Categories
Conclusion

RMST 202: A Conclusion

I can’t say I’m not relieved that the school year is ending, but I still can’t believe how fast this term felt. I signed up for this class completely on a whim. I remember finding this course on a Reddit post at 2 a.m., and thought, sure, why not? I had no real idea what Romance Studies meant (I did not read the course description lol), and I definitely did not expect to spend a semester reading about stories from Paris, Cameroon, Italy, and all the way to colonial Indochina. And well, guess what happened…

This course was actually my first ever elective at UBC. The contract grading thing genuinely threw me off at first because I had never even heard of it existing, and lowkey didn’t believe it was true. The idea that I could decide upfront what grade I was working toward and then just do the work for it, without every single post being picked apart against a rubric, was just hard to believe (considering like, every other course I’ve taken in my life).

That said, I am not a big reader, so having weekly reading was genuinely something I had to make time for, as I am not a quick reader either. To be honest, some of these books I would never have picked up on my own in any universe. Nadja is not something I would have found myself reading on a random Tuesday night unprompted. Like, to give this course its credit, I don’t even think I would have known of the existence of some of these authors if it weren’t for it. However, going through such a wide range of authors, styles, time periods, and parts of the world gave me a much broader sense of what literature can actually look like and what it can do. Not every book worked for me but I think the variety was the whole point. You’re bound to enjoy at least one thing.

The course description talks about hoping students were affected by what they read, and I think that’s probably the most honest measure of whether a literature class actually succeeded in doing anything. Some of these books actually stuck with me. The Impatient is probably the one that stuck with me the most (recency bias, maybe?), but because it genuinely feels impactful and frankly, quite disheartening.

Thanks to Prof. John, the TAs, and everyone else I’ve met through this course. Wishing everyone good luck on their finals and a fun summer break 🙂

Categories
Amal

Thoughts on The Impatient

The Impatient follows three women, Ramla, Hindou, and Safira, as they navigate life inside a polygamous marriage in northern Cameroon, Africa.

In this novel, every time a woman tries to stand up for herself or say that something is wrong, the fault is always put on her behaviour rather than what’s actually being done to her. What Amal is showing is that the most effective way to keep a system going is to attach it to something no one can argue with, and then make the women who’ve already been through it the ones who pass it down. For example, Hindou’s mother was forced into marriage at 14 to replace her dead sister with one week’s notice. Despite that, she sends Hindou back to her abuser anyway, fully knowing the fate her daughter awaits.

Building on this, it’s also worth noting how little the men actually have to do to enforce the systems and traditions that entirely benefit them. As an example, the aunties are the ones steering the brides into the wedding cars. Goggo Diya is the one telling Hindou her screams during her assault were indecent and disgraced the family. Lastly, Safira spends most of the novel scheming against Ramla, not the man who has wronged them both. However, we cannot say that any of these women are acting out of pure cruelty either. After all, they’re just doing what they’ve been taught their whole lives to do. It just shows that over time, they become conditioned to take part in the same system that was used to break them. The system reproduces itself through the people it has already damaged, which is what makes it so hard to dismantle in the first place.

This novel was a hard read, especially compared to other books in this course. Even though the characters themselves are fictional, child marriages, domestic abuse, and misogyny are still very much alive and happening all over the world. It is also the fact that Amal herself lived through a version of this that makes it even more disheartening. Women shouldn’t have to survive something before anyone takes it seriously. For my last read of the course, I hesitate to say I enjoyed this book in the usual sense, but it reminded me that reading can bring you into lives and realities completely different from your own.

Discussion question: Was there anyone in this book who was ever really free to make a different choice?

Categories
Piglia

Thoughts on Money to Burn

Money to Burn is the most “movie-like” book we’ve read so far. It’s based on a real 1965 armored truck robbery in Buenos Aires that spins out into weeks of hiding, and finally a siege in Montevideo where the gang literally sets money on fire. The book covers several events: the planning, the robbery itself, and the police closing in. All the while, journalists, witnesses, and cops give their own versions of the events that occured.

The most interesting relationship in the book, for me, was the relationship between Dorda (the Blond Gaucho) and Brignone (the Kid), the “Twins”.

