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Barcelona: Club Editor, 1962; 243 p.; 19,1 cm (Club dels Novel·listes)
Description
Barcelona, early 1930s: Natalia, a pretty shop-girl from the working-class quarter of Gracia, is hesitant when a stranger asks her to dance at the fiesta in Diamond Square. But Joe is charming and forceful, and she takes his hand. They marry and soon have two children; for Natalia it is an awakening, both good and bad. When Joe decides to breed pigeons, the birds delight his son and daughter - and infuriate his wife. Then the Spanish Civil War erupts, and lays waste to the city and to their simple existence. Natalia remains in Barcelona, struggling to feed her family, while Joe goes to fight the fascists, and one by one his beloved birds fly away. A highly acclaimed classic that has been translated into more than twenty languages, In Diamond Square is the moving, vivid and powerful story of a woman caught up in a convulsive period of history.… (more)
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User reviews
LibraryThing member tvgrl
The Time of the Doves tells about the Spanish Civil War from a working class female point of view using stream of consciousness prose and grippingly vivid storytelling that assaults the senses. It takes place in Barcelona and was written in Catalan. This is maybe the best novel ever, even in
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translation, like Woolf meets Stein crossed with Graham Greene. Rodoreda seems to carve words as if they are made of physical material to construct a place and time that make you feel you can see, hear and taste the world her characters live. The sadness of history is captured here; you will cry real tears. I've never read anything quite like it. Utterly beautiful and profoundly moving. Life and Death and Love and War. Show Less
LibraryThing member JimmyChanga
I read this book for the Spotlight Series (which puts the spotlight on small press publishers by having bloggers read and review a book by a small press that they have chosen to feature for that month. The current spotlight is on Graywolf Press). I will post this review on my blog on July 31,
"And as he was talking he'd run his fingernail along the crack in the table and dig out breadcrumbs that had gotten stuck there, and it seemed strange to me that he'd do something I did sometimes but that he'd never seen me do."
This book is about the experience of something big in the body of something small, small as a woman named Natalia. Because all big experiences, even marriage, even children, even war, even despair--because all of these big things are also little things, or it comes one little thing at a time--doves and eggs and the name Colometta or the smell of hydrochloric acid.
And though something big can be forgotten, can be silenced, can be inside deep like termites going from inside out instead of outside in, something small like blue lights or a cork or a picture of some lobsters, they stay with you in tiny shards just quiet-like. This book is about how to forget them.
"I'd learned to read and write and my mother'd gotten me used to wearing white clothes. I'd learned to read and write and I sold pastries and candy and chocolates and bonbons filled with liqueurs. And I could walk through the streets like a human being surrounded by other human beings. I'd learned to read and write and waited on people and helped them…"
All these small things are like a cork to stop up the big things but the big things get through anyway. The things not said, because it's too painful, or simply because our narrator is not very eloquent. She's in-eloquent not because she's stupid but because she's not totally aware of her feelings, at least through most of the novel. But that doesn't mean she's not able to move you, the reader, all the more for it.
So that's what this book felt like--just tiny experiences that slowly build up, with a whirlwind of characters and things and thoughts all written in a style that seems slightly dizzying because the sentences are long but not complicated, they are long in the way a Frank O'Hara poem is long, where you run out of breath by the end of the sentence with that inexplicable breathless urgency.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and was glad that Spotlight on Small Presses gave me the extra nudge in the rear-end to finally read this wonderful Graywolf Press book (since it was already on my "to read" list).
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2010:"And as he was talking he'd run his fingernail along the crack in the table and dig out breadcrumbs that had gotten stuck there, and it seemed strange to me that he'd do something I did sometimes but that he'd never seen me do."
This book is about the experience of something big in the body of something small, small as a woman named Natalia. Because all big experiences, even marriage, even children, even war, even despair--because all of these big things are also little things, or it comes one little thing at a time--doves and eggs and the name Colometta or the smell of hydrochloric acid.
And though something big can be forgotten, can be silenced, can be inside deep like termites going from inside out instead of outside in, something small like blue lights or a cork or a picture of some lobsters, they stay with you in tiny shards just quiet-like. This book is about how to forget them.
