ABSTRACT
In her 2013 memoir, Temps d’innocència [A time of innocence], Carme Riera describes her relationship to the Spanish Civil War as mediated through language: “Quan jo vaig néixer feira nou anys que s’havia acabat la guerra. La paraula ‘guerra’ tenia, però, un gruix quotidià” (47) [when I was born, the War had been over for nine years. The word “war” had, nevertheless, an everyday feel to it].1 Therefore it seems tting that it is through writing that Riera approached and came to understand the past and present repercussions of the Spanish Civil War. Her relationship to the past in her memoir is rooted in a photograph of her father she describes, and in the novel La meitat de l’ànima [Half the soul] from 2004 the protagonist delves into her family’s past upon receiving unsigned letters. Language as the form and function of memory takes on various shapes in Riera’s work including the language of the photographic composition and the one-sided perspective found in the epistolary form that often proves paradoxical. For Riera language does not always reveal information or enlighten the characters or readers of her work, but instead is a means to ensnare and seduce the reader into a complex literary world of meaning, subversion, and doubt.2 In this study, the importance of the family album and personal history shade Riera’s writing about the past, which becomes an unstable place where the truth and facts are mere creations and subject to change.