“Dorda is heavy and quiet, with a ruddy face and an easy smile. Brgnone is thin, slightly built, agile, has black hair and a complex so pallid, it looks as if he’s spent more time in jail than he actually has.” (pg. 1)

The two of them move through the story as a pair of homosexual(??) men in a world built on macho performance and violence, and Piglia never lets you forget how out of place that makes them. As Silva and the cops close in, you can see how those circumstances affect their relationship. It holds, in the sense that they don’t betray each other, but it also destroys them. The closer they get to each other, the more their relationship becomes impossible to separate from the violence around it.

The book’s pacing is hectic in the first half: names, nicknames, side characters, and bodies appear and disappear so quickly that it’s kind of hard to keep track (although I might’ve gotten used to it at this point). At first, I found that frustrating, but I think that it was an intentional choice by Piglia, like being transported into the chaos of the city and the investigation itself. I also appreciated that Piglia never turns the gang into antiheroes, as they are anything but innocent. In general, though, the book never really tells you who to side with. The gang is responsible for some awful things: they kill guards, hit civilians, make reckless choices, and there’s no attempt to frame them as tragic, misunderstood guys underneath it all. At the same time, the police don’t feel like the good guys either. Piglia expresses that there is no real inherent ‘good’ or ‘bad’ here, which makes it harder to decide to whom your sympathy is supposed to go. (if anyone at all)

Anyways, as a true-crime fan, I found myself enjoying this book a lot!

Discussion question: Who do you think are the real ‘villains’ of the story? Or is there no one truly at fault here?

Categories
Duras Uncategorized

Thoughts on The Lover

Reading Marguerite Duras’s The Lover is a genuinely disorienting experience. It’s essentially an autobiographical novel about a fifteen(ish?) year-old French girl who begins a passionate affair with a wealthy, older Chinese man.

A detail I found interesting about the novel is how it actively deprives us of the lover’s identity. For example, we know he drives a black limousine and wears the light suits of Saigon bankers, but we never learn his actual name. We barely even get a concrete description of his face. He is strictly “the Chinese man” or “the lover.” I think keeping him a mystery is a deliberate power move by Duras. By stripping away his personal details, she turns him into a vessel for the narrator’s own awakening and a means of escaping her family’s abuse and financial situation. In some other books we’ve read in this course, women are the unnamed, mysterious objects of the male gaze, but Duras does the opposite. Perhaps that is one difference between male and female authors. It proves the story was never really about him; instead, it’s about her (Duras) claiming ownership over her own past and memories.

The deliberate de-centering of ‘The Lover’ leads right into the most uncomfortable debate surrounding the book: of whether or not she is truly a victim. On paper, the dynamic is glaringly abusive. She is a minor, and he is a much older adult operating in a colonial society where her family despises him for his race but actively uses him to pay off their massive debts. It has all the textbook markers of exploitation. Yet, the narrator describes herself as fully aware of the transactional nature of the affair from the very beginning, and she actively claims her own sexual desire rather than framing it as something done to her. For her, the relationship is a calculated stepping stone, a way to finally separate herself from her terrifying older brother and her mother’s suffocating despair.

Ultimately, I really enjoyed how the book forces you into such a morally grey area. It doesn’t hand you easy answers, but instead provokes real thought about morality, race, gender, and toxic family dynamics. Plus, as someone who is Southeast Asian /Chinese, the setting just felt much more local and relatable to me compared to the other books we’ve read, which made me enjoy it a lot more.

My discussion Question for the week would be: How would you interpret the narrator’s role in the affair —do you see her primarily as a victim of her circumstances, or does her intense self-agency make you think otherwise?

Categories
Calvino

A Book About Reading a Book About Reading?

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is one of those books that’s interesting because of how strange it is, rather than because it’s enjoyable to read. The whole book is basically ten different novels cut off mid-story, tied together by a weird frame narrative where “you,” the Reader, keep trying to find the missing pages. It’s creative, sure, and I’ll give it credit for how self-aware and experimental(?) it is. I have to say, halfway through, I started to get bored. Once you realize the pattern—start a story, get invested, it abruptly ends. It starts to get very repetitive. 

