Conclusion :)

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Finally, my last post. Can’t even believe I made it through 11 books over the semester.

In this course,  we actually touched on a lot of stories about memories. Regarding the memories of reading, I can still clearly remember the image of secretly reading The Romance of the Three Kingdoms during class in elementary school. However, as I grow older, I need to spend more and more time on my studies, life and work, and it has been a long time since I have been able to settle down to read a book. What was once a recreational activity for me has become a time-consuming activity that I won’t touch. This class really helped me recapture the joy I felt when I was immersed in reading.

One of my favourite books from this semester would have to be Agostino. Although, other stories have touched me, Agostino is the book that really resonated with me. When the protagonist is suddenly overwhelmed by the need to face the split identity of a mother and a woman. It really made me feel exactly the same way I felt as a child that I cast the filter of a tall image of an adult and then shattered it. So often, while reading gives me immersive pleasure, I’m constantly looking for myself in books and reflecting on them. （So, reading is also a way for me to re-examine myself and something to learn from.)

Although, this is the last post, I really don’t seem to have anything in particular to say…. So I’ll share a quote from Cici’s self-published quote:

Now that you’ve read my conclusion post, it’s immediately time to consider and respond to the last question I gave.

You are caught up in your memories, tapping the keyboard in front of your computer/laptop, and say, “(something in the comment).”

And I say, “Great, now you have one more reading memory with Cici’s conclusion post.”

[ Quote  inspired by….If you read the book, you should know who he is LOL, see ya! :)))) ]

Final Question: 

Please share one interesting reading experience you have throughout this course :)))

My Brilliant Friend – Elena Ferrante

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Finally, it’s the last book! Luckily, I personally liked this book 🙂

Well, this book is full of the dilemma and helplessness of women in a patriarchal society, but also showing the awakening of women’s power. Lila and Elena form a complementary and mutually redeeming feeling to me, and they find in each other the state they aspire to be in. Unfortunately, fate has a way of making things difficult, and life is always accompanied by all sorts of regrets and hardships. We can see that Lila and Elena’s relationship started with a courage contest. I liked the following passage:

“She thought that what we were doing was just and necessary; I had forgotten every good reason, and certainly was there only because she was. We climbed slowly toward the greatest of our terrors of that time, we went to expose ourselves to fear and interrogate it.”

The exposure of fear and terror really bound them together. They are willing to present their weakness, grow and learn from each other, TRUE FRIENDSHIP!!!

In Elena’s eyes, Lila is a gifted girl with an innate sense of wildness and resistance that Elena admires and envies. Lila’s resilience inspires Elena’s sense of independence. As a result, Elena instinctively draws closer to her, follows her, and shares her sorrows and joys. In school, the two compete and inspire each other. In life, Lila takes Elena to skip school and asks the cranky and rude Achille for her rag doll. Lila is the other side of Elena’s repressed life, and Elena’s following of Lila reflects her desire for a life of freedom and independence.

At the same time, in Lila’s point of view, Elena is also the one that she aspires to be and become. Lila, as the daughter of a shoemaker, stops her educational path at the end of elementary school because of her family’s financial burden. She dreamed of making an amazing pair of handmade shoes, but was repeatedly struck by reality and ended up getting married in a young age (16 is pretty young 🙁 ). Lila’s experience reflects the suppression of women’s personal value in the subordinate position by the male and patriarchal ideology of that era. Women were often in a position of exploitation. Although Lila learns through a lot of reading and self-study; at the bottom of her heart, she still longs and yearns for school life. Just like the quote below:

“Not for you: you’re my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls.”

This quote is full of Elena representing Lila’s unfulfilled dream, the need for women to become independent and improve their social status through education. How ironic that when it comes to profit, women are often the ones who are exchanged.

Lila and Elena are supporting each other, as well as competing with each other; being a united front and at the same time at opposite poles, growing in opposite directions. The two see themselves in each other, and never free from each other’s influence and dependence.

Question for Discussion: 

“They were Cerullo shoes for men. Not the model for sale, not the ones with the gilded pin. Marcello had on his feet the shoes bought earlier by Stefano, her husband. It was the pair she had made with Rino, making and unmaking them for months, ruining her hands.”

Oh no…tragic ending…Poor Lila tried her best to get rid of the misfortune brought by her destiny, only to step into a “betrayed” marriage again. If you were Lila, how would you rewrite your life story?

