I feel like I say this every week, and I always mean it, but this is now my favourite book we have read so far. First of, I’d like to say how much I hated Quimet. He took advantage of Natalia’s naive personality and trapped her in a marriage. He was toxic, had major jealousy issues and would gaslight Natalia. Basically, men have been gaslighting women since the 1960s.

I’ve seen many blogs talk about how the doves symbolize freedom, I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. For Natalia, the doves drove her crazy. She felt as though she was being suffocated by the birds. There’s this juxtaposition about the meaning behind the doves if you look at it through Natalia’s perspective.

In the lecture video, Professor Jon talks about how Natalia contemplates killing her children. I won’t lie, I can understand where she’s coming from. Rather than wanting her kids to suffer the consequences of war and slowly dying day by day, she wants a quick end to their life. I don’t think I can judge her when I don’t know what it’s like living through and experiencing the casualties of a war. However, I didn’t see many people talk about how Antoni tried to suffocate Rita when she was a baby? I thought that this was way more drastic than what Natalia wanted to do. Antoni’s only reason to trying to kill his little sister was his jealousy whereas Natalia wanted to kill herself and her kids them to spare them from an awful life. Antoni really needs to get his jealousy in check, much like his father.

I loved how this books portrayed the emotions of someone living through war on the sidelines. Natalia’s worries about keeping her kids alive and getting enough money to survive were so saddening to read about. Her life just became about surviving, not living: “I could barely buy food because I had almost no money and because there was no food to buy” (141). The circumstances in which she was living were heartbreaking.

Finally, I want to talk about Antoni, Natalia’s second husband. I think he was the literal embodiment of what a person’s like after war. “That they’d picked him up half ripped apart on the battlefield and pieced him back together as best they could” (160).  People before and after war are not the same, they have seen and lived through horrors that no one should ever have to go through. They try to live the rest of their  lives as best as they can after the war tore them apart and left the to mend the pieces of their lives. Natalia and Antoni’s relationship was just that.

Question of the week:

Why do you think the last sentence of the novel is  “Happy…” (201)?