Living in the Shoes of a Woman in the Spanish Civil War for a Week

Hope everyone had a good reading break! Although this novel wasn’t one I’d prefer to read during the break due to it being emotionally draining and a little slow, it was still surprisingly a thought-provoking read due to the evolution of a young woman. At least for the books I signed up so far, I realized that this is another novel where gender is a prevalent topic. It’s about Natalia, a young woman in Barcelona who grows and learns about what it means to be a woman during a civil war in the 30s. She’s extremely naive in the first half of the book. It’s said that her mother passed away and the she never really had a good portrayal of unconditional love growing up or a sense of guidance through the world she lives in. This results in her making some interesting choices and being a pushover at first, “because that’s how I was. It was hard for me to say no if someone asked me to do something.” Her biggest choice was probably leaving Pere for Quimet — who could never redeem himself in my eyes throughout the story. She ends up in a relationship where she is constantly being controlled or caught in an imbalance. Although the things Quimet did to her would be considered a bigger deal today, he still: took her away from her marriage; gave her a pet name that she preferred not to go by; monitored all the men she spoke to; did considerably less work than Natalia to support their family and much more.

So really, every page I turned, I found myself just annotating about how annoyed I was by Quimet. I also vividly remember him being the definition of delusional and a gaslighter when he accused Natalia of seeing Pere again when she was sure she never did. I know that the things that occurred to Natalia were legitimate things that could happen to women but I would constantly ponder on how unfair it was that we even had to go through that. Like a lot of others said, the unfortunate events she underwent made me feel extremely empathetic towards her. It also forced her to mature and realize that she needed to be resilient in the patriarchal society she lived in. One that: made the division of labour between her and Quimet so unjust that as soon as he died, she became just another number in society without meaning or any financial stability; misinformed or chose to neglect women’s value. An example of this misinformation was when Natalia spoke of having sex with Quimet for the first time: “I’d always been afraid of that moment. They’d told me the path leading to it was strewn with flowers and the one going away was strewn with tears. And that joy leads to disillusionment. Because when I was little I’d heard people say they rip you open.” And to add an anecdote regarding the division of labour in the novel, it reminded me of Florence Pugh’s monologue in Little Women talking about how being a woman in the past didn’t mean anything or that you could do much without a husband.

As much as I still have a lot to say, I’ll end things off by saying how I admired Natalia’s resilience throughout a lonely and difficult parenthood while being suffocated from the many other expectations society put on women. I’d also like to add that another reason why I probably found this a little slow but still interesting was how I felt that the story wasn’t about anything crazy but could speak to many women’s experiences. This story may specifically connect to mothers or those who may feel that they don’t have everything figured out or how some things may be holding them back. It’s all kind of about ordinary people but also shows how the circumstances we face and the people that come and go can affect us.