I genuinely thought The Time of the Doves was going to be a soft, romantic, Barcelona-in-the-sun type of novel. Instead, I got a man who renames a woman within five minutes of meeting her.
Natalia goes to a festival. She’s tired. Her waistband is digging into her stomach. She’s thinking about literally anything except destiny. Then Quimet appears, asks her to dance, and by the end of the night he’s calling her Colometa. She corrects him, her name is Natalia, and he insists she can have “only one name: Colometa.”
And somehow… she doesn’t run.
That moment is so small, but it’s so loud. Because renaming someone is not cute. It’s ownership disguised as affection. And what makes it brilliant is that Rodoreda doesn’t dramatize it. No music swells. No narrator screams “RED FLAG.” It just happens.
That’s the pattern of the whole novel.
Quimet isn’t written like an obvious monster. He’s talkative, dramatic, obsessed with furniture, deeply committed to arguing about salt at dinner. At one point he turns seasoning into a philosophical crisis about the devil. It would be funny if it wasn’t so revealing. Everything becomes his stage.
Meanwhile, Natalia’s inner world is chaotic but quiet. She says, “We lived without words in my house,” and that line explains so much. She isn’t equipped for confrontation. She feels things deeply, but she processes them inwardly. Even her anxiety shows up physically — the waistband “pinching, pinching” while she dances. Her body is stressed before she consciously is.
What really got me is how gradual the transformation is. There isn’t one dramatic moment where Natalia disappears. It’s smaller than that. He tells her she has to like what he likes. She asks, gently, “What if I just can’t bring myself to like something?” He answers, “You’ve got to like it.” Conversation over. That’s it. And somehow that tiny exchange says more than a full screaming match would.
And then Rodoreda throws in absurd details- middle-aged men celebrating an appendix surgery crash the wedding dance. People obsess over wallpaper. Arguments about apartments feel like life-or-death. The tone swings between comedy and suffocation so smoothly you almost don’t notice the suffocation creeping in.
That’s what makes this novel so unsettling: it shows how identity can be reshaped politely.
No dramatic collapse. No cinematic betrayal. Just slow adjustments. A nickname repeated enough times becomes real. A compromise repeated enough times becomes personality.
By the time Natalia is fully Colometa, it doesn’t feel like something that happened to her.
It feels like something that happened quietly around her.
And that’s worse.
Discussion Question: Do you see Natalia’s transformation as something imposed on her, or something she slowly participates in without realizing it?
3 replies on “Love, But With Terms and Conditions”
Hello!
You mentioned one of the parts that stood out to me the most while reading the text, which was “What if I just can’t bring myself to like something?” I thought this part showed how Quimet expects everything to be according to his way, with no exceptions to be made. Your blog post was extremely insightful, thank you for sharing!
Hi Keshia! I see Natalia’s transformation as mostly imposed on her, but shaped by the environment she’s in. Quimet, the war, and her limited options all narrow her world so much that adapting becomes a way to survive rather than a conscious choice. It feels less like she willingly becomes Colometa and more like she slowly adjusts to what her life allows.
“Because renaming someone is not cute. It’s ownership disguised as affection. And what makes it brilliant is that Rodoreda doesn’t dramatize it. No music swells. No narrator screams “RED FLAG.” It just happens.” Yes, definitely the novel avoids the drama of the big events, it focuses on the every day struggles and micro violences that compose Natalia’s reality. As you say, that’s the pattern of the whole novel.
We can discuss it on class.
See you tomorrow!
Julián.