Month: March 2026

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? 

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