Le doy un 1 porque macho no entendí ni la mitad de lo que estaba leyendo que horror, la historia en si una vez leído resumenes online no está tan mal pero la experiencia de leerlo es popo

Natalia begins by recalling the time Joe first asked her to dance at a fiesta in Diamond Square, and how the romance grew from there to marriage and children, their own place, pigeons and, eventually, civil war and the impact it had on her life.

At first, I’ll be honest, I disagreed with the courtship. Joe seems overbearing and slightly crazy, referring to Mary all the time, making demands on Natalia that to her credit, she questions or stands her ground against. But he wins her round, and I had a dark feeling where the book would go. They get a place together and Joe’s laziness again had me on guard (what for I couldn’t really tell you) but maybe at that time, this is what men were like. They have children and Natalia works hard to give them little. By the time Joe heads off to the front, they are breeding pigeons which everyone enjoys, but which Natalia has to take care of.

There is no embellishment, Natalia describes things in the simple harsh terms that they deserved. As the war drags on, she sees Joe intermittantly and then not at all, and eventually has to accept the unbelievable, that he is never coming home. She works to keep her family fed and together, and as the war continues without Joe, or the friends he had signed up with, Natalia contemplates the unthinkable when she sees no way to provide for her and her children. But then an unexpected chance arrives, and Natalia has to make a choice for herself and her children in a world that has much changed since she was a young girl dancing in Diamond Square.

This is a book about Natalia ultimately, Barcelona is there, the war is there, albeit in the background, but this is about survival, a time of peace, with the clouds of war gathring on the horizon, and then a time of struggle and conflict. At the end Natalia has secured a future for herself and her children, although not in a way that should would picked naturally, and she struggles to deal with everything that she has gone through, I can imagine, very much like that generation from Barcelona, or anywhere else where civil war has laid it’s violent paw.

Rodoreda weaves an evocative story from a bleak time period in history, and does it from a woman’s point of view with class and no small amount of style. I picked this up from an article in the Guardian on books about Spain to read during the lock down, and it was a good shout, I very much enjoyed it.
(blog review here)

Skimmed only

fine but wtf

Para empezar esta reseña, me gustaría resaltar algo que dijo la propia autora en una entrevista y es que esta obra es una historia de amor. En cuanto al feminismo como tal, no existe. Si bien en su faceta costumbrista es un texto del que es muy interesante sacar lecturas feministas, el texto no transmite ninguna intencionalidad feminista.

Reseña completa en: https://palabrasvioletasyletrascriticas.wordpress.com/2024/03/21/resena-la-plaza-del-diamante-de-merce-rodoreda/

Li o livro para um dos clubes do livro que estou presente. Acredito que no começo da narrativa eu me empolguei bastante com a ideia de narrar a vida da protagonista durante um período histórico importante para a Catalunha e a Espanha como um todo. No entanto, conforme a obra foi avançando senti que me afastei um pouco da narrativa.

Na totalidade, foi uma boa leitura e que recomendo a quem desejar mais livros "históricos" - só que já deixo avisado que a parte histórica não é um foco em nenhum momento.

Temos uma narrativa que torna-se bem triste em alguns momentos (principalmente com as consequências geradas pela guerra), mas que também tem seus momentos de felicidade/alegria nas coisas simples. Acho que isso é o que mais irei levar da obra.

Assim, irei deixar 3 estrelas pra obra.

I'm writing this on the back of my doctor's note because it's the only paper I have with me at the coffee shop and a bad bout of illness has me out of sickness-induced superstition loathe to leave this composing till I go home. Yes, I know, not the best place/activity for an invalid, but I (not contagious, mind you) already had one and one too many of those days two yesters ago where no writing and a mere twelve pages of reading left me with the feeling of a small bone rotting away from lack of use. Lack of structure. I'll not compare being too ill to engage in literary matters to surviving the Spanish Civil War, but the style of prose fit the motion of my stomach-swamped brain, a pinball autopilot where not much seems to help and even less is not a threat and one obliges the familiar for as long as one can.

This work creeps up on you. Maybe more so to me with my usual "Is this abuse? Is this misogyny?" until nightmarish paranoia of years and years set three-quarters in to the novel deemed, yes. That the author meant. It's a book where the soldiers would be better off not coming home and the conditioning of peacetime kills quicker than the complicity of wartime, albeit wartime being an uncertain word when civilization incorporates so much. In short, there's a woman who was once a girl, children who were once eggs, friends of the family who were once alive, and the revenge of a much taken for granted housewife that happens to convulse with the bloodborne seizures of a country. There's losing and winning for this small scale woman and her small scale children, and what she knows of the war is drawn from the availability of work, of food, of hydrochloric acid. I could go into gender politics and bigotry and yadda yadda yadda, but I'm too tired to belittle this much grappling with the trauma of hallucinatory life.

In terms of kudoes, how often do you read Catalan literature penned by a woman? In terms of references for swift comparison purposes, an single self internalized [b:Regeneration|5872|Regeneration (Regeneration, #1)|Pat Barker|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1365925619s/5872.jpg|9250] of another country, another time, another gender, another breed of PTSD, but a similar refrain: nothing is worth this. Nothing.