Categories
Piglia

Money to burn… I didn’t think that would be half as literal as it was

I actually loved the writing style of this book. It felt so much more readable despite this not being a super short text. The only exception to that was at the beginning when they were introducing a large number of characters, and not only were tossing around new names, but were also using a variety of nicknames interchangably with these new names, which definitely made me have to go back a reread a few paragraphs to make sure I understood who was doing what. I will say as well that some of the ‘action scenes’ were a bit hard to follow, I also had to reread the actual heist itself again to try to understand what exactly occured and by whom… it did not help as much as one would hope.

I found it really interesting the way they, similar to Duras, just dropped heavy topics and terminology into the story, with no noticeable shift in tone. You start out the book and you obviously know the characters are bad people, but in many forms of media criminality doesn’t denote  a truly ‘bad’ or unlikeable character. They just seem like a strange group of individuals, who are objectively bad people, sure, but nothing crazy or of real note, then suddenly the story of Malito abducting, drowning, and raping the police officer, for seemingly little reason other than revenge and his own pleasure. Now that’s not to say the police officer did nothing wrong, we are told about his part in Malito’s torture, evidenced by the marks still left on his body, but still… what happened to two wrongs don’t make a right? Maybe it’s just me, but I’m okay with the murder part, it’s not entirely unjustified, but the rape? Entirely unnecessary, that was just because he wanted to. You know, power dynamics and all of that.

I 100% was not expecting the ‘twins’ to be together after their time of being referred to as brothers, and referring to each other as brothers… that was weird. I don’t really have much else to add to that, I just felt like it deserved recognition for the reaction of “WTF” I had at the first instance.

I absolutely loved that they burnt the money and tossed it out as a message. Not only did the title come full circle, but it felt like it addressed themes within the story. I mean it above all is an act of defiance, and with that, is the impression that the outrage is more about the destruction of the money than the violence and the broken system that produced it. I mean money is, at its core, a tool of social control and power, and despite the robbers risking everything to steal it, they end up burning it in what could be read as a rejection of the system that provides it its value. Beyond that, it also appears to feed into the critque of economic and social power that underlies the entire book. I mean everything about this is theway that criminal violence is condemned but institutional violence is praised, or at the very least normalized.

All in all I really enjoyed the themes and the book as a whole.

Q: What do you think this story is trying to convey beyond the critique of economic power? Based on this message, can you think of any changes that would improve the conveyance of this (and any other existing) message?

Categories
Duras

So… are all these book couples just examples of what not to do, or…?

With all the love and respect in the world, what did I just read? I would normally ask “will we never have a story that has just one ‘normal’ character?” but I also know that our class conversation would be “but what is normal?”… So I suppose I certainly have learned something, it just may not be the intended takeaway. I will say though, I loved the way that for many of the characters, I could never quite form complete persepctives on them, as most of them failed to fit into standard character archetypes. For example, our main character, who is rather cruel to and holds distinct emotional power over her Chinese ‘Lover’, but at the same time is a victim in the same way she is a perpetrator, as she’s fifteen dating a man much older. The lines are no longer clear cut. Similarly with him, he is in love with someone far younger than him, and is aware enough that it’s seen as wrong as to insist they hide it, however he also seemed genuinely in love with her and at no point brought up intimacy nor pushed or seemed to be focused on it. All of that was from her, who also ignores and uses him for his money, albeit rather straightforwardly. So what category is he? A groomer? A victim? Something in between? We don’t really know, like many people he exists somewhere in between.

That all being said, there’s one character I don’t think fits that idea, which is the sociopathic elder brother. He doesn’t seem to have much for any potential upsides or that kind of complexities, it seems he’s essentially never the victim, always the perpetrator, and of a variety of different things at that. You could argue that the elder brother has been failed his whole life by his family who enables his behaviour, cleaning up his consequences on his behalf and never making his own up to his actions. I would argue that that might help explain, but doesn’t excuse his actions in any sense of the word. He, at least for most of his life, doens’t gamble out of desperation, his debts are all cleared up by his mother. He’s simply what one might consider a sociopath, alebit one with a developed gambling addiction, which in and of itself begs the question of whether it’s his fault that he is the way he is.