I also think the way he writes about women was very strange. Every time a woman shows up, I feel like she’s described as if she’s there to be gazed at rather than to exist. Ludmilla, the “Other Reader”, could have been really interesting, but she’s mostly presented as mysterious and sexy and hardly anything else. Even when she does have her own ideas about reading, they’re filtered through how the male protagonist sees her. It’s also worth it to point out that the book literally assumes the reader is a man: 

“You can leave the bookshop content, you, a man who thought that the period when you could still expect something from life had ended.” (Chapter 2, pg 32) 

Once you notice that, it’s hard to ignore how every story-within-a-story has men at the center and women hovering around them as lovers and/or muses. Although there are moments where it seems like he’s actually doing it on purpose, like when the narrator literally asks if being the “protagonist” gives you the right to sleep with all the female characters. I guess, in a broader sense, this pattern of male-centered storytelling feels like Calvino’s way of exposing how literature itself has been built around that perspective. But even if that’s what he’s trying to do, it ends up falling into the same pattern anyway? The female characters feel more like ideas than people, and the book kind of proves its own point. It’s hard to tell if that’s intentional or just the limit of what Calvino could imagine, but either way, it doesn’t sit right with me. 

By the end, I think I respected the book more than I liked it ( although I definitely did not dislike it). I can say that I enjoyed the ‘self-aware’ aspect of the book, and it was unlike anything I’ve ever read before. 

Discussion question: Do you think Calvino was actually critiquing the way women are written in literature, or was he just doing the same thing himself? 

Categories
Rodoreda

Time of The Doves – Rodoreda

The Time of the Doves follows the life of Natalia, an ordinary working-class woman in Barcelona whose personal story unfolds alongside the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath. The novel traces her journey from a passive young girl at a festival to her journey through motherhood and marriage, and finally to a widow struggling to survive poverty and hunger amidst war. Through this novel, we see war through the lens of those most affected by it.

I think Quimet’s renaming of Natalia as ‘Colometa’ is one of the first moments where she loses control over her own identity. He laughs when she insists her name is Natalia. That moment stuck with me because it feels small, yet it sets the tone for everything that follows. From then on, her old life and identity begin to fade. Her life now revolves around Quimet and only his wants and needs. Following this, Quimet’s doves are an extension of his dominance over Natalia. They multiply uncontrollably, invade her apartment, and force her into endless cleaning. Just like Quimet’s authority, they take up space that was never freely given to them.

I also think the connection between the doves and motherhood is really complex. Natalia is constantly associated with reproduction—first through the doves breeding endlessly, then through her own pregnancies. Both feel less like choices and more like obligations forced upon her by Quimet. The apartment becomes overcrowded with children and birds, and she is the one left to manage all of it. In that sense, the doves reflect a distorted version of femininity: nurturing, cleaning, and enduring. But when she finally kills the pigeons, I saw it as her first real act of rebellion. She destroys what has been symbolically suffocating her.

“When they were sleeping I’d stick the funnel in their mouths, first one and then the other, and pour the acid into them and then pour it into myself and that way we’d put an end to it all and everyone would be happy since we wouldn’t have done anybody any harm and no one loved us.” (pg. 146)

I sympathize a lot with Natalia here. In fact, I don’t see her actions as cruelty; I think it symbolizes her absolute breaking point as a woman who has been stripped of agency for years. She ends up buying the acid, yet she can’t bring herself to go through with it. I think that this hesitation matters more than the act itself. It suggests that despite everything, there is still something within her that cannot be destroyed. Some instinct, some quiet resilience, remains intact. I like to think that inside her, beneath the exhaustion and trauma, there is still a trace of the young girl who once stood in the Placa del Diamant before her old life was stripped away from her. She is not entirely gone.

My discussion question for the week is: Do you think Natalia’s suffering was primarily caused by war, by the patriarchy, or by economic inequality? Or are these forces inseparable?

Categories
Zobel

Thoughts on Black Shack Alley

 

Black Shack Alley follows author José growing up in 1930s Martinique. The story is split into three parts, and each part follows José in a different stage of his childhood, in a different place.

