Month: April 2026

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Conclusion

Conclusion! (That felt way shorter than I thought)

I now realize that since the last book I read was “Love Me Tender” by Debre, I should’ve titled that blog post “Love Me Sweet” and then titled this conclusiatory one “Never Let Me Go”. But alas it is too late now. I digress.

Regardless, I wasn’t sure how much I was going to like this course at first. I mean I like reading and discussion as such, but this was a lot of texts and I didn’t know what the expectations of these discussions and blog posts were, and admittedly I just overthought everything… However I was pleasantly surprised overall. It felt more doable (even if I most definitely procrastinated the reading until the weekend before it was due…) than before and honestly I enjoyed reading the other blog posts and such, it felt basically like a big book club in some ways. Though admittedly talking in class scared me, there’s nothing that makes you feel more incompetent than putting your hand up and speaking in class.

I would say overall my favourite texts were Nada, The Lover, Faces in the Crowd, and Black Shack Alley. They were relatively readable and honestly interesting even if I didn’t like a number of the characters. I’d argue that the dislike is what made a lot of these texts engaging, there’s nothing that drives one to continue with something more than spite! In all honesty all of the texts in this book seemed to have three to four main things in common: war, memory, social class, and shitty men. Even if they weren’t primary topics, to my recollection essentially all were present in one way or another barring a few exceptions.

Oh, it also taught me that Freud goes far beyond my own major of psychology and permeates everyone and everything else somehow. I really thought I was free from him while in my electives, it appears that I was wrong.

I would say that my thoughts on literature and reading haven’t changed all that much. That being said my thoughts on literature have been expanded I think. Though I read a good amount even prior to this course, I didn’t necessarily have a whole lot of background knowledge regarding the development of literature during these periods. I read a lot but I didn’t necessarily classify the type of writing (surrealism, modernism, etc.) so this has kind of let me look back on other texts that I have read and understand more context regarding them, as well as refine what kinds of books I like and why.

Honestly over all, I would read another romance language book or a few willingly. Which I hadn’t totally considered before. Or at least I would find some in audiobook form.

All in all thank you so much all of you for your time and effort during this course! I have enjoyed meeting and talking to all of you!

 

 

Categories
Debre

Love Me Sweet, Never Let Me Go – Debre

To be completely honest, the title of this book absolutely made me go back and listen to the Elvis song by the same name. That was on loop during this book. But that’s a side tangent.

In all honesty, at the start of this book I didn’t love the fact that it was in first person. I’m really just not a fan of first person writing in general, however as I got further in I started to appreciate what that writing choice brought to the story itself. I feel like it added a level of intimacy and internalism that wouldn’t have been there otherwise, even with an omniscent third person perspective. I think this worked perfectly with her stream of raw consciousness, especially the more painful aspects. It’s as though we’re in her head. That being said, I really thought that once the main character was suggested/established to be a lesbian, I really thought we were going to get one story with a potentially healthy relationship, or at least a story that lacks a male shitty character. And yet… Laurent. I feel that requires little to no elaboration, just UGH.

It was interesting to me that both this story and the last I read for this class, ‘Faces in the Crowd’ by Luiselli, both have a focus on motherhood. In this case, Constance’s experience was rather non-traditional, having lost custody of her son because of her spiteful ex-husband. Comparatively, the main character in Luiselli’s has a painfully traditional motherhood experience during that period of her life. Though notably, both women have some sort of separation from their husbands. In this story’s case, Constance is seen as breaking the soceital standards by pursuing herself and her desires, contrasting the way a mother ‘should act’. This is in distinct contrast to the main character of Faces in the Crowd who end up going from a bohemian young adult, to a stereotypical mother who largely sacrifices her own desires, hobbies, and work in the name of her family. Oddly enough both are condemned in different ways by the different readers, one for submitting to traditional gender roles and sacrificing self, and the other for breaking them and choosing herself.

One thing I found very interesting, was the fact that the title is in English regardless of whether the book itself was actually in English or French. Considering the text was originally written in French, the fact that it started out with an English title felt odd. What was the purpose of that? Depending on the reasoning, should the English translation of the text have the title in a different langauge such as French?

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