Point of View

The novel is narrated by Dores in the first person. Dores looks back on her life as a 95-year-old woman and finally hopes to let go of her pain through storytelling; therefore, the majority of the novel is told in the past tense. In the chapters before her retrospective narration, Dores narrates in the present tense at times. These chapters also include the past tense narration of events that happened during the decades after Graça’s death and before the present, which in this case, is set in 2015. The insertion of Dores’s present self into the narration of her past indicates that the story is of an entire lifetime—the way one person is formed by the events of her past. Each part’s chapters jump in time—from Dores’s memories in the present to the chronological narration of her friendship with...