About a year later, I read Rodoreda's most famous book, The Time of the Doves. I have a lot of lingering mental images from this book too— most distinctly, a room on the top of a building filled with pigeons— and the memory of a mood: poverty, privation, war in the distance. But I didn't love The Time of the Doves the way I did A Broken Mirror. I found the story sometimes hard to follow and the narrative style — sort of stream of consciousness — a bit disengaging. Most of all, there was something about the relationship between the narrator and her husband that never quite clicked for me. I couldn't understand why she loved him, why she put up with him, why she let him fill that room at the top of their house with pigeons! It never felt like he loved her in return. And, I mean, I know such relationships exist; I was just unconvinced by this one.
So I guess you could say that going into Garden by the Sea, I was hopeful that I would find another A Broken Mirror and a little wary that I might find instead another The Time of the Doves. I'm pleased to report it was the former. I knew within just a few pages that I would love this book. Garden by the Sea is narrated by the aging gardener at the seaside estate that serves as the summer home for a wealthy young couple from Barcelona. The reader develops an affection for the gardener and we do learn a little about his story and quite a lot about his lifestyle, but the main story he tells us is of a love triangle between the Senyora of the house, her husband, and her childhood sweetheart, who shows up, suddenly a wealthy, married man, on the neighboring seaside estate. The book has an upstairs/downstairs quality, where the reader gets to listen in on the gossip of the gardener, cooks, and housekeepers. It's been a very long time since I read The Remains of the Day — and the gardener is a very different kind of narrator (a different kind of person) from that book's butler — but I found myself thinking of it as I read Garden by the Sea with its secondhand plot.
Like the other two Rodoreda books I've read, Garden by the Sea is also an intensely visual book. Flowers are ever-present, defining each moment of the season as they bloom and die, or are picked for a bouquet or trampled at a party or under attack by aphids or unearthed and repotted. But there are so many other visual details as well: the specific color of the dresses the gardener's long-dead wife wore; the rowboat, with its red paint peeling over the years, and then repainted; the old eucalyptus tree; the little beach at the bottom of the stairs below the garden; the swimming pool on the neighboring estate that is lit from inside(!); the sunflower wallpaper at the local inn that the gardener buys to repaper his own kitchen; the handmade envelopes where the gardener stores his seeds. I can picture all these things. I have such a strong, tangible image of this lovely seaside villa and the Catalonian town where it stood, and it's stunning.
