Catherine Lacey on an Antifascist Classic of Catalan Literature

Literary Hub highlights Montserrat Roig’s nineteen seventy‑two Catalan novel Goodbye, Ramona, an antifascist classic that weaves three generations of women named Ramona through Barcelona’s turbulent twentieth‑century history. The opening thrusts readers into the Spanish Civil War of nineteen thirty‑six to nineteen thirty‑nine, as a bomb‑scarred city forces the protagonist Ramona Ventura to search for her missing husband. Roig then steps back to the late nineteenth century and later to the late 1960s, showing how each Ramona confronts patriarchal constraints and political oppression in her own era. While the civil war claimed roughly one million lives, the novel’s focus remains on the intimate struggles of women navigating love, loss, and resistance. As Literary Hub notes, the work stands as a vivid testament that language and the desire for freedom cannot be silenced.

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