Author: lahumada

Reading The Time of the Doves I kept noticing how Natalia’s life is shaped more by what she’s missing than by what she has. No one ever showed her what a healthy relationship looks like, so when Quimet appears she doesn’t really choose him; she just drifts into him. And Quimet? Major red flag. Immediately. The pushiness, the jealousy, the public humiliation— and making her kneel in the middle of the street? Outrageous. He isn’t slowly becoming controlling, he starts that way. Even small things feel wrong, like when “he told me we had to go fifty-fifty on the apartment. Like we were just friends.” (38). On paper that sounds fair. Emotionally it’s cold. He treats her less like a partner and more like someone he’s arranging into his life, besides, of course, being really emotionally and physically abusive.

What I actually found really interesting is Rodoreda’s narration style. Natalia repeats phrases or memories, like “That rubber waistband digging into my waist and my dead mother couldn’t advise me,” even when they don’t logically fit the moment. I think this shows her anxious personality, her trauma, and also the things that really stuck with her. She isn’t analyzing her life, she’s just experiencing it as it comes. Her thoughts don’t move in straight lines; they circle back to whatever unsettles her. She never directly says she feels abandoned, but the narration keeps proving it, and the repetition made me feel her anxiety instead of just reading it.

The injured dove scene really stayed with me because it feels like the novel quietly preparing us for what Natalia will later go through. When they find the bird, “Mateu said the best thing was to kill it, that it was better for it to die than to live tied up like a prisoner.” (65). At first it just sounds harsh and kind of unnecessary, but later, when her children are starving, Natalia ends up thinking in almost the same way. I don’t see this as her becoming cruel, I see it as her running out of options. The book made me feel like ethical judgment is, in a way, a luxury, something you can only really apply when you actually have choices. Hunger shrinks the space where you can think ideally, and the question stops being what is morally pure and becomes what causes the least suffering when every option is bad. She still feels the weight of what she is considering, which shows her morality is still there, but the normal ethical categories stop making sense in a situation built around survival, and that is what makes the foreshadowing scene stick for me.

The war in this book never feels heroic. We don’t see battles; we see empty kitchens and closed businesses. Even Quimet’s death is anticlimactic, at the time she barely reacts, and I think it’s because she was preoccupied with what will follow up to having no husband and two mouths to feed. What I found powerful is that she doesn’t really grieve then; she grieves years later. When she goes back to the old apartment and screams, it feels like delayed grief and trauma finally catching up to her. The scream, “A scream I must have been carrying around inside me for many years…,” (197) feels like she leaves part of her trauma there. When she says “it’s all over now,” I read it less as happiness and more as release.

Question: Who do you think “poor Maria” is supposed to be?

Being Peruvian definitely shaped how I read this book. I probably would have enjoyed it even more if it had not been midterm season, but I still ended up liking it a lot. Through Ernesto’s inner conflict you can understand a lot about the society around him. He is mestizo, and because he grew up around Quechua speaking communities he understands and empathizes with that world much more than the other boys. What stood out to me the most is that even though Deep Rivers reflects Peru of roughly the 1920s to 30s, the social hierarchy still feels very present in the country a century later.

The use of the word cholo/a really caught my attention. In the novel it works mostly as a social classification, not automatically an insult. In peruvian society today, it often carries a strong negative racial meaning and is usually used as an insult toward Indigenous and working-class people. Growing up in Lima, society always felt and still feels very classist. Indigenous culture is often celebrated symbolically (food, festivals, traditions), but in daily life many people, at least in Lima from my perspective, still distance themselves from Indigenous identity and look down on Indigenous people, even when that heritage is part of their own ancestry.

Which takes me to another point. This divide is not only social, but also cultural and emotional, and Arguedas shows it through Ernesto’s relationship with nature and sound. I loved the descriptions of nature and sound. The rivers, chants, and myths feel intimate and alive, almost like a home Ernesto understands deeply. The way the boys describe Lleras turning into a creature also reminded me of many myths and legends I have heard when I traveled around the highlands of Peru. The importance of the zumbayllu and its sound shows how deeply Ernesto feels these connections, and it made me remember how every time I travel there the culture is so beautiful and diverse it almost feels overwhelming. However, for me it feels slightly different. I didn’t grow up fully inside that culture, but I recognize it and admire it from a distance. In that way I related to Ernesto, not because our lives are the same, but because of the feeling of being close to something culturally meaningful while never fully belonging to it.