One of the things that I think shapes my experience reading this story, is how easy it is, in many ways, to forget how young our main character is. I think this may be due to the way the ‘voice’ comes across as significantly older, which offsets the reminders of schooling and whatnot. Part of it also may be that I’m still in a form of school, albeit in university, and so mentions of school don’t seem quite so alarming. It may also have something to do with the sense that her ‘lover’ comes across as younger than he actually is, in his actions and behaviour, as their relationship dynamic doesn’t fit what one would expect of an exploitationary relationship between an older man and a young girl.

Q: Who, if anyone, is most at fault in this book for the majority of its events and tragedies? What makes you choose this person over the others?

Categories
Lispector

RIP Macabea, you will not be missed in the slightest

You know, I really didn’t think there would be a book that I hated just about as much as Proust, yet here we are. Oh my god the way I almost gave up on this whole book within the first 10 pages needs to be studied because what even. I get that it’a through a fictitious author and all of that, and I’m sure you could get into the meaning and reasoning behind that, however that pissed me off so bad at the beginning. It was like reading an extra 10 pages of nothing. Though I do appreciate our narrator’s devoted hating at the start, such as the line “Because she lacked fat and her body was drier than a half-empty sack of crumbled toast” (pg 30), it was honestly the only thing that kept me going, his perspective of her transforms slowly into what appears to be a form of love for her, ironicaly just in time for her death (that I 100% saw coming). My redeeming quality is the random four Marias that she lives with, I don’t know why I love it as much as I do.

I think I’m learning that I cannot stand dealing with genuinely stupid people, but Macabea pissed me off so bad the entire book. Don’t get me wrong there is something to be said about an essentially entirely ordinary girl, but she has absolutely zero redeeming qualities? She’s not intelligent or aware, she’s not especially kind or moral, she’s notably rather ugly, she’s essentially a doormat, she’s entirely socially incompetent with zero improvement, etc. I mean come on, and she’s not even that aware of any of it! I mean she has a job, she considers herself a ‘typist’ of sorts, but she can’t even type accurately? It is not a hard skill to learn with practice, she deserves to be fired if she can’t do the bare minimum (how she wasn’t actually, despite the original threat, idk). She’s basically the human equivalent of a moon jellyfish: useless, brainless, and spineless. She needs to be removed from the gene pool (… ask and you shall receive?).

To be fair though, most of the characters here suck, including Olimpico and Gloria. Olimpico is a little bitch, which we knew from the start. He’s the eptiome of toxic masculinity combined with absolute incompetence. Is it weaponized incompetence? Is it general incompetence? Is it delusions of grandeur? or D All of the Above! Gloria on the other hand immediately broke girl code, it’s rule 1 that you don’t date your friend’s exes, let alone take your friends’ boyfriends… yet there we go. To be fair it’s not like Olimpico was much of a catch so that might have been a dodged bullet for Macabea.

Q: Did you like Rodrigo’s role in the narration? Would you have changed it, and if so, to what? How would that impact the story and it’s meaning? What do you think the author’s intentions with making it a story within a story were, rather than just directly telling Macabea’s story?

Categories
Rodoreda

Natalia – I promise divorce is legal now… I guess you don’t really need it anymore but still

This was such an interesting story, including the writing style. Sentence after sentence was started with ‘and’ even when the sentences use it as a conjunction: “And I stuck up for Quimet’s mother and said yes, she had put salt in the food. And the neighbour said if she ate food that was too salty…” (pg. 35). It reads as though it’s her unfiltered train of thought and her mind is running like a doped up hamster’s wheel. This alongside her sparse use of commas gives off the impression of a breathless way of communication, as though she’s so wrapped up in trying to get through what she’s saying that she couldn’t stop even if she wanted to. She also didn’t appear to pause to analyze what she was saying, with little thought once anything was put out there. Considering Natalia has supposedly had years to go over these events in her mind, it kind of gives the impression of her reliving the events that contain a lot of unprocessed feelings. Perhaps largely Anxiety or PTSD? Which would make sense all things considered. It felt raw in a way most novels don’t. I mean I personally write the equivalent of run on sentences quite often, but go back and edit them out. In this case the author didn’t, which creates an interesting effect.

