The Song of Youth by Montserrat Roig (tr. Tiago Miller)
Review by Claire Carroll
‘A shining light of Catalan literature’ is how Colm Tóibín describes Montserrat Roig. This might appear to be easy shorthand, but it feels searingly accurate for a writer who uses such singularly beautiful prose to illuminate Catalonia’s complex political landscape. The Song of Youth, translated into English by Tiago Miller and published by Fum D’Estampa, comprises eight stories, written during Roig’s prolific but prematurely curtailed career.
Light features heavily in this collection; the elderly protagonist of the titular story observes the changes in light form her hospital bed, as she contemplates the imminent end of her life. The narrator of ‘Mar’ relishes memories of her lover-friend that are lit up by radiant sunsets. The story, about intimacy, feminism, friendship and death, meanders through time, returning to tender moments and fragments of memory. It culminates in a kiss in the ‘soft, almost spectral evening light slipping through the open balcony’. The eponymous Mar is elusive, to both the story’s narrator and the reader. She is multifaceted; highly intelligent and alluring, but also fickle, slippery, evasive.
Similarly evasive is the elderly scholar at the centre of the final story ‘Before I Deserve Oblivion’, which is told via a letter in response to accusations of his inappropriate behaviour. The story reflects a frustratingly regressive gender paradigm, but nevertheless highlights a changing dialectic of sexual politics and expectations. This is one of Roig’s special powers; creating characters that are deeply, provocatively philosophical, but also relatable in their flaws and tenderness. Death hangs over these stories, reminding us that time, for all of us—good or bad, loved or otherwise—is always passing.
The eight stories collected together in The Song of Youth are bright and kaleidoscopic, varying in length and style. There are stories within stories, where the main narrative takes place as a conversation. As with ‘Mar’ and ‘Before I Deserve Oblivion’, there is frequent darting in and out of memory, with narrators that feel as though they are trying to cling on to small, bright details through their dialogue. ‘Free from War and Wave’ is told as a hushed conversation on a sleepless night, one that weaves together fragments of stories of war. Recalling the anti-fascist discourse of mid 20th century Catalonia is a radical act. The ideas produced by this discourse and the act—enshrined within these stories—of holding them up to the light transforms them into something else.
As the narrator in ‘Free from War and Wave’ says to herself as she drifts off to sleep, ‘there are stories so old that they become like lullabies in times of peace’. Roig’s writing leaves the reader with a vivid sense of time and place, but also invites them to consider how quickly real lives become fable, how easily we absorb war, oppression and pain into our collective memory. The effect of this is both soothing and unsettling, but perhaps this is where the acute sense of power in Roig’s work lies; in remembering things as they really were, on both a personal and political level, in all of their pain and beauty.
The Song of Youth is published by Fum D’Estampa, 15th September 2021