The Book of Chameleons – Jose Eduardo Agualusa

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I didn’t really read much into the meaning of this book. However, I did like the magical realism of the book’s setting. The main characters are a reincarnated chameleon (which, when I first started reading, Agualusa didn’t intentionally reveal the identity of the narrator until it brought it up on its own, which made me chuckle in spite of myself the moment I learned about it) and Felix, a man who makes his living selling antique books and his ability to fabricate the past for people. Honestly, I loved the scenes where Felix and Eulálio shared and exchanged dreams and watched sunsets together, and it gave me a sense of calm and fullness, like in the following passage:

“…he goes to the kitchen and comes back with a glass of papaya juice, he sits on the sofa, and shares the sunset rites with me. We talk. Or rather, he talks, I listen. Sometimes I laugh – this seems enough for him. I get the sense that there’s already a thread of friendship holding us together”. (p.4)

Okay, now comes the part I don’t really get. Why change the past?

Let’s take Bachmann as an example. He takes his new identity and lives with it, even changing his accent and clothes to fit his new identity better. So is he real himself now? Does changing one’s identity guarantee a smooth life path in the future? In my personal opinion, a person’s life is constantly being recorded and rewritten every moment (every moment of living can be a change). Who cares what your past was like except yourself? So again, what is the point of changing the past? Can I interpret this behaviour as a kind of escape and disapproval? Also, instead of changing the past, it is better to keep the past in mind, to be constantly reminded of how one’s future can be changed from past experiences. The past is not a stain, it’s a “teacher” creates a future of infinite possibilities.

I wish I could say more about it, but I don’t have anything else to share because this book really confused me…

Question for Discussion:

“This seemed perfectly possible to me. A name can be a curse. Some are dragged along by their name, like muddy river waters after a heavy shower, however much they may resist they’re propeUed toward their destination . . . Others, on the contrary – their names are like masks that hide them, that deceive. Most have no power at all, of course. I recall my human name without any pleasure – but without pain either. I don’t miss it. It wasn’t me.” （p. 40）

What does the past mean to you? If it were you, would you change your past? Why or why not?

Money to Burn – Ricardo Piglia

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This novel is filled with money, crime, sex, drugs, alcohol; in one word: chaos! After learning that this story was based on a true story, it gave me even more of a sense of the insanity of the world.

Anyway, I wanted to share something about the theme that the whole story revolves around: MONEY!

The story begins with a tense bank robbery operation and police shootout resulting in casualties.

They hadn’t counted it but the canvas bag stuffed with cash was so heavy it could have been filled with stones. Lumps of cement, concealing the fine notes, all in usable cur- rency, packed into a canvas bag tied with a naval knot.

‘We were in it up to our necks,’ said Dorda.（p.29）

From this moment on it became clear to them that they would pay a huge price for this looted money.

Another scene that struck me was the money burning scene near the end.

They began tossing burning 1,000-peso bills out of the window. From the kitchen skylight they succeeded in floating the burning money down towards the corner. The bills looked like butterflies of light, flaming notes.A buzz of indignation rippled through the crowd.

‘They’re burning it.’

‘They’re burning the money.’ (p. 157)

Wow~ If I were a pedestrian on the side of the road, how shocked I would be to see this scene! No doubt, I would think they are crazy. Isn’t money meant to be spent? Why burn it? What a waste! However, if I again take the protagonist’s point of view, they are already facing the dead end of their lives, and the meaning and value of money to them at this time should be very different from what ordinary people sees. Money sweeping through the fire and scattering in the air also symbolize the liberation of Dorda and Brignone’s relationship. Well~then…what is the value of money?

Question for Discussion:

“The idea got out that money is innocent, even when acquired as a consequence of death and crime. It couldn’t be considered culpable, but rather it should be viewed as neutral, as a symbol that comes in useful depending on how one wants to use it.” （p. 158）

Money isn’t just at the center of this novel, it’s a necessity for us to survive in the society. Often, money is associated with more negative terms. So what does money mean to you?

The Lover – Marguerite Duras

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Okay, I admit that the relationship is indeed poignant, and Duras does have a different flavor in taking this memory and writing a book about it. But the purity of the relationship is worth reconsidering; after all, the beginning of the protagonist’s relationship is based on the mutual benefits of money and beauty. Another thing is that it’s a big joke to the people they each end up marrying, and I found it more or less disrespectful to the partners that later comes into their lives. (And maybe that’s my own personal little emotional cleanliness fetish?) Regardless, the biggest obstacle in this relationship is the reality of race and social status. This is like a gap that can not be crossed, not just by physical and spiritual love can be overcome, which at the same time also accomplished the key factors of the poignancy of this relationship.

