As Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo[Notes 1] points out in his foreword, Sales "does not root his thinking in certainties but rather in lives exposed to the world’s absurdity, its procession of blood, death and injustice".
[1] Sales began writing the novel in 1948 at the age of thirty-six on his return to Barcelona after nine years of exile from Franco’s Spain.
[3] The line is from Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona (Act 1 Scene 3): "O, how this spring of love resembleth The uncertain glory of an April day, Which now shows all the beauty of the sun, And by and by a cloud takes all away!"
On one level, the title refers to the enthusiasm raised by the declaration of a Catalan Republic on 14 April 1931[Notes 2] by Francesc Macià from the balcony of the Palau de la Generalitat.
A fourth part set in the devastated landscape of Barcelona and Catalonia under the Franco dictatorship is now published as a separate novel, Winds of the Night[6] (Catalan: El vent de la nit).