As much as Natalia is a relatively interesting character, she has aspects of self-imposed helplessness. She knows what’s going on around her (directly usually, not largely), including with others, but she doesn’t even consider doing anything? It’s like she needs a sympathetic audience, at least moreso than the friend she complains to, because apparently that girl isn’t enabling enough. That being said there are times she is rather unaware on a larger scale, such as when the war crept up on her. I mean there were certainly foreshadowed moments, such was when “the rich were mad at the republic” (pg 79), but it doesn’t click for her until later. I love the show of how ignorant and oblivious people can be when wrapped up in their own lives. I mean she was so focused on ridding the house of doves that she basically missed the entirety of the political situation? Though it’s totally in character, if she had worried over or even anticipated anything, it wouldn’t have been in character. Throughout the entire book we are truly just at the tender (skewed) mercy of Natalia’s interpretation of the world.

Despite all of this, I definitely ended up injecting my own perspective into the novel, which made it kind of a frustrating read considering Natalia’s personality. I was reading through and getting so annoyed by her not getting what a piece of trash Quimet was being (Colometa seemed a little cute at first… it did not last). But this largely goes back to the frustration her not helping herself at times, I’d argue. Sometimes I had to put the book down (metaphorically, I was reading a pdf) just to take a break from Natalia being pushed around, and in a way take back some of that lack of control she has.

Q: Would you change anything about the writing style if you could? Do you think it would add or detract from the story itself?

Categories
Zobel

Man, it really was those goddamn meddling kids – Black Shack Alley

I have to say, I really did like the writing style, it was the only thing that got me through most of it because the length (Last minute reading) was kind of intimidating. While there were a lot of things I loved about this story, I also realized that books ragebait me way too easily because I was genuinely crashing out for around half the book if not more. I feel I also have to add that, though the girl “Tortilla”‘s name is probably not pronounced the same as the food, I absolutely thought of both her and her name that way.

Things I liked first: I loved that the story subverted expectations at times, often for a sense of realism. I really thought Medouze would play more of a role throughout the book than he did, mind you as soon as the scene of Jose waiting for Medouze who didn’t come home happened, I knew he wasn’t going to make it, but before that scene I really thought he was going to be a relatively consistent character. That being said, I agree with killing him off. The circumstances our characters were living in often resulted in death, untimely or otherwise, and it’s entirely likely that there were many signs a child, like Jose, would simply not have noticed. On the other hand, I really thought when M’man Tine got sick, and went to the hospital, I 100% thought that ‘hospital’ was being used the way parents tell their kids the family dog went to the ‘butterfly farm’. It just seemed like the logical progression in that moment?

I also like how they portrayed the casual violence, especially throughout the beginning of the book as an introduction, and it persisted throughout. Children learn from the actions of those around them, so I thought it was a really good detail that they showed the cruelty of the children’s actions, for example towards animals, rather than much of the adults’. Like: “with other friends, I enjoyed catching, so we could play with them and mutilate them afterwards, tiny crabs whose holes dotted the bank…” (pg. 82). It’s as though it doesn’t even register to them, because it likely doesn’t, their concept of morality is entirely based on the actions of others. In fact, the kids only seem concerned when their actions come back with consequences.

