spread out below and the war is coming toward it - and then Quimet goes to the front with his friends and does not come back, and the doves go one by one.

9. 9
   Placa del Diamant

   Years later, remarried and safe and still not quite alive, she walks out at night to the square where it started and screams - and it is the ugliest and best sentence in Catalan literature, and then she goes home.