First of all, I really loved JosĂ©’s grandma’s character in the book.  I like how she’s portrayed as kind of like a ‘tiger parent’ (we Asian kids can relate), but still cares deeply she cares for him. She doesn’t express her love through gifts or affection, but as a reader, you can tell just how much she cares for him through her actions. She wakes up early, goes to the cane fields, comes home exhausted, yet still manages to feed him, keep him clean, even though they have almost nothing. It’s easy to read her strictness as cruelty at first, but the more the story goes on, the clearer it becomes that she’s fighting for him with everything she has. It is because of her actions that JosĂ© gets access to something that could actually change his future. I think that’s what makes their relationship so moving and relatable. It isn’t warm and sweet in a conventional way, but it’s real, and many of us can relate to this.

Another thing this book does well is showing the struggles of not just obtaining an education, but life afterwards as well. Jose’s life doesn’t just magically get easier after he leaves the plantation. Fort-de-France is a different setting from Black Shack Alley, but little changes about his financial situation. His mother still has to fight for every basic necessity. If anything, the lycĂ©e makes him even more aware of where he stands amongst his peers. He’s surrounded by wealthier, lighter-skinned students who seem like they belong there without trying, all the while he’s constantly conscious of his clothes, his background, and the fact that he’s out of place there.

Overall, Black Shack Alley reminds readers just how easy it is to treat education like something guaranteed. When in reality, it’s a privilege to even be able to read and write, let alone be able to attend university. Jose’s story shows how hard it is to even reach ‘the starting line’ when you’re dealing with issues like poverty, racism, and a system that’s built to keep certain people behind. Nothing is handed to him in life. I think it made me appreciate how much access to education can shape someone’s life, and how many people have had to fight for what others just get automatically.

Discussion question for the week: Who do you think ‘benefits’ more from José’s education in the story: JosĂ© himself, or the people around him who invest everything in him?

Categories
Agostino Moravia

Growing Up is Actually Horrible – Agostino

Agostino was a short read, but one that leaves a lot to think about. I think it’s more than your usual coming-of-age story. It’s one of those reads where the writing coaxes you to keep going even though you’re lowkey really weirded out. It actually reminded me a lot of Proust, in the sense that a lot of the emotional tension going on circles back to the mother figure in both of these books.

To start, I would argue that Agostino’s relationship with his mother was definitely not normal. You can sort of feel it right from the beginning. His willingness to show her off stems more from his innocent love and admiration for her. He clearly loves her dearly and refers to her as “his mother”. However, pretty quickly, the narration shifts and she becomes “the mother,” and at one point Agostino reduces her even further to “just a woman”.

“She’s a woman, nothing more than a woman” (pg. 44)

Even when he still loves her, the attachment feels obsessive in a way that isn’t normal for a regular mother-son relationship.

Once that private world with his mother starts falling apart, his developing relationships with the others become more central. This is where the gang of boys comes in. Despite their verbal (and physical) mistreatment of him, Agostino finds himself going back to them again and again. He wants their approval. He wants to understand what they understand. And he doesn’t really have anyone else to turn to because his mother is distracted (looking at you, Renzo) and emotionally unavailable. In fact, the book captures something very real and raw about puberty. Your feelings get unexplainably intense, and suddenly, the people around you have way more influence than they used to.

And it’s not just puberty that causes Agostino to think and act the way that he does. The moment he meets Berto and the gang, we’re suddenly reminded that Agostino is no normal boy—he’s rich. He’s sheltered in a way that shows in everything, in how he talks, what he knows, what he’s embarrassed by, what shocks him. The other boys understand sex, money, and power in a blunt way because they’ve been around it. When the boys mock his wealth and ask about his house and his lifestyle, it’s a reminder that he’s been protected from reality all this time. Perhaps that is why their approval matters so much to him. It’s not only about friendship, but it’s also about trying to catch up to a world he suddenly realizes he knows nothing about.

Overall, I found Agostino a pretty straightforward read. My discussion question for the week would be: Do you think Agostino actually wants to grow up, or does he just want to stop feeling left out and powerless?

