Translated from Catalan by Peter Bush
Review by Michael Eaude
In 1940s and 1950s Spain, young people rarely heard their parents explain anything about the 1936-39 Civil War. The war was a trauma for the losing side – and most people had lost. The victors were few: the military caste, the church, the wealthy and their lackeys. Silence was a way to survive, to protect both parents and children. The Teacher and the Beast explores this silence, even taking it a twist further by featuring a heroine with particular difficulties of communication. Severina, born in 1943, is an only child brought up by her parents Román and Simona in an isolated house on a main road, along which conventional life rushes by. She doesn’t go to school, where she would be exposed to the horrors of fascist education, but is taught at home by her mother.
In The Teacher and the Beast Monsó has found an original way to tackle the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975). She chooses to write a coming-of-age novel that approaches the horrors of fascism indirectly. Román and Simona give Severina a loving but lonely childhood. Simona is a dreamer who both inspires her only child’s imagination and impels her to question everything. If intelligence can be taught, Simona teaches her daughter to be intelligent. Severina grows between the ‘remote galaxy’ of her mother’s world and the quiet practicality of her father, a typewriter salesman who spends long, mysterious periods away from home. Readers realise rapidly that he is an anti-Franco activist, though Severina is protected from dangerous reality by her parents’ coded conversations. Fortunately, Severina has a phenomenal memory and manages to pass the Francoist exams without having to attend school or even understand the content. But she does not learn social skills. In one example, when later she goes to college and a classmate says casually “How’s it going?”, she is silent while she agonises for several seconds over the precise answer. She does not realise it’s merely an informal greeting. Understandabily she gains a reputation for being stuck-up and unfriendly.
In Severina’s adolescence, her parents die, Simona of TB and Román in a car accident. Alone, bereft, Severina decides to study in Girona to be a primary school-teacher. In 1962, aged 19, she arrives at her first job, at Dusa, a Pyrenean village as isolated as her home. On arrival, her welcome is so strange that she “wondered… whether she’d come to that village to teach or to learn”. Things don’t go too well. People gossip of her arrogance because she doesn’t know how to make small talk, doesn’t attend the killing of the pig and doesn’t go to mass. She worries she should know what she doesn’t know, so never asks. She is saved by Justa, an elderly woman who explains the danger of not following the norms in a society corrupted by the Civil War defeat, and is protected by Simeó, a huge man 30 years older than Severina, known as ‘the Beast’ because of his crude speech, frequent drunkenness and rough manners. Anyone would want to avoid him, so big and wild! But it is he who is yet the most gentle person in the village. “He didn’t come out with any commonplace and she felt immediately at ease, as if walking alone across a dormant volcano on a bright sunny morning”. With gentle tact, Simeó draws close to Severina and they become good friends. Imma Monsó loves to undermine first impressions, which is a way to make her readers think.
Monsó has the gift of making readers smile about serious themes. The naivety and social incapacity of Severina leads to a lot of comedy intertwined with the sadness of her loneliness. In one example both Justa and Simeó try to persuade Severina that it’s dangerous to mention Lenin’s name in class. But she doesn’t know who Lenin was and sees no harm in repeating to her children an anecdote about Lenin that her father had told her. In another example, Severina attempts to form friendships with other young
women teachers in neighbouring villages, but, in painfully comic attempts at conversation, is puzzled that they are interested only in fashion, film stars and potential suitors. On another occasion Júlia, her free- thinking aunt in Barcelona, sets up a meeting between Severina and a young man. They walk round the city all afternoon, but she can think of nothing to say and he is similarly afflicted. The practical Severina finds sexual satisfaction by herself, lying in the grass on the hill-side in Dusa.
Since 1996 Imma Monsó (born in Lleida in 1959) has written nine novels, three books of short stories and an account of the sudden death of her husband, published in English as A Man of His Word in 2014 by Hispabooks. Winner of numerous prizes in Catalonia, she has been translated to several languages, though The Teacher and the Beast is her first novel to reach English. Like all her novels, The Teacher and the Beast is marked by a complex and unusual plot and eccentric but realistic characters. Monsó structures the book through scenes, sometimes chapters, that alternate between Severina’s year in Dusa and her childhood. Severina is a moving creation: fragile, yet tough. She fights to overcome the loss of her beloved parents and understand the reality of a village twisted by the fears and secrets of repression and defeat.
Monsó creates several fine characters, all contributing to Severina’s education: Justa, who helps her to negotiate the village; Aunt Júlia, determined to live freely in Barcelona despite the dictatorship’s norms; the family’s only neighbour, López, who runs a garage with few clients, then a bar without customers; or the frivolous young women teachers. The novel’s greatest character is Simeó. Both he and Severina
appreciate smoking, alcohol and (no need for small talk) silence, which then allows them to explain to each other their lives and desires. Silence is no longer a chasm between people because no-one dares speak of politics. Rather, the ability to be silent together connects the two friends. By taking an intelligent innocent like Severina, Monsó is able to introduce her readers bit by bit to the brutal reality of Franco’s dictatorship while also telling an often comical coming-of-age story.
It is worth adding technical details. The Teacher and the Beast is a large-format paper-
back with wider spaces than usual between the lines, which add to the quality of the reading experience. The novel’s prestigious translator Peter Bush has also supplied useful end-notes on details not easily known to non-Catalan readers.
Michael Eaude has lived between Barcelona and the hills of Valencia for thirty years. He is the author of several books including Catalonia: A Cultural History and Triumph at Midnight in the Century: A Critical Biography of Arturo Barea. He has written for the Guardian, Literary Review and Socialist Review. His website can be found here: www.michaeleaude.com.
Imma Monsó, The Teacher and the Beast (Gretton, 2026). 978-1739206734, 360pp., paperback.
