Montserrat Roig’s 1972 classic of Catalan literature, Goodbye, Ramona, both opens and closes in a vivid scene of the Spanish Civil War, but if you don’t remember the exact contours of that extremely complex conflict, don’t worry. Instead pay attention to the woman being described on the page, a woman we’ll soon come to know as Ramona Ventura, as she searches the streets and eventually a morgue for her husband while bombs fall on Barcelona. The chapter is full of references that might go over your head if you don’t remember every name of every political faction involved in the conflict, but all you really need to pay attention to is the expert and terrifying description of a war-torn city, and a woman urgently trying to make her way through it.
Roig, who was born during the Franco dictatorship in Spain, was a feminist and antifascist activist in her mid-twenties when she published this novel, her first. With it, an important new voice in Catalan literature was announced—a visionary who could write about the most turbulent times in Spanish history, but on a personal scale. The book braids three distinct narratives of three generations of women living in Barcelona, all named Ramona, from the late nineteenth century, through the Spanish Civil War, and into the politically tumultuous 1960s. Though the lead-up, immediate carnage, and violent tail of the civil war is an important backdrop to the novel, that oft-novelized conflict is not her main focus. Instead, Roig is interested in what happens to these women—whom they love or are loved by, what they want or are permitted to want—as men in their homes and men in their government make choices that dictate the overall course of their lives.
As I began reading Megan Berkobien and María Cristina Hall’s English translation, my curiosity led me to refresh my memory of the events that precipitated and occurred during the Spanish Civil War, all of which, I suspect, will feel strangely familiar to the contemporary reader. The conflict began when a group of far-right nationalists, including a large faction of the military, staged a coup in 1936 in response to election results that they didn’t particularly agree with. The battles fought in the civil war caused, by some estimates, a million deaths, and led to hundreds of thousands of executions in the years afterward. In 1939 the war ended—in part because the leftist/centrist resistance couldn’t agree with each other enough to cohesively quell the far-right coup—and the Franco dictatorship began, an Italian-style fascistic government that lasted until Francisco Franco’s death in 1975. There may be some current world leaders who openly admire Franco. They might also be the leaders who see nothing wrong with murdering or kidnapping their political enemies, or suspected political enemies, in the streets of their own country.
As I began reading, my curiosity led me to refresh my memory of the events that precipitated and occurred during the Spanish Civil War, all of which, I suspect, will feel strangely familiar to the contemporary reader.
Roig’s opening throws us in the violent center of the Spanish Civil War, but from there we leap backward in time. Suddenly, it’s 1894 and we’re inside the eldest’s Ramona’s diary, just days before she is to marry a man she hardly knows. This is Ramona Jover, a young woman entirely oblivious to what it is her currently unborn daughter will eventually have to live through. Instead, she leads a life of relative calm and luxury, though few would call it a life of freedom or personal liberty.
The privileges of Jover’s life appear entirely superficial, even a bit alien, when contrasted with her granddaughter’s narrative thread. Ramona Claret is a university student in the late 1960s, still living at home with her mother and grandmother (who, of course, are both also named Ramona). The youngest Ramona gets involved in a legitimately dangerous academic resistance against the far-right government and is baffled and disappointed by her own mother who “went through life constantly disoriented by her husband’s moods, like an awkward little child who doesn’t expect anything from anyone.”
This youngest Ramona has much higher expectations for the world she lives in, and grander ambitions for her place in it, yet she falls into a similar trap of tying her happiness to an emotionally unavailable man. She’s hopelessly in love with one of the student leaders of the resistance; he, in turn, is so consumed with his own political ideas that he can’t see that the manner in which he treats women is inherently opposed to his professed politics. In these three Ramonas we see three possible orientations a woman might take against her own oppression. After an idealistic youth and a subsequent nervous breakdown, our eldest Ramona, Ramona Jover, eventually finds strength in resignation to what a woman born in the 1800s can ever do or be. Ramona Ventura has simply lived through too much war and seen too much death to enjoy the luxury of a real stance or reaction; she seems to accept the brutality and coldness of her husband as the best she can hope for, while admiring her own mother’s strength. The youngest, Ramona Claret, is still in the process of constructing her rebellion against the status quo, but it is a resistance full of real danger—as state-sponsored kidnappings and executions abound. There’s little resolution for Claret, albeit some hesitant hope.
When Montserrat Roig wrote and published this novel in her native Catalan, her government was still trying to suppress the language. Millions of people spoke and continue to speak Catalan, Basque, and Galician in Spain, but Francisco Franco, like all good dictators, insisted on cultural homogeny; the use of any non-Castilian language in virtually any form of public life was banned and made to seem unpatriotic, un-Spanish, foreign, and not to be tolerated. As I write this introduction, various far-right movements, in my home country and around the globe, are similarly attempting to oppress their own citizens. Goodbye, Ramona, such a vivid and sweeping story of Catalan refusal to comply with this oppression, is a testament to how a language, just like the desire to be free or to love or to learn, simply cannot be contained.
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Excerpted from the introduction to Goodbye, Ramona by Montserrat Roig. Copyright © 2026 by Catherine Lacey. Published by Modern Library, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC
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