Mercè Rodoreda’s “Time of the Doves” is a whirlwind of a novel surrounding the life of a woman. This young women goes through a journey and this novel follows her through first person narrative and shows what is going on in her head. Starting out Natalia is an ordinary girl who falls in love with Quimet, and I can see a million red flags in Quimet. This man is quite literally abusive and controlling, but Natalia is surrounded by a fog too thick to see the bad side of Quimet and focuses on his good side. Immediately I related to Natalia because she says “It was hard for me to say no if someone asked me to do something.” As Taylor Swift would say, Natalia and I are both pathological people pleasers. This was the first sign I knew I would appreciate this book. Natalia is not one to speak out or try to recreate the mold of a woman and honestly I do not see how this is a bad thing for her. Sure, it was frustrating at times seeing her be as naive and timid as she was, but it is nice to see something more relatable to the general population of women especially because of the setting of the book which took place, during the time of the Spanish civil war. At least she was self aware.

I think she tried her best to focus on her circle of life rather than what was going on around her because there was a large portion of the book where there was no direct mention of the war. The narration was almost as it was coming straight from her thoughts because I noticed a lack of commas. I had to stop a few times to make sure I was reading the sentences correctly because how how long the were. It almost felt like written anxiety. However, I did appreciate the feel of this style of writing because it did feel like I was in her head rather than seeing her through an outsiders perspective and this helped me relate to her a lot more. As much as we were inside her head, we really could not predict what she was going to do or in some cases what she was feeling which I thought was odd. When she got told Quimet had died, she went to breathe, but I was unsure if it was a breath of relief, shock, sadness? Maybe a little bit of everything.

I could tell how much she struggled with leaving her children and how much she resented her husband, because she sabotaged his dove breeding hobby. I felt this was kind of symbolic because it is the first out of character thing Natalia does. With this started the domino effect of raising her kids on her own, living in poverty and having thoughts about suicide and killing her children. I felt a lot of people were shocked by the fact that she had those thoughts, but with her sheltered life and how she was treated by her husband I think she thought it was the best thing to do for her kids at the time. We saw from the beginning how naive she was and so even though yes it was a terrible thing to think, I was not at all surprised.

Finally she was offered a job and this was so sweet for me to read. I loved that she could overcome her negative thoughts and how she was offered a light. She needed this to pull her out of a dark place and I would have been really upset if this story ended in death.

My question is did you judge Natalia for having thoughts of killing her children? Judging does not have to be in a bad way, but just like girl what are you doing (shocked) kind of way. Or did you understand her thought process given her situation?