The style of Garden by the Sea is slow, observational and oblique, never strident ... Although the changing relationships of the vacationers is what moves this book's plot along, they become almost ancillary to the way that early 20th-century Catalonian class-politics are subtly articulated through the gardener's observations. The patient, eloquent and often digressive prose of Rodoreda, who wrote in Catalan, provides an aesthetic experience on each page that assembles itself bit-by-bit into an unforgettable novel ... Dark, comedic and written in lush detail, Garden by the Sea is a compelling portrait of the affluent vacationers of the beautiful Catalonian coast of the 1920s.

It is a testament to Rodoreda’s skill that she not only packs such richness into her novels, but it is just understated enough to intrigue the reader to dig deeper. It is not just hesitancy that clouds the narrative, but also grief ... Martha Tennent and Maruxa Relaño embrace the seeming non-events of the text and render emotional undercurrents beautifully, skillfully striking a balance between the rhythm of Rodoreda’s writing and the moments where we seem to luxuriate in the language itself. Both the translators and the author seem to know that the power of Garden by the Sea lies in the spaces between the words, in what remains unsaid, and the result is a story that settles itself in your mind, content to be recalled later on, perhaps in a garden.

Rodoreda’s work denies us easy emotion; instead, emotional experience is conveyed through what remains unsaid, a skill Rodoreda performs with a unique mastery ... At its simplest, Garden by the Sea is a story of spurned love, shifting sands, and the ways in which idleness and inaction can come to define a life ... However, there’s a carefully-rendered pain behind his observations, indicated in the way his life has stagnated almost to the point of paralysis ... The Catalan story, and the story of its literary tradition, is unavoidably marked by linguistic repression and interruption—it isn’t linear, and neither are Rodoreda’s narratives. As such, she writes stories in which astute narrators stumble upon meaning as if by accident, letting their discoveries pass without being dwelled upon by remarkably unselfconscious prose. Her characters, unaccustomed to both agency and self-reflection, are wholly unable to say what they mean, which causes massive and sometimes fatal failures of communication.

Rodoreda is possibly the most important modern Catalan novelist, and this availability to English speakers corroborates that well-deserved reputation. Though the book was first published in 1967, its aesthetic and literary qualities still hold up well.

This is a romantic, wistful novel, with self-referential touches, lacking the harshness of the better-known Time of the Doves (1962) or Camellia Street (1966). What it shares with them is an impressionistic first-person voice that tries to build reality from scraps of always incomplete experience. Its plain elegance is nicely caught by the translators Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent ... Through half-glimpsed events, judicious eavesdropping, kitchen gossip and stray confidences made to the narrator, a tragedy takes shape and breaks as inevitably as a wave formed far back in the ocean – water being a symbol of death, as flowers embody care for life ... the novel transcends its central melodrama ... One charm is the peculiarity of the people filtered through the narrator’s mild observations ... While atmospherically it feels like the Symbolist 1890s, the jacket blurb sets the novel in the 1920s. Maybe. There are rather too many cars and phones, and a building boom in Barcelona, and the Mirós are expensive and painted in Mallorca (where the artist moved in 1956). Indeterminacy at least conveys the universality of transitional times.

In a novel notable for its graceful, restrained prose—sensitively rendered by translators Tennent and Relaño—Catalan fiction writer Rodoreda (1908-1983)...creates a finely etched portrait of 1920s Spanish society, as seen through the eyes of a quietly attentive gardener ... The garden itself, described in sensuous detail, takes a prominent role ... A captivating tale gently spun.

There is love and death—which sets up some touching scenes near the story’s end—but they’re related by the Nick Carrawayesque gardener at such a distance that they never threaten to disrupt the villa’s routine. Though the laid-back narrative’s lack of stakes may make some readers fidgety, others will revel in the easy, unhurried passage of years and light intrigues at the villa.