"I'd learned to read and write and my mother'd gotten me used to wearing white clothes. I'd learned to read and write and I sold pastries and candy and chocolates and bonbons filled with liqueurs. And I could walk through the streets like a human being surrounded by other human beings. I'd learned to read and write and waited on people and helped them…"
All these small things are like a cork to stop up the big things but the big things get through anyway. The things not said, because it's too painful, or simply because our narrator is not very eloquent. She's in-eloquent not because she's stupid but because she's not totally aware of her feelings, at least through most of the novel. But that doesn't mean she's not able to move you, the reader, all the more for it.
So that's what this book felt like--just tiny experiences that slowly build up, with a whirlwind of characters and things and thoughts all written in a style that seems slightly dizzying because the sentences are long but not complicated, they are long in the way a Frank O'Hara poem is long, where you run out of breath by the end of the sentence with that inexplicable breathless urgency.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and was glad that Spotlight on Small Presses gave me the extra nudge in the rear-end to finally read this wonderful Graywolf Press book (since it was already on my "to read" list).
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LibraryThing member kidzdoc
This novel is widely considered to be one of the greatest works of Catalan literature, and an evocative portrait of life in Barcelona during and after the Spanish Civil War. It is set almost entirely in the city's Gràcia neighborhood and is narrated by Natalia, a simple and attractive young woman
Natalia meets Quimet, a spirited young carpenter, on La Plaça del Diamant, who doggedly pursues and ultimately weds her. The marriage is a not completely blissful one for Natalia, as Quimet is a paternalistic, dismissive and unaffectionate husband, although he is apparently loyal to her and loves the two children she gives them. Quimet insists that raising doves will be their ticket out of poverty, and he builds a dovecote on the top of their apartment to the chagrin of Natalia, as the doves' home comes as the expense of her private work space. She tolerates this intrusion with resentment, which is followed by a surprising act of silent protest.
Quimet joins the Nationalists as war breaks out, and Natalia is left to fend for herself and her children. As the stress of poverty and the uncertainty of Quimet's fate haunts her, she realizes that no one will come to her aid in the besieged city where everyone is struggling to find enough food to eat. At her most desperate moment she is rescued by a kindly older man who takes her and her children under his wing. She is driven nearly to madness, but the experience emboldens and matures her, yet it is one that scars and continues to disturb her for the remainder of the story.
The Time of the Doves is largely narrated by Natalia, in a breathless manner of a woman who is overwhelmed by life, yet manages to overcome obstacles and survive tragedy. Hers is a sad and tragic story, but through it Rodoreda permits the reader a look at the lives of ordinary citizens helplessly caught up in political events, war and its aftermath. I found the first half of the book mildly interesting at best, but the second half was a much more compelling read, as Natalia's personal misfortunes threaten her sanity and the lives of her children. I was sorry to see this novel come to an end, and I will likely get to it again soon, as I suspect that it will be considerably more rewarding on a second reading.
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who works in a small shop there. She lives from day to day, with little concern of her future or the larger world outside of Gràcia, as she is largely unaware of the political turmoil and imminent danger facing the citizens of Barcelona and Catalonia as those loyal to the government and nationalists led by Francisco Franco begin to take sides against each other. Natalia meets Quimet, a spirited young carpenter, on La Plaça del Diamant, who doggedly pursues and ultimately weds her. The marriage is a not completely blissful one for Natalia, as Quimet is a paternalistic, dismissive and unaffectionate husband, although he is apparently loyal to her and loves the two children she gives them. Quimet insists that raising doves will be their ticket out of poverty, and he builds a dovecote on the top of their apartment to the chagrin of Natalia, as the doves' home comes as the expense of her private work space. She tolerates this intrusion with resentment, which is followed by a surprising act of silent protest.
Quimet joins the Nationalists as war breaks out, and Natalia is left to fend for herself and her children. As the stress of poverty and the uncertainty of Quimet's fate haunts her, she realizes that no one will come to her aid in the besieged city where everyone is struggling to find enough food to eat. At her most desperate moment she is rescued by a kindly older man who takes her and her children under his wing. She is driven nearly to madness, but the experience emboldens and matures her, yet it is one that scars and continues to disturb her for the remainder of the story.