Because of this, Ernesto siding with the chicheras during the salt rebellion felt important. He isn’t choosing an ethnic identity but making a moral choice to sympathize with those suffering rather than automatically aligning with his own “social group”. The novel shows how groups like the colonos and the chicheras are essential to everyday life and the economy, yet they are still looked down upon within the social hierarchy. The salt rebellion matters because the women are not criminals at all, just people trying to keep the poorest alive and do what they believe is right, yet they are still treated like criminals.

When Ernesto tells Doña Felipa, “You’re like the river, señora… They’ll never catch you,” he links her to a force of nature that cannot be controlled. This connects to the title itself. To me, the “deep rivers” symbolizes deeper cultural currents: memory, culture, and resistance flowing beneath official society. By the end, when Ernesto crosses the bridge and leaves Abancay, the river also marks a transition in him, showing that he now recognizes these forces and carries that awareness with him even as he leaves.

On that, I also found it interesting that the novel doesn’t really have a clear ending. We never learn what ultimately happens to many characters, and that feels intentional, suggesting the conflicts the book shows are not solved but just continue beyond the story. It made me wonder: if Ernesto only understands both worlds because he doesn’t fully belong to either, is that actually a kind of advantage, or does it mean he’ll always feel out of place no matter where he goes?

“But now, now that I am dead, it occurs to me that possibly all men once in their lifetime long to make some great renunciation… in order to feel themselves masters of their own destiny.”     

wow…. 

I really liked this novel. The narration through a “ghost’s” POV made it interesting in a way that didn’t feel confusing or heavy. It was like she moved between memories, emotions, and anecdotes really smoothly, almost like everything was just flowing together

I think the novel reflects on a lot of themes that still feel very relevant. One of them being how women revolve their lives around men. Ana María says it herself: “Why must a woman’s nature be such that a man has always to be the pivot of her life?”(pg.226) This really stuck with me because, even though women in the novel technically have some freedom to choose and live, most of them still base their emotions and day-to-day decisions around men.

We see this clearly in the competition among women: who is prettier? who comes from a higher social class? who is more desirable? The suicide of Silvia was the strongest example of this for me. She kills herself out of jealousy and comparison, over Maria Griselda’s beauty. Or another example is Anita having sexual relations with the guy she loved just to tie him down. Honestly insane, but it shows how deeply women internalize these pressures and insecurities, and how destructive they become. 

On the other hand, men are allowed to do as they please in the book. They have affairs and leave women, without facing the same judgment. Antonio and Ricardo both renounce Ana María in different ways, and that renunciation gives them a sense of control (as the quote in the beginning of this blog says). Ricardo convinces himself that he’s meant for bigger and better things, so leaving Ana María “pushes” him to do so. Antonio, on the other hand, only loves her when it’s light and one-sided, and the moment she loves him back, he pulls away and turns cold to stay in control.

Women, on the other hand, are not allowed to do the same, they would be called shameless or sick if they did so. Instead, they are expected to suppress their feelings: love, desire, passion. This repression is framed as “wise behavior.”  This idea still exists today. Women are often labeled “too emotional” or “crazy” for caring deeply, which makes this book feel surprisingly current. 

Because Ana María spends her entire life repressing her emotions, it makes sense that the moment of real clarity only comes on her “second death”. That’s why the question “Must we die in order to know certain things?” stood out to me so much. I read it as the idea that people often only allow themselves to feel, reflect, and care once someone is gone. It’s only after dying that Ana María realizes how much she mattered to others: Ricardo goes to her grave even though she thought he had erased her from his life, Antonio cries, and her children show grief. She can’t undo the suffering she lived through, but being dead allows her to finally understand it, and in that sense, her death becomes a kind of clarity, almost an act of life. 

Do you think this clarity finally “frees” her from the repression she lived her whole life?