Acceso usuarios
P. Louise Johnson
Maria Aurèlia Capmany's 1967 work "Un lloc entre els morts" is set in the early years of the nineteenth century, and in part against the backdrop of Barcelona under Napoleonic occupation. Its poet-protagonist Jeroni Campdepadrós finds himself in a conflicted personal situation characterized by fragile health and existential turmoil. He struggles to create a clearly defined and secure self-identity which will allow him to feel, in Lynn Chancer's words, "legitimately human". His reality is a consuming ambivalence structured around the twin poles of pleasure and remorse, and this manifests itself most notably in his interaction with female "others". In turn, the ethics of his own struggle can be read, tentatively, as dramatizing the ethical ambivalence in play between Catalonia and its "others" in the novel (Spain, France), while the allegorical aspects of the reading derive additional momentum from the circumstances of the novel's composition under Franco's dictatorship.
