Damn. This one was a lot to take in. I felt drawn into this book from the very beginning, when Natalia talks so bluntly about her dead mother and how she no longer has someone to guide her life decisions. From the start, it feels like Natalia doesn’t have a real sense of autonomy and that she is somewhat helpless, floating through life and just letting it happen to her. It’s not a weakness in her character that leads to things happening this way; rather, it feels like she is too tired to fight for a different life, and that she is forced to begrudgingly accept whatever changes come. She is obviously an incredibly strong person, given all that she endures. It makes me wonder what kind of life she could have had if she’d lived in different historical circumstances, without the war and the limits it placed on her already constrained life. Would she have found peace? Or would that lingering sorrow stay with her no matter the context?

This whole novel is tinged with melancholy, with a kind of sadness that takes hold of you and seeps into your bones and makes you want to curl up and fall asleep for a long time. If you’re a Yo La Tengo listener, you know kind of how it feels. Almost a comforting kind of sadness. Natalia embraces this sadness as if it’s simply a part of her, as if she was born with it baked into her being. She often describes this feeling as being worn out or tired, without making specific reference to the sorrow she carries around. There are several moments where she allows herself to really feel that pain and let it out, like after Antoni offers her a job, and that long overdue scream on page 197, but it never really feels like she experiences a true moment of release.

And the doves… oh those damn doves. The doves, for Natalia, seem to represent the lack of control she has over her own life, the pervasive sense of heaviness that hangs over her like a dark cloud. Like how Quimet calls her Colometa (little dove) and never her own name, never giving her a choice or caring to ask what she wants. The stench of the doves lingers throughout her entire life, it seems, haunting her, reminding her of choices made, time passing, people lost. On page 174, later on in her new life with Antoni, Natalia imagines these doves differently, imagines herself caring for them and keeping them healthy in the dovecote. She makes up a story about having a tower of doves, like the one Quimet promised, and tells it to the women in the park. This part is so sad- it feels like she is holding on to bits of the past, to the familiar, even though it’s not something she wanted necessarily. These fragments are all she has to cling to, without any real happy memories to look back on.

There’s also some crazy, rampant misogyny in this book, but I’ll leave that for the class discussion. Overall, this was a heart-wrenching and bleak read that I’ll be thinking about for a while.

My question- what do you think of Natalia’s relationship with Quimet?