The Time of The Doves

By

Mercè Rodoreda

Diamond Square
Barcelona

Silvia Munt in the film adaptation of "Plaça del Diamant"

Mercè Rodoreda   is considered  to be the most important Catalan novelist of the postwar period. Her novel The Time of the Doves (La plaça del diamant) has become the most acclaimed Catalan novel of all time and since the year it was published for the first time, it has been translated into 27 languages. This work is also considered by many to be best novel about  the Spanish Civil War.

The works of Mercè Rodoreda has been sometimes compared, because of their style to those of Virginia Woolf, an English writer who was admired by the Catalan novelist. Some of the recurring features in Rodoreda's writings are a femenine narrator and a poetic style full of symbolism. The women in her novels are fragile in appearance but they possess a great internal strength. Her novels are located in places that she knew very well because she had actually lived there, the neighbourhood of Gràcia, Romanyà de la Selva,  Geneva...

Mercè Rodoreda was born in Balmes street (Barcelona) in October 1908. At the age of twenty , She married her uncle, Joan Gurguí who was fourteen years her older. The marriage was a failure. Rodoreda began to write as a way of escaping a very boring life. Before the Civil War she wrote four novels. Aloma (1937) being the most important of them.  During the civil war, she worked for the Catalan Generalitat's Public Affairs Department. After the war she was exiled in Paris and later Switzerland  where she began to write again, in 1972 she returned to Catalonia and settled down in Romanyà de la Selva (Girona) until her death in 1983.

In The Time of the Doves, Rodoreda tells the story of Natàlia, a girl just like many others of her time, who accepts without complaining everything that life (or her husband) imposes on her.

This resignation ends with the arrival of the war. Natàlia will finally rebel herself against everything that she considers unfair. The novel is also a faithful portrait of postwar Barcelona and how this historical period influenced the lives of its inhabitants.

Mercè Rodoreda

As in other novels by Rodoreda, there is a play on symbols. The doves that Natàlia breeds in her home symbolize hope. As Natàlia’s hopes are fading away, the doves fly away or die. Setting the doves free is eventually a way by which Natàlia manages to get free of her past.

Other important works by Mercè Rodoreda are Camelia Street (1966) Broken Mirror (1974) or How Much War (1980).