Categories
Uncategorized

‘The Shrouded Woman’: She’s just being real

The novel takes us through Ana MarĂ­a’s memories, which resurface as certain key figures from her life enter the room where her body lies. Each presence unlocks a different part of her memories with that person. Because she speaks from death, there’s a new honesty to the way she looks at herself and others, which makes her feel less like a traditional heroine and more like a real person to me. 

I find her relationship with three key men in her life particularly interesting. 

“You are the most charming woman I have ever known; it’s too bad you are my wife, Ana María.” (pg. 226) 

Antonio, her husband, admires her, even finds her charming, and yet resents her in the role of “wife.” Despite this, she remains emotionally invested in him long after he has withdrawn from her, which points out how one-sided their relationship has become. Ricardo feels like the central figure who represents her youth. With him, everything is raw and natural. He represents freedom, desire, and also a kind of naivety that only comes with being young and free. That early relationship is less about who he is as a person and more about what he opens up in her, which is why I think he was the first important male character we are introduced to. Fernando, in contrast, belongs to a much later stage in her life, when she is more withdrawn and aware of social expectations. He represents a quieter, more resigned kind of attachment. 

 Although her part in the novel was quite short, Sofía is another important character in Ana María’s story. Their rivalry is subtle, but it lingers underneath all their interactions, and I think it shows a lot about how women in the novel are often put against each other. Likewise, if Sofía and Ana María are defined by their inner lives and emotions, María Griselda is defined first by how others see her. Honestly, we never really get to see her side of anything. With Ana María, Sofía, and Silvia, we at least understand what they are feeling, or why they react the way they do. Their choices are tied to emotions we can see. With María Griselda, it’s the opposite. We mostly see what her presence does to other people, but we never really know what any of this feels like for her. She isn’t given the same chance to think for herself. That silence turns her into some sort of “trapped dove”  (which is really ironic since later on, her own husband kills her pet doves)—a woman whose beauty makes her visible but also strips her of any kind of depth, as if being that beautiful disqualifies her from being seen as a full person with thoughts of her own. 

This was probably my favourite read so far! Mostly because, compared to Proust and Breton, I feel that this novel was much more my style. My discussion question for the week would be: How does telling her story from her deathbed change the way we judge her relationships and choices, compared to if the same events were told while she was still alive?  

Categories
Uncategorized

Nadja: Not really a love story?

So, Nadja was my first ever introduction to surrealist fiction, and all I can say is…at least it was less confusing than Proust.

For starters, the first few parts of the book left me wondering whether I was reading the right book or not, because like… where exactly was Nadja? It felt I was like reading Breton’s notebook, except he’s already circled and underlined parts I was supposed to find profound. I didn’t always. Sometimes I just felt like I was being talked at lol. I do get that that’s sort of the surrealist thing, though.

But when Nadja finally enters the book, it gets so, so, so much more interesting. Not because the writing changes (although it does feel more focused), but because she’s just… weird?? Compellingly, though, don’t get me wrong. I could see why Breton was obsessed with her. But at the same time, it also felt like he only loved her as long as she stayed unreadable to him. The second she became more real—vulnerable, messy, like a normal person—he started distancing himself from her.

There’s this quote that stands out to me: “Andre? Andre? . . . You will write a novel about me. I’m sure you will. Don’t say you won’t.” (pg. 100)

And yeah, well, she was right. But not in the way she probably meant. It doesn’t feel like a love story. It feels like he’s trying to turn her into a symbol of something bigger—Surrealism, madness, mystery—and once she stops being useful for that, she disappears. I also can’t stop thinking about how the book ends. Like, after all that, he doesn’t visit her when she’s institutionalized against her own will (after calling her “mad,” which like… okay??). Like woah. I guess she really was just a phase to you Breton. (Oh, and can we also talk about the fact that he was married the whole time?)

So yeah. This didn’t feel like a love story to me. It felt more like a story about obsession, and not just with Nadja, but with what she represented to him. I don’t think Breton loved her. I think he was fascinated by her, consumed by her strangeness, drawn to her like she was an idea instead of a person.

That being said… I still liked the book. The writing is gorgeous in places, and the structure (or lack thereof) actually made it really interesting to read. I also liked the images scattered between pages. My discussion question would be: Where can we draw the line between love and obsession?

Spam prevention powered by Akismet