I am still not used to reading. It might be the selection of books in the course, but it’s probably just me. I rarely read books that do not involve supernatural powers or mystery solving. Anyway, I am definitely sensing a pattern here. Why does every book need a problematic figure? To be frank, I […]
Posted in Blogs, Rodoreda | Tagged with arse, love, marriage
I have been traveling to Barcelona last year. Despite the awe I was experiencing with the beautiful buildings — more specifically, Guell Park and La Sagrada Familia — I was fascinated with the fact that those small villages that we usually never pay attention to when we travel was surprisingly similar to the small town […]
Reading “The Time of the Doves” by Marcè Rodoreda made me feel lots of big girl feelings, I was intrigued, disgusted, confused, furious, and most of all just straight up sad. I think this book speaks a lot to generational trauma, especially in women. It reminds me of the type of generational trauma that is […]
Posted in Blogs, Rodoreda | Tagged with Blue, Gaslight, Generational Trauma, sad, war
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 […]
Wow, reading this was a rollercoaster of emotions. Maybe because I never imagined myself reading this novel anywhere aside from my house and yet I found myself immersed in the story, while being on vacation in Barcelona…where the story unfolds. It was such a surreal experience to be walking through the same bustling plazas and narrow […]
Posted in Blogs, Rodoreda | Tagged with loss, resilience, war
“And I didn’t know if I was sleeping or awake but I saw the doves. I saw them like before. Everything was the same: the dovecote painted dark blue, the nests full of straw, the roof with the wires getting rusty because I couldn’t hang the clothes up, the trapdoor, the procession of doves marching […]
Posted in Blogs, Rodoreda | Tagged with birds, children, class, dove, entrapment, gender, grief, growth, love, melancholy, metaphor, peace, symbol, war
Initially, I didn’t like The Time of the Doves. For a while I couldn’t figure out why. I found that some kind of energy was missing from the book. When I made it to page 79, however, I realized why I had found the book unappealing up to that point, and from that moment onwardContinue reading “Inner Life and Agency in Rodoreda’s Time of the Doves“
Posted in Blogs, Rodoreda | Tagged with agency, narration, thetimeofthedoves
To be honest this book was not my favorite. The Time of the Doves by Mercè Rodoreda, in my opinion, was rather slow and I found it hard to connect with the characters. It was beautifully written, but I would normally not be inclined to read this on my own time. At first when I […]
Posted in Blogs, Rodoreda | Tagged with children, healing, Mercè, merce Rodoreda, The Time of The Doves, trauma, war
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this class, it is that the shortest books have the most to say. I found this novel to be such a beautiful telling of the ‘other side’ of war stories—a story about the people who stay behind, and the aftermath of conflict. One thing that really stuck out […]
Posted in Blogs, Rodoreda | Tagged with gender, politics, war
Hi everyone! I hope you all have been having a relaxing reading break! I enjoyed this novel the best out of the ones we have read so far. In my blog post, I will briefly summarize how Natalia goes through the five stages of grief and what I …
Posted in Blogs, Rodoreda | Tagged with children, doves, female-perspective, grief, Natalia, war
