Tag Archives: repetition

Schweblin

Week 13: Fever Dream and the Contamination of Anxiety

Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin was haunting to say the very least. I read the entire book in one sitting – less out of choice, and more out of an inability to ever comfortably set it down and step away. From the very start, the reader is invaded with anxieties and disorientation. We are placed in the body of Amanda, who we quickly learn knows about as much as we do in regards to what is taking place in this town. As Jon says, there is a low-level anxiety and paranoia that permeates the narrative and we are never really able to escape. There is no moment of refuge, no pause in the spiral of disturbing events to catch our breath. We are stumbling through a fever dream of horror as much as our narrator, Amanda, is. Even the cadence of the dialogue and the hazy, but simple scene descriptions were downright creepy and reminiscent of jarring horror movie moments.

The frequent references to time running out and the need for urgency, kept me constantly on my toes, terrified of what I’d read on the next page. David and Amanda exchanging innumerable hot-and-cold guesses, like “we are very close now,” “this is the moment isn’t it?,” “this is the last moment of peace” (paraphrased), kept me activated and uneasy through every page. The sense of ever-nearing doom was inescapable. The lack of any answers or context further heightened this experience. It was frustrating and almost suffocating to feel as in the dark as Amanda; I found myself feeling indignant that we (the readers) were not given more context than the narrator, it was maddening to feel so blind and uninformed.

Learning about the history behind the very real horror of the novel made me appreciate the narrative style so much more. I can only imagine that the Argentinians affected by glyphosate poisoning felt this same maddening frustration and confusion on a massive scale. The fear that environmental contamination inspires is so visceral and unmoving. Fever Dream, if inspired by real experiences, is a heartbreaking but understandable reaction to this nightmare – meaning-making in dark, magical forces, desperation for dubious cures, and enduring paranoia about everyone in sight. In this light, Fever Dream is really a beautiful, if difficult, portrayal of this very real and devastating sociopolitical issue. Like Jon, suggests generational poisoning of rural Argentina is just the painful manifestation of real, contaminating forces that continue to seep into Latin America via exploitation, colonization, and violence: “The poison was always there,” says David (169).

Question for discussion: What are your thoughts on Amanda’s increasingly heightened paranoia for Carla? There’s a moment when she believe Carla’s fallen bikini strap and overwhelming perfume were perhaps intentional, malevolent distractions. Do you think Carla had intentions to poison Amanda? What do you think became of Nina?

Standard
García Márquez

Week 8: One Hundred Years of Solitude and Collapse

I found that I enjoyed the second half of One Hundred Years of Solitude by García Márquez significantly more than I enjoyed the first half. Many of the symbols, broader themes, and patterns started to become more coherent for me, and this awareness infused each chapter with much more significance.

The imagery of “spiral and collapse” has persisted throughout my reading of the text, and I believe it fittingly characterizes the world of Macondo and the Buendías. I imagined the plot, rather than a classic mountain, as a large corkscrew that coils forward in time but continually reifies the past’s events and tragedies. When I reached the end and read about the tornado winds that finally swept Macondo away, I thought this was a fitting symbol to complete the narrative. At the center of this spiral, trying bravely and desperately to create order within the chaos of the family, is Ursula, the relentless matriarch. She is one of the only constants in the midst of changing yet repetitive characters and events. In a sense, I imagine her being the “eye of the storm” in the center of the spiraling hurricane of this family.

In the second half of the novel in particular, we see Macondo and its founding family spiral through chaos and false progress. Capitalism and imperialism seem to overburden the once idyllic town until it explodes under the weight of its many tragedies. Conversely, we see the Buendía family collapse in on itself. This is illustrated quite vividly through their repeated turning in on themselves incestuously. Shut away, wading yet again through their enduring and collective solitude, the spiral finally seems to crash into its center upon the death of its indelible matriarch. But, like the text suggests, I think the beginning of the collapse really came upon the death of Pilar Ternera, who has always acted as a shadowy and unloved matriarch in her own right. Pilar is also one of the few founders of Macondo, present throughout the text. Despite being rejected, she births two sons of the Buendía family and comforts/”grandmothers” several others. In addition, she has a special relationship with time that seems to place her at the center of this hurricane too; able to envision events of the past and future, she seems to know the Buendías’ fate all along. When she dies, this spiral has finally lost the integrity of its center and collapses in forcefully.

This quote illustrated this imagery and Pilar’s role most for me: “There was no mystery in the heart of a Buendía that was impenetrable for [Pilar] because a century of cards and experience had taught her that the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle” (396).

To bounce off of Jon’s discussion question, I think the family’s fate could have been saved by the naming of the last Buendía Rodrigo, rather than another Aureliano. The text repeatedly alludes to their destiny for greatness and I believe this greatness could have been truly preserved with the symbolic ending of the name cycle. Question for discussion: Do you think something else could have saved the Buendías from their fate?

Standard
Borges

Week 5: Labyrinths and the Maze of Understanding

Exactly as the title foreshadows, I found myself quickly getting lost in Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths. The first definition Google provides for labyrinth is “a complicated, irregular network of passages or paths in which it is difficult to find one’s way; a maze.” Fittingly, I found Borges’ narrative style to be at times complicated, meandering, or just misleading. I found myself needing to read sentences or passages more than once – usually several times over. And even when I felt that I was properly following the storyline, I’d come across a passage that would make me question my understanding of what came before. In this way, both frustratingly and amusingly, I felt like I was navigating a real labyrinth consuming Borges’ work. I’d like to think this was his exact intention.

Despite feeling occasionally uncertain, I really enjoyed the reading journey Labyrinths led me down. The stories were unusual and unexpected yet vivid and compelling. In each, I am positive something significant or interesting completely flew over my head. But, again, faithful to the title, I think the stories were written to provide unique paths for every reader and allow certain details to go unexamined upon your first pass. Typically in a maze, people will walk up and down the same corridors repeatedly in the process of way-finding, and in this same way, I expect multiple reads of Borges’ text to be necessary to reveal all the nuanced mysteries.

Before reading this text, I had known Borges to be associated with the genre of “magical realism,” but upon finishing, I was surprised that scientific-fiction (sci-fi) wasn’t a more affiliated style. The short stories were full of incredible invention, science, mathematics, physics, and philosophy. Certain passages were so formal and academic – almost mathematical – that I sometimes felt a rigorous background in these topics was needed to properly appreciate what was being said.

Throughout, Borges remained faithful to the themes of time, plurality, and importantly, labyrinths. In many of his stories, Borges completely deconstructs my understanding of time and introduces extraordinary layers of possibility in each narrative. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the way Rick Riordan describes the Labyrinth in the fourth novel of the Percy Jackson series; a self-aware, self-expanding maze that bends time and has a fragile relationship to reality. Similarly, Labyrinths felt like an infinitely vast, infinitely layered maze, with supernatural intelligence. There is one quote in the very first short story that I think perfectly reflects the text’s enormity: “This plan is so vast that each writer’s contribution is infinitesimal. At first it was believed that Tlön was a mere chaos, an irresponsible license of the imagination; now it is known that it is a cosmos and that the intimate laws which govern it have been formulated, at least provisionally” (8).

Question for discussion: Do you think Borges could have achieved the same maze-like reading journey in a single narrative arc rather than across multiple short stories/essays?

Standard