Now what I didn’t like: Those goddamn kids. Oh my god. They were all awful and frankly deserved worse punishments than they got (generally). I get that they were in unfortunate circumstances but they were just such brats that if any of them died, including Jose, I probably would have celebrated. Genuinely, I couldn’t help but imagine having to deal with them and they are precisely why I don’t want, and generally hate children, especially ones like that. I mean the alley kids literally committed arson? With stolen matches? For no good reason? “‘We have set fire to Mr. Saint-Louis’ garden! No more fence, we’re going to see what’s inside!’ Already, a huge cloud of smoke rose above the hedge of branches. Everybody was jumping about and frolicking, and that new-found joy also got me to dancing and shouting” (pg. 41). Like genuinely they should’ve been tossed in the fire they started because what even. Even the school kids generally sucked (albeit less).

Q: What do you think the adults should’ve done with those kids in the alley, considering their actions? Is there a right answer?

Categories
Laforet

Nada – the exact amount of resolution it felt like we got :(

I actually quite liked this one despite how long it was. Though I can’t tell how much of the writing style is Laforet and how much is the translation, it’s by far my favourite so far (though the bar is low). I’m starting to think it may not be the texts that are the issue and that I’m just bad at names between this story and ‘The Shrouded Woman’… or maybe I need to stop reading the books late at night. Or both. Probably both.

One thing I liked about this book was that it felt plausible, it felt like it could’ve happened to anyone. Andrea started excited to go to Barcelona for university, and to live with her relatives, but it just does downhill in a lot of ways. That being said I can appreciate that it isn’t all negative, there are nice hints of fun, and friendship, and such. Interspersed between the casual cruelty and general dysfunctionality of her family/home life, is Ena and Andrea’s other friends, and even Gloria. Her story here isn’t so one note despite the overarching feeling of heaviness and despair due to the political and personal settings. I kind of love the way the family and their home is described as though they and it all are dead, like they (or at least a part of them) had died in the civil war, I love how it shows, even subtly at times, the effects of the war. Phrases like: the air was “stagnant and rotting”, the scene was “agonizing”, and more.

One thing I can also appreciate the fact that it showed Andrea’s preconceptions about Barcelona, ones that were proven wrong: ‘… since all my impressions were enveloped in the wonder of having come, at last, to a big city, adored in my daydreams because it was unknown” (pg. 3). She daydreams about the city through rose-tinted glasses, which then transfers to her perception of the events around her.

One thing I loved was the focus on art and the pursuing of it. Even today, pursuing art (not just something in ‘Arts’ but actual art) is often seen as silly and basically dooming youtself to be poor and destitute. This is especially true with the rise of AI and some people seeing art as worthless, or something that needs to be easier and less effortful, as though it’s a right and not a privilege. With that in mind, the fact that it’s such a focus for the story as whole, is amazing in my perspective. Art is something that goes back to the earliest of humans, we’ve seen it through every era, so to see these people in a post civil war environment, the country arguably in ruins, still pursuing art, just feels right as though everything is coming full circle. I mean even her uncles have (had, more or less) artistic jobs. I’d argue this is almost an aspect of hope? The world didn’t truly end despite it feeling like it did for those people. It does kind of make me wonder if there’s anything more inherently human than the prospensity to create art?

All of that being said, despite everything, does Andrea truly take away nothing?

 

Categories
Bombal

“Hey Alexa, play the Ghostbusters theme song”

To give credit where credit is due that was at least more readable than the previous texts. That being said, I need someone to draw up a family tree of all of the names that popped up because goddamn was that a lot. I admittedly confused the names of Antonio and Alberto at one point, and it was a whole thing because nothing was making sense. I managed to convince myself that somehow it was a Jr. and Sr. situation… I don’t know either.

I will say that sometimes the writing style confused me as well, with the constant flipping between multiple different perspective/points of view, alongside incredibly long dialogue sections. At times I had a hard time figuring out who was speaking and about what/who. There were sections that have repeated introductions, and at times I genuinely thought I was going insane and had somehow managed to reread the same pages repeatedly without realizing.

