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A review by korrick
The Time of the Doves by Mercè Rodoreda
4.0
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.
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.