Asia and Europe were probably the two poles of the world for Duras’s childhood, and her traveling between these two poles became part of her early life. This kind of exchange not only strengthens the connection between the two, but also pulls apart the distance between the two. The narrator received a Westernized education that was matched to her whiteness. In accordance with her mother’s wishes, she was educated in the white schools of the colonies literature, and with her mother’s words, her way of thinking and behaving then inevitably became European. As a descendant of colonizers living in the land, the narrator never had any doubts about her identity and status, white people, even if they came from a broken white family like her, still had an invisible sense of superiority. The colonizer’s mentality subconsciously influenced her thoughts and consciousness, so from the very beginning she was no different from the other white people, so she inevitably became European in her thinking and behaviour. The complete hermeticity between the two worlds reveals a real isolation. Duras separates the two worlds with a mysterious, ghostly language. As an adult, Duras tells the story of colonization and domination in a way that seems to be unintentional, but is in fact a story of colonization and domination. It can be said that this “love” in the colony is a disaster from the very beginning, and even the two parties involved know very well their position and the situation of each other, and neither of them thinks to save themselves. Under the background of the colony, the disaster that happened to “I” and the associated people are just an accessory.

Question for Discussion: 

“Throughout our affair, for a year and a half, we’d talk like this, never about ourselves. From the first we knew we couldn’t possibly have any future in common, so we’d never speak of the future, we’d talk about day-to- day events, evenly, hitting the ball back and forth.” (49)

Let’s hypothesize! If the relationship did cross the barriers, where do you think the two would end up? Is it happy and fulfilling? Or do they go their separate ways? (In other words, do you think the relationship would really last?)

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller – Italo Calvino

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The narrative perspective of this book was completely unexpected to me, and this is the first time I’ve read a book where the author narrates from a second-person point of view, which definitely gave me a very strong gateway to connect with the author. This was a very new and creative reading experience for me to have over the years!

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller continually draws attention to the act of reading a book. Appropriately, the protagonist of the novel is the “reader,” whom the narrator also refers to as “you”. While the novel initially seems to break the wall and address its real-world audience directly, the narrative eventually reveals that the “you” in the story is actually a specific character – a single man who is obsessed with reading the story from beginning to end, and whose actions are often driven by the attractive woman he encounters. The novel refuses to end any of its 10 stories and leaves other mysteries in its wake.

The train that appears in this novel caught my attention. To me, the train symbolizes reading as a journey that can take the reader to new and unexpected places. The symbolism of the train portrays reading as a linear, guided experience-at least on the surface. The nominal story focuses on an unnamed narrator who somehow arrives at a remote train station but seems reluctant to reveal who he is, why he came to the station, or what he did before arriving there. The narrator keeps pointing out that the world around him is an illusion and that you, the reader, can only see things when the author specifically points them out to you. These details draw attention to how the reader, like a train on a set of guide tracks laid down by the author, has no choice but to move on and observe the lives of the characters moving on the defined tracks. Nonetheless, as the rest of the novel makes clear, just because reading is a linear experience does not mean that a story has to be a straightforward journey from beginning to end. The train in the first story may give a sense of continuity and forward momentum, but the abrupt ending of the first story confirms that the novel as a whole will not be a linear train ride. Later in the novel, the reader is on a train and thinks he catches a glimpse of Lyudmila on a train going in the opposite direction, only to wake up and realize that the whole experience was a dream. Shortly afterward, the reader marries Ludmilla, contradicting the dream of the train in the opposite direction and suggesting that, despite the powerful force of the train appearing to move in one direction, sometimes the notion of a linear journey is nothing more than an illusion.

Question for Discussion:

Beginning: “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.” (3)

Ending: “And you say, “Just a moment, I’ve almost finished If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino.” (260)

What an interesting way of writing a novel! The novel begins with the reader starting to read and ends with the reader finishing the book. While that said, the chapters in between is in bits and pieces. However….does this entire novel somehow give you an overall feeling/sense of completeness?

The Time of the Doves – Mercy Rodoreda

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The Time of the Doves tells the story of the two marriages of the heroine, Natalia, living in the period of Spanish Civil War, when she first meets and falls in love with Quimet in the square. But their married life was not a prosperous one, and to make matters worse, Ouimet enlisted in the army when the Spanish Civil War broke out, leaving Natalia to raise her two children on her own. This, of course, brought the already poor family to an even more devastating situation, and Quimet’s death brought Natalia and her children to a point of no return, even to the point where Natalia thought of killing her children and then committing suicide. In the midst of this desperate situation, Antonio’s appearance becomes a ray of hope that shines on Natalia. After marrying Antonio, her life became more affluent. As her children grow up, Natalia returns to the square and begins recall her family’s days, releasing the emotions she has suppressed for years.