While I can appreciate that the people were relatively realistic, as in everyone was terrible, except for maybe Maria Griselda who was just there for a lot of it, it was kind of tiring to me. At least, Maria Griselda wasn’t much of an active participant in the casual cruelty occuring from the other characters, she was more the indirect recipient. Even Sofia, who was usually one of the least bad characters, was still kind of a jerk, even if she thought she was doing it for the right reasons (and for fear for her life). I understand that Ana Maria is not a reliable narrator for any of this, but still, at the end of the day the people here just sucked. Severely. It does make you wonder how much the actual events deviated from Ana Maria’s memories, especially considering we don’t know how far back these memories are. Over time, especially for memories people go over time and time again, and thus have to re-encode, memories get warped. So considering she obviously thought of these events often, how warped do you think this all is? How unreliable is our unreliable narrator? Did she purposefully gloss over details she didn’t wish to remember, despite it being ‘involuntary’? Is there exaggeration?

I think half of this life ‘flashing before the eyes’ would’ve been less annoying and depressing if Ana Maria and Sofia just kissed from the start and tossed aside the men entirely. It would’ve saved so much time, energy, and sorrow.

One of my favourite parts was of her heading towards her ‘true’ death: “Resigned, she lays her cheek against the hollow shoulder of death” (p.231). It reminds me of a post someone made (probably on twitter or similar), which was “I hope death is like being carried to your bedroom when you were a child and fell asleep on the couch during a family party. I hope you can hear the laughter from the next room”. The way Bombal describes her laying her cheek against death’s shoulder reminds me so much of that sensation of being carried as a child, oftentimes while feigning sleep. It makes death as a whole feel less scary, oddly enough.

Categories
Uncategorized

Andre, hun, with all the love in the world, have you considered therapy?

I really thought that after Proust, the texts would get significantly more comprehensible. Wrong. I can’t even articulate my thoughts through the entire beginning of the text on here because it includes so much profanity. It’s entirely possible that I’m missing something because where does the whole play from the start come into relevance? I mean he was like “the girl is coerced into lying to her grandmother to stay at the boarding school… fast forward, the girl’s mangled body tumbled out of the cabinet” and that was the end of it? Don’t get me wrong, it left an impression, but also… what? Unless it was to introduce the absolute insanity that permeated the rest, I don’t understand. It felt like only the middle made partial sense and even then it felt very achronological.

Admittedly, I’m kind of unsure who the crazy(-est?) one is in this relationship: Nadja, Andre, or both, because wow there is so much wrong here. Nadja kind of comes across like she’s half-living in another world, she reminds me of a more aggressive Luna Lovegood (if that makes sense). I’m not sure whether she’s supposed to be connected to some sort of witchcraft or just genuinely mentally unwell, but that certainly was a ride to get through. I would have gotten sick of her so quickly, which makes me think that Andre must have some kind of residual trauma going on, because genuinely what was wrong with him? Sir, you are married.

That being said, the text introduces some interesting questions and concepts. Right from the beginning is the introduction of “Who am I?”, which has its own set of interesting philisophical implications, albeit relatively common. Instead, an aspect that really stood out to me was the idea of ‘is it possible to truly know who others are?’. The quote “as a dream about someone resembles that person in reality. It is, and at the same time is not, the same person; a slight and mysterious transfiguration is apparent in the features” intrigues me because it begs the question of, since we can only interpret a person through our own lens, can we can ever truly see someone as anything other than a distorted version of themselves? Could we ever know?

Another thing that really caught my attention was comments about the difficulty of psychiatric release, even if no longer necessary. It reminded me of an experiment done in the 1970s, where participants falsified a single symptom to get institutionalized, but upon arrival dropped it to see whether psychiatrists would be able to differentiate ‘insanity’. Not only were participants not released, but their behaviour was considered ‘symptoms of illness’ and resulted in further diagnosis of either schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Only after ‘admitting’ to being sick and ‘taking’ medication, were they released, not for realization of stability or error, but because the psychiatrists thought they were currently asymptomatic enough. The fact that this book brings up the same issues as a study from 50 years later is a concern.

Categories
Uncategorized

Proust…. I think?

