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 In Diamond Square (aka The Time of The Doves, The Pigeon Girl, and The First Half Was A Drag But We Got Going In The Second Half) was surprisingly difficult for me to get through. I really expected to zoom through this relatively short book because I’m interested in the Spanish Civil War and subsequent dictatorship, and because my copy has an endorsement from Gabriel Garcia Marquez on the front cover. In hindsight, I should’ve known to not pay too much attention to that praise though, because I’m not even a big fan of his novels either. Oh well.

It was only towards the end of the novel when I started to connect some dots about why it was a difficult read. Throughout the book, Rodoreda uses a combination of short, simple sentences, and some very long ones like “Another father was carrying a young boy round his neck and he was clutching a small white front with a blue silk bow and twinkling diamond star, and the crowd was pushing the two fathers, and without noticing, they got closer and closer until the boy started snatching cherries from Matthew’s daughter’s front and by the time we cottoned on half the frond was missing its cherries.” (p22). That is a very long sentence. By the way, the translation I read has different names for the characters than the Time of the Doves translation, in case you were wondering about who Matthew is.

Rodoreda also has some “paragraphs” that I only call paragraphs for lack of a better word because they literally go on for pages. Not a single indentation. My English teachers are screaming, and all the old prescriptivist linguists are rolling in their graves. Chapter 35 has an example of a 3-page-long paragraph. And on top of that, she has an awful lot of sentences that start with ‘and’ (see what I did there?) I was going to make another comment on the traditional grammarians being upset again but I’ll give benefit of the doubt that the language ‘rules’ are different in Catalan. Though I frequently got frustrated with the long paragraphs and the abundance of ands, having to reread parts multiple times because my eyes were just skipping across the page, I finally realised that maybe this was all just another reflection into Natalia’s mind. 

If that’s the case, then Rodoreda certainly pulled it off effectively because how can a narrator who’s on the way to insanity narrate all of her story in a comfortable, easily-digestible way? After finishing the book I felt a little silly at my assumption that I should find the narrative easy to comprehend. Why should I have to expect clarity and coherence from a narrator who herself is having difficulty with those things?

Truthfully, this novel was quite humbling for me to read, and definitely tempered my expectations of a book; sometimes you’re not meant to find reading easy – though some writers make everyone’s life difficult just to show off their grandiose lexicon, sometimes there’s a legitimate reason for making your reader labour through your writing.

I was going to talk more about certain themes in the novel but instead I got on my soapbox about sentence length and paragraphs-that-really-shouldn’t-be-considered-paragraphs. I guess I’ll pass that on to you all. My question is: What is the significance of the pigeons? What do they represent? Are they even a symbol at all? Am I just overthinking things?