The whole story made me feel Natalia’s strength as a mother, and at the same time, the traditional concept of marriage also made me wonder about the role of women in a traditional marriage. The theme of “motherhood” is widely reflected in everyday life and is closely related to social attitudes, gender relations, child rearing and education, cleaning and other household chores. In the story, Quimet’s mother is anxious to find out the news of Natalia’s pregnancy soon after their marriage, and Natalia is accused of almost suffocating the baby because she is in pain during labor. This shows the understanding of motherhood in the society of that time, that is, they considered it as a social duty of women. Secondly, the interpretation of motherhood is also reflected in men’s attitudes and decisions about pregnancy, which in turn is related to the equality of gender relations. Natalia originally refuses to have a child, but fails to do so because of Quimet’s “brainwashing”. Moreover, mothers from different social classes have different attitudes towards child rearing, education and domestic labor. Since Natalia’s family was poor, she had no choice but to do everything herself. We can see the awareness of “motherhood” at the social level in Spain at that time.

In the story, Rodoreda also makes full use of symbolism in interpreting the theme of “motherhood”. “When they saw me coming the doves who were roosting raised their heads and stretched their necks. They spread their wings and tried to protect the nests. When I stuck my hand under their breasts they’d try and peck me” (111). The doves protecting the eggs symbolizes a mother protecting her child, the most straightforward interpretation of mother’s protective love.

Question for Discussion:

“And while she was talking the doves were the bosses of the roof. They came and went, flew out of the little room and went back down into it, strutted along the railings and pecked at them with their beaks. They were like people. When they took off it was like a flight of light and shadow. They’d fly above our heads and their Shadows fell on our faces. Quimet’s mother tried to startle them, waving her arm like a windmill, but they didn’t even look at her(102)“.

This novel is just like its title, doves are everywhere in the story. What do you think these doves mean in Natalia’s mind? Similarly, why does Rodoreda use the doves as a symbol?

Deep Rivers – Jose Maria Arguedas

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The novel, Deep Rivers, takes the reader through the lens of life in a municipality in the mountainous interior of Peru through a personal perspective of a middle school student. Most of the inhabitants are Quechua-speaking Indians and mestizos. The novel reflects that although they live in pain and poverty, they are noble in spirit and full of hope for a better life. The novel begins with Ernesto’s school life and moves on to the festivals in the town, the people’s demonstrations against the salt monopoly, the bloody repression by the authorities, and finally his departure from the school due to the plague epidemic. The painful and joyful episodes of these successive events are vividly written with a strong lyrical atmosphere, full of the national character of the Indian nations.

The book is very interesting in that it includes many Quechua words and is followed by translations of the words, for example:

“Then I remembered the Quechua songs which continually repeat one pathetic phrase : yawar mayu, “bloody river” ; yawar unu, “bloody water” ; pUk’tik yawar k’ ocha, “boiling bloody lake” ; yawar wek’e, “bloody tears.” Couldn’t one say yawar rumi, “bloody stone,” or puk’tik yawar rum;, “boiling bloody stone”?” (p.8)

This list of gory and barbaric words immediately made me think of the title of the book, Deep Rivers, and then I started to think, why would Arguedas name a story about Indians Deep Rivers? What is the use of it? Or is it a metaphor for the oppression and injustice done to the Indians?

On the other hand, I found the main character, Ernesto, to be a very questioning and curious person about everything. We as readers also learn and understand through his personal perspective. A lot of the writing is descriptive of the landscape, which gives me as a reader a lot of room for imagination. The whole work was very realistic for me, no magical elements, massive descriptions of the environment portray the beauty of the land, the lives of ordinary people, their joys and sorrows, their pain and exploitation, etc. A beautiful picture of the Indians, the presentation is quite lyrical and emotional.

Question for Discussion: 

“If the colonos, with their curses and their songs, had annihilated the fever, perhaps from the height of the bridge I would see it float by, swept along by the current, in the shadow of the trees. It would pass by caught on a branch of chachacomo, or of gorse, floating on the layers of pisonay flowers that these deep riv­ers always bring. The river would take it off to the Great Jungle, the country of the dead. Like Lleras !” (p. 233)

How would you interpret the “deep rivers”?