The Time of the Doves is largely narrated by Natalia, in a breathless manner of a woman who is overwhelmed by life, yet manages to overcome obstacles and survive tragedy. Hers is a sad and tragic story, but through it Rodoreda permits the reader a look at the lives of ordinary citizens helplessly caught up in political events, war and its aftermath. I found the first half of the book mildly interesting at best, but the second half was a much more compelling read, as Natalia's personal misfortunes threaten her sanity and the lives of her children. I was sorry to see this novel come to an end, and I will likely get to it again soon, as I suspect that it will be considerably more rewarding on a second reading.
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LibraryThing member hippietrail
This was highly recommended by the proprietor of the bookshop in Barcelona when I asked for the best novel in Catalan - after he convinced me of the problems with Tirant lo Blanc.
LibraryThing member toryana
Required reading for one of my honours papers. On first read I found the narration quite chaotic, often with long, not very elegant sentences. However, on subsequent reads I began to enjoy the story very much indeed.
LibraryThing member Jayeless
This is an incredibly depressing book. It's just relentless misery, all the time. From the very beginning, our narrator's life is miserable, and as time progresses things get worse and worse, until towards the end she finally gets a slight reprieve.
So I didn't find this book very satisfying. I read
For the first third, the thing that stood out to me was the abusive marriage that Natalia, or Pidgey, was stuck in.Her husband Joe was written so deliberately to be a controlling and emotionally abusive man that I thought it was going to become a plot point at some point, but... no. Perhaps my expectations were raised because it was right there in the introduction that she was going to marry a second time, which I thought meant she was going to find some agency and leave the worthless turd she was married to. Unfortunately not. His behaviour is never really acknowledged as controlling or anything either, which of course reflects the fact that Natalia doesn't have a lot of agency, and just accepts nearly everything that happens to her. She never questions her husband's behaviour, which doesn't mean that the author doesn't, because after all, she laid it out so plainly. But even so, it made it hard for me to get invested in the story – like, it was hard to barrack for Natalia when she wasn't even barracking for herself.
And then there is the second part – my reading session that took me up to 58% – which was just characterised by an overload of pigeons. Apparently (according to the introduction, again) this was actually Mercè Rodoreda's original vision for the novel; she wanted to write about someone completely surrounded by pigeons, and she made up the rest of the novel to work around this vision. I think this novel is an excellent example of how this is a terrible way to design a novel. Also,her violence towards the pigeons – like shaking the eggs to kill the pigeons before they hatched – kind of really disturbed me.
Finally, there is the war, and the consequences of that. Her thoroughly unlikeable husband goes off to fight against the fascists, which you could consider an attempt to show us that "even bad people can do good things", except that the novel thoroughly equates the fascists and the workers' revolution anyway. Bourgeois characters are given space to make their idiotic arguments (like "without the rich, the poor could not survive" – because history has shown how trickle-down economics works so well) and I can't recall any arguments ever being made in favour of the revolution. It's true that Natalia never really supports the fascists, because she's so busy trying to avoid starvation, but there are other characters supporting the fascists on the basis that it'll end the war and end starvation... so. That link is still made, just weakly.
I guess what bothered me about this is that the novel depoliticised a deeply, and integrally political conflict. This is something that depictions of the Spanish Civil War do a lot, and I think it's appalling, because if these are the only depictions accessible to you (which they basically are) then you're going to come away not even knowing what the war was.
I don't think this is a bad novel, but it definitely wasn't my type of novel, being depoliticised with a very weak protagonist. These may be valid choices, but they don't sit well with me.
Edit: Just one final comment – I wasn't really a fan of the translation; it seemed like the translator got over-excited and translated lots of things he shouldn't have, like people's names. Maybe Pidgey instead of Colometa was acceptable (if "Colometa" has the same vibe as "Pidgey" in Catalan, which I'd assume it does), but I don't think there are many Joes, Matthews or Ernies running around Barcelona and that really took me out of the story. Also, some street or another got translated to High Street, but Passeig de Gràcia stayed as it was? Why?! It's not the kind of story that would work if you tried to transplant it somewhere other than Barcelona, so I don't get why you would translate all the names and most of the geographical landmarks. Like I said, it took me out of the story and made me feel like it was set in some weird fake and/or alternate-universe version of Barcelona, which can't have been the intention.