Let me just start off by saying that that was not even remotely what I expected. This felt like a fever dream, I have reread sections and still don’t totally know what the point of some of that was. It felt like it was flitting back and forth between things, or going on tangents, and either brushed past things or focused on others (not always relevant, at least in my opinion) with extreme detail. It kind felt like early 1900s male equivalent of a middle-school girl’s diary. I think it may partially go back to the lack of ‘standard story structure’, of which I simply am not accustomed. It constantly felt as though I was missing connections or details.

That being said, I don’t think it necessarily makes it ‘bad writing’, as so much goes back to the intentions of the writer, but it certainly isn’t the commonplace format, which made it difficult for me to comprehend at times. It certainly made me question my literacy and general literary skills. Though, I think that’s a good thing despite how humbling it was, a large part of why I chose this course was to look at different perspectives I may not come into contact with as often, and while I would prefer to have those perspectives be a bit more comprehensible, beggers can’t be choosers.

While those were my intial thoughts and they still hold true, I have to consider the goals of literary modernism, trying to make it ‘new’ so to speak and bypassing the traditional literary patterns. In that sense, I would say Proust succeeded in that endevour. It is not traditional, it is not standard.

Honestly, some of the detailed points of the story were so odd to me, right from the very start. There is a substantial bit of writing at the beginning that is focusing on how the boy is laying in bed and what his room is like, but in many ways none of that was relevant, it was a lead into his memories of Combray and these details were not referrenced meaningfully going forward. While the writing often paints beautiful images in your mind (such as the madeleines with tea), it also almost provided too much detail at times, to the point it felt like it lost it’s purpose.

Once the story got past the scene of the boy talking very dramatically for a long paragraph over wanting his mother to kiss him late into the night and more than once (Freudian who?), and M. Swann was introduced, it felt like it was coming together a bit more, at least for a while. Overall, I found the quote: “The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh trivility or other every day” rather ironic, because that’s what this book feels like to me, fresh trivility each page, which may be intentional.

That all being said, I hope the class conversation helps with all this!

Categories
Uncategorized

Introduction!

Hello! I’m Ava. I’m a second year psychology student and have absolutely no idea what I would like to do with that degree! (I’m living in denial of having to figure it out). I’m currently taking five courses alongside work, so I’m admittedly hoping this course has some ebbs and flows to the work level. I was born and raised here in Vancouver, but would ideally like to do Go Global at some point during my time at UBC. In my free time I enjoy doing puzzles, listening to music, and playing volleyball.

My course schedule as a whole required an overhaul and this course caught my eye, that being said, as such I came into this course with very little expectations beyond ideally not drowning in work. Though I enjoy reading and generally read a good bit, the amount of older translated literature I tend to read is rather low so I’m hoping this course may spark a bit more of an interest in that regard. Additionally, admittedly reading for enjoyment has taken a bit of a backburner for me as of late, as the swaths of schoolwork and textbook readings have prioritized my time, and made me dread having to read any more than I already have. Despite all of this, I have decently high hopes for this course’s methodology, as contract grading seems like an interesting idea to keep expectations clear and reduce grade anxiety (of which I have much). Ideally, this will be an interesting and engaging course which allows enough freedom to not seem stifling, but enough structure to explore various ideas and perspectives I don’t tend to naturally interact with. I don’t personally enjoy writing literature, which has stopped me from persuing a large portion of other English or Literature courses, which also may have facilitated interacitons with a wider variety of viewpoints, so I hope that this being more reading and discussion focused will fit me a bit better.

In regard to the question “Where is the Romance World?” found within the lecture, I would argue that the romance world cannot be a physical place in any sense of the word. Though the romance languages are a language family/group, that doesn’t give it physiological substance or a ‘world’. In this case, my instinctual response to the question of “Where is the Romance World?”, is that the question should instead be “What is, or would be the Romance World?”, should it exist in any medium. If essentially every boundary separating entities of all kinds, including land, is fiction, then how could the “Romance World” be truly separated out from any other? Who would, in theory, decide what that entailed? Rather, I’d argue it is an abstract if anything, accessible by those who wish to explore it linguistically, through any means, but not physically.

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