Agostino – Alberto Moravia

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Of all the novels that we have read in the past few weeks, Agostino is one that really resonated with me. As I read the novel, it was like a mirror to the overwhelmed adolescent me. Although the novel is relatively short, the storyline, especially the complexity of the main character’s inner workings, is well presented.

Agostino is just a 13-year-old boy, and in the legal sense, 13 is still a child, within the realm of the underage. It is worth noting, however, that at this stage of life a child also happens to enter a gap between childhood and adolescence. It is a stage when the child’s psyche is slowly approaching the adult psyche.

From the very beginning, Agostino considers his mother to be the most sacred, the most respected and the most dominant. (He enjoyed all the time which he spent with his mother) Because Agostino is unreservedly dependent on his mother as a child, his mother’s great image is very glorious and sacred when it is first established. But as the story progresses and Agostino approaches the adolescent psyche, he suddenly realizes that his mother’s love can be projected not only to himself, but also to others in other ways. This inevitably goes against the image of his mother in Agostino’s mind, leading to the disintegration of the beliefs he has always held in his mentality. Poor Agostino’s limited perspective as a son does not allow him to realize that ‘his mother is not only his mother, but also a woman’. As a result, Agostino does not have the ability to process and regulate himself, so he can only dispose of this great shock by expressing disgust and avoidance. On the other hand, the same is true for Agostino’s mom, who is also imprisoned by the single perspective of being a mother figure. In mom’s perspective, Agostino has been a child who has not grown up, so she acquiesces to Agostino’s ignorance about feelings and sex. But that’s exactly why the knowledge of sex education doesn’t guide Agostino’s growth in the right way, and Agostino can only understand it through his narrow/limited perception.

In my opinion, we are constantly learning and growing along the way, and every shock and apprehension of something that doesn’t match our own perceptions is a unique education from this society. Although, I can’t give a proper way to deal with it, perhaps that’s why every individual living on earth is ‘alive’ and unique.

Question for discussion:

…he had lost his former pleasures without managing to acquire any new ones (Moravia, 74). So he found that he had lost his original identity without acquiring through his loss another (Moravia, 78).

Do you ever had a feeling like Agostino, “had lost” something…”without acquiring another”? Or how do you interpret this kind of feeling in your own life? (A feeling of getting stuck? lost? misery? roaming?)

 

The Shrouded Woman – Maria Luisa Bombal

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The Shrouded Woman is centered around the perspective of a dead woman, who, though dead, still sees and hears her family and friends who come to her coffin, which plunges the woman into memories of her time spent with these people. The memories triggered by the sequential appearance of her daughter, her old nanny, her lover, her father, her sister, her obsessive crush, her son, her husband, and other family members and friends, truly restore and reproduce the tragic life of the heroine. The entire work is filled with the heroine’s wandering mind, active life trajectory and wandering emotional thoughts. This unique narrative perspective adds a one-of-a-kind aesthetic connotation and intensity on many levels.

What grabbed my attention the most throughout the story was the topic of marriage. For Maria, the heroine, is surrounded by her cousin, who gives her her first experience of love; and then by her best friend and confidant, Fernando, who has always been devoted to her; but by a quirk of fate, she marries Antonio, whom she does not love at all, even though he is firm and discreet in every way. In this loveless and lifeless marriage, every intimate physical contact between the two, without exception, leads the heroine to a heartfelt rejection and resistance to her husband. In a given social relationship, women’s personalities are mostly established in relationships with other people compared to men’s, so for the heroines, if they still have expectations for marriage, they should be able to create a close and tight psychological relationship with their husbands, so as to avoid the threats and harms that may come from the separation. It is clear that Maria has a fragmented experience of life. The world of death is a more complete paradise for the incomplete feelings of life, and it is a strong expression for creating a perfect world of love.

Bombal was a leader in Latin American feminist literature. In the Latin American society at that time, women’s social status was far lower than men’s and they did not have the right to go to school and receive education. The image of women portrayed by Bombal captures the most natural desire and psychology of women’s emotional world, and at the same time demonstrates that women seem to be weak and powerless to the vagaries of fate, but they are never tamed, never deceive themselves, and are faithful to their own feelings and find the power of survival in them.

Question for Discussion:

“The woman in the shroud did not feel the slightest desire to rise again. Alone, she would at last be able to rest, to die. For she had suffered the death of the living. And now she longed for total immersion, for the second death, the death of the dead.” (Bombal, 259)

The death mentioned again at the end of the novel intrigued me a lot, how do you interpret this “second death”, again what does the heroine’s first death signify?