So I didn't find this book very satisfying. I read
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it over three reading sessions, and it seemed that the novel changed a lot between each of those sessions (even though the points where I stopped were not-particularly-remarkable chapter breaks).For the first third, the thing that stood out to me was the abusive marriage that Natalia, or Pidgey, was stuck in.
And then there is the second part – my reading session that took me up to 58% – which was just characterised by an overload of pigeons. Apparently (according to the introduction, again) this was actually Mercè Rodoreda's original vision for the novel; she wanted to write about someone completely surrounded by pigeons, and she made up the rest of the novel to work around this vision. I think this novel is an excellent example of how this is a terrible way to design a novel. Also,
Finally, there is the war, and the consequences of that. Her thoroughly unlikeable husband goes off to fight against the fascists, which you could consider an attempt to show us that "even bad people can do good things", except that the novel thoroughly equates the fascists and the workers' revolution anyway. Bourgeois characters are given space to make their idiotic arguments (like "without the rich, the poor could not survive" – because history has shown how trickle-down economics works so well) and I can't recall any arguments ever being made in favour of the revolution. It's true that Natalia never really supports the fascists, because she's so busy trying to avoid starvation, but there are other characters supporting the fascists on the basis that it'll end the war and end starvation... so. That link is still made, just weakly.
I guess what bothered me about this is that the novel depoliticised a deeply, and integrally political conflict. This is something that depictions of the Spanish Civil War do a lot, and I think it's appalling, because if these are the only depictions accessible to you (which they basically are) then you're going to come away not even knowing what the war was.
I don't think this is a bad novel, but it definitely wasn't my type of novel, being depoliticised with a very weak protagonist. These may be valid choices, but they don't sit well with me.
Edit: Just one final comment – I wasn't really a fan of the translation; it seemed like the translator got over-excited and translated lots of things he shouldn't have, like people's names. Maybe Pidgey instead of Colometa was acceptable (if "Colometa" has the same vibe as "Pidgey" in Catalan, which I'd assume it does), but I don't think there are many Joes, Matthews or Ernies running around Barcelona and that really took me out of the story. Also, some street or another got translated to High Street, but Passeig de Gràcia stayed as it was? Why?! It's not the kind of story that would work if you tried to transplant it somewhere other than Barcelona, so I don't get why you would translate all the names and most of the geographical landmarks. Like I said, it took me out of the story and made me feel like it was set in some weird fake and/or alternate-universe version of Barcelona, which can't have been the intention.
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LibraryThing member hbergander
A literary accomplishment of the Spanish Civil War as seen from the Catalan viewpoint
LibraryThing member kewing
This is the 2013 translation by Peter Bush. I previously read the 1981 translation by David Rosenthal, which changed the title to 'The Time of the Doves.' The translations are very different, but because I do not speak or read Catalan it is difficult to know which is the better translation. The
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story is fairly straightforward: a young woman is swept off her feet by a charming, if somewhat misogynistic young man. They marry and have a son and daughter. He gets into raising pigeons, which overwhelm their home. The Spanish Civil War serves as a constant backdrop and the young man and his friends go off to fight while she makes do. The young men die and she is destitute, considers suicide, and is 'saved' by a local grocer. Largely as a matter of convenience, the woman and the grocer marry. The children grow and the daughter marries local young man while the son joins the army. The young woman decides the grocer is a good man and she is in love, again. For me, it's the backdrop of the civil war that provides the tension. I picked up the newer translation while in Barcelona last year, so it was easy to visualize the locations in the novel. The newer translation did not remind me of the previous translation; pigeons in the new translation, doves in the older one. The two translations are very different editions, like two separate views of the same story. They should be treated in LibraryThing as separate books rather than as the same book -- they are separate and unique translations of the same text. Show Less
Subjects
Awards
Language
Original language
Catalan
Original publication date
1962
Physical description
243 p.; 19 cm
Other editions
La plaça del Diamant by Mercè Rodoreda (Paper Book)
La plaça del Diamant by Mercè Rodoreda (Paper Book)
La plaça del Diamant by Mercè Rodoreda (Paper Book)