Suffering and Emotion in Time of the Doves

Hello everyone! Hopefully, you all had a great reading week and enjoyed reading The Time of the Doves by Mercè Rodoreda. This novel is a story full of emotion and hurt detailing the protagonist Natalia’s life through the Spanish civil war. The novel is written in a way that folds the emotion into the words so that it is easy to miss the impact at first. Natalia has a difficult time expressing all of her feelings which translates very well onto the page. She tends to bottle everything up, only showing emotion when she is at her wit’s end. She consistently receives bad news about the death of her father, her husband and their friends. She does not process these emotions until later. Her main focus through the majority of the book is to survive, survive the war, survive her abusive husband and finally once the war is over, she can process her emotions. That is not to say that she is cold and unfeeling.  We see her experience joy, dancing at Place del Díamant when she meets Quimet, anger when the doves take over her home, and sadness when she plans to kill her children at the height of the war. Her way of coping is to push all of these emotions down and survive until she can deal with them. While it does work, it causes her a lot of grief in the meantime.

Natalia has to make many difficult decisions throughout the novel, mostly caused by the war. She is a single mother in charge of two children with no money in a war-torn country. Even at the beginning of the book she has to choose between Quimet and Pere (she should have picked Pere in my opinion). She has had to choose since day one. There is a heartbreaking moment where she goes to buy hydrochloric acid to kill her children as she realizes there is no more food for them. Another is when she leaves her son at a refugee camp and he begs her not to go but she knows he will be better off there. These are all moments of difficult choices and suffering, a common theme in the novel. Even before the war, we see Natalia suffering in her abusive marriage, with the doves and all of her emotional labour which continues through the war. She truly cannot catch a break. Reading it made me sympathize with Natalia and her family as there seems to be no happy ending. The end of the novel is similar, where everything is not happy and perfect but it is improving and she has finally dealt with all of her trauma.

This is not a happy read but it is an impactful read. My question to you today is which section was the most impactful to you? I feel like there are so many to pick from as the novel is chock-full of impactful, emotional scenes.

As always, thank you for reading!

– Len ❤