Is Rodoreda's Death in Spring an allegory?

I really don't know what to say about Merce Rodoreda's Death in Spring except to say that it's a nightmare vision of an alternate world - where the dead are filled w/ cement and entombed inside living tree trunks, young men are chose by lot to swim "beneath" the village to ensure that the village is not in danger of being swept away by flood and the men emerge, if they do, w/ obliterated faces, where the village holds a single prisoner, confined to a steel cage, who is ordered to speak only in the form of neighing, to the amusement and delight of the villagers, and so on. I don't know if the novel has a coherent plot - none seems to have emerged in the first 100 pp or so - or if it's improvised, based on dream logic. There is no significant character development - the narrator is a 14-year-old boy whose father dies at the outset and then he wanders around with his stepmother who later becomes his wife and gives birth to their daughter - these are the status facts, but I can't say that any portrait of a character emerges - and, though the book jacket posits that the novel may be an allegorical presentation of life under Franco's fascist rule (Rodoreda was a Spanish/Catalonian writer who died in 1983, and the novel was published posthumously five years later), but that account doesn't feel right to me at all - the setting feels like an isolated village whose inhabitants live by strange customs of their own design, not under the rule of a military dictatorship in any form. You could force the analogy, of course, but I think the power of the novel isn't about transformation of reality but about pure invention and imagination, the evocation of a spirit of unease, terror, and wonder. It's not a horror story by any means, in that the world depicted feels nothing like our own and we can't identify w/ any of the characters, but it's a  queasy, surreal vision of an alternate world - not sustainable in a long novel, but Death in Spring is thankfully pretty short.