Month: March 2026

Categories
Luiselli

Another failed marriage… how many is that now? – Faces in the crowd

This story is honestly more along the lines of what I was expecting based on the title than some of the others. It was also rather relatable in some ways, regarding trying to balance work, life, family, and more. The young mother tries to balance her role as an author with her own parenting obligation, notably only being able to do bursts of work sporadically rather than consistent, scheduled work. This is honestly very relatable, especially during busy work seasons or finals season, where trying to do sustained efforts on any personal projects feels like trying to swim upstream. Comparatively, the narrator presently lacks a family obligation at the moment, allowing her more flexibility to work and socialize.

That being said, it was kind of a confusing read at times. I hate non-linearly structured books, the shifts between time and perspective made me feel like I was in the text equivalent of being stuck in a washing machine. That being said, I think one could argue the confusion is intentional and represents the instability of the narrator’s experience and identity. I can appreciate the logic of it being there, but that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy reading through it because let me tell you, reading that at 11:30pm on a Saturday night after having worked since 8:30am is a new kind of fever dream.

I feel like the narrator is centered around the idea of freedom. There is a distinct contrast between the past and present of the narrator, she was once independent and lonely but also free, there was nothing keeping her tied. She flowed freely between people and places. In the present however, her whole life is defined by her domestic role, her ties to her husband and children. She is no longer free to flit from thing to thing and is constantly sidetracked with interruptions, no longer having time for herself. It’s interesting that when she was most free was when she was most lonely, and that despite being tied down, no longer able to dedicate time to writing, she is happier in many ways because she isn’t alone. It’s as though loneliness seeps into every aspect of your life and contaminates it.

The whole situation with her manuscript and her ‘relationship’ with Gilberto Owen is so interesting to me, especially once she creates the decoy novel due to her husband being a certified PoS(TM). I mean genuinely what was his problem anyway? Why are his two settings passive and useless, and asshole? Regardless, the way that she kind of shapes Owen’s life like he’s a character rather than a person is rather interesting, I mean he is quite literally her coping mechanism, especially as her marriage is falling apart. She literally fanfiction-ed his life.

 

Q: At what point do you think Owen is no longer a historical figure, but a true character in his own right within the book? Do you think he could feasibly be a ‘true’ character considering this is her interpretation and conclusions regarding his perceived life?

 

(P.S sorry for the late post (it’s like 2am… (:( ) ), life is a pain and a half!)

Categories
Agualusa

… so, should we address the chameleon, or I suppose gecko, in the room?

I know this text wasn’t that long compared to some of the other texts, but somehow the writing style made it feel even shorter which I really appreciate. I also appreciate the lack of 50 billion names all being introduced at the same time, which I can’t say about Piglia. I will say, reading a story being narrated by gecko was not what I expected, I really thought that the reptilian nature of the title was going to be more metaphorical than literal. That being said the fact that it’s a gecko feels kind of silly. All in all this book was not at all what I was expected.

One of the first things I really enjoyed was the introduction of Felix’s job, I mean he had “a whole new bourgeoisie, who sought him out. They were businessmen, ministers, landowners, diamond smugglers, generals – people, in other words, whose futures are secure. But what these people lack is a good past, a distinguished ancestry; diplomas. In sum. a name that resonates with nobility and culture. He sells them a brand new past. He draws up their family tree. He provides them with photographs of their grandparents and great grandparents, gendemen of elegant bearing and old-fashioned ladies” (pg. 16). I mean he’s literally selling them a dream, albeit a selfish dream, which feels a bit pointless in ways beyond ego and social standing considering these people are already notably part of the bourgeoisie. That being said it makes sense that a lot of the people that come from wealth don’t have a ‘good’ family history, but that doesn’t mean I disagree with the alteration of history regarding the acquiration of that money. No one gets to choose the family they’re born in, but that doesn’t mean they should get to reap the benefits of the negative history, whilst also erasing it. I’m not sure it is possible to erase the past, it never truly leaves you. Building on that, I love the way they portray the flexibility of memory, and how unreliable it can be. It’s so easy to convince yourself and others of things, even ones you start out knowing are not true.

I do find it interesting that this story contributed to the continuous theme in this course of ‘war’. As soon as I got through part of the chapter where they were talking about a ” a report on the mine-sweeping operations”, it immediately clicked in my mind that this was another war related story. This was interesting to me because in all honesty, unlike many of the other stories such as those taking place in Spain, I don’t know much of anything about Angola or Angolan history. So I guess that meant I wasn’t expecting it in the way I did many of the others. This is. in all honesty, just ignorance on my part. There’s always more to learn I suppose.

Q: What do you think of Felix’s job? Is it moral? Rational? Fair? Should there be conditions? Is it ever truly possible to change one’s past?

 

 

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?

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