Novela de la escritora catalana Mercè Rodoreda sobre la vida cotidiana durante los años de la Segunda República, la Guerra civil española y la posguerra. ( )

The first third was frustrating because the protagonist is so naive but the rest of the book is a very moving portrait of the impact of the civil war on a woman at home trying to keep it all together. ( )

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Pretty writing. ( )

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 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. 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. ( )