Author Archives: guoyiwen

Week3: Mad Toy by Robert Arlt

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Mad toy is made up of four not-too-close-knit stories, Thieves, Work and Days, Mad Toy, and Judas Iscariote. The reason why they are not too closely related is that the four stories are basically not very related in terms of plot and content, the only connection being that the main character of all four stories is Astier, a young man from the lower class who lives on the outskirts of the Argentine capital. These four short stories actually depict the four stages of Astier’s adolescence and youth, with no obvious timeline linking these four different stages, but they are not completely cut off either. We can see that some common characters occasionally appear in these four short stories. This novel continues author Robert Arlt’s usual style – relentlessly showing the ugliness and lack of hope in life.

The opening story tells of Astier and two friends from his teenage years who form a club, and how they will fretfully take minutes of the club’s meetings, while the club’s activity is stealing, as their dream is to become heroes who rob from the rich and give to the poor. This restless and exciting activity came to an abrupt end during their first theft. Their activity this time is stealing books, they find the technical ones useful and the literary ones worthwhile, but this behavior stops when they run into the police.

Later, Astier had to go out to work in order to survive; he knew about inventions as well as literature, so it was logical that he would find a very good job. But no, his invention of counting stars was considered useless. In this moment, Astier’s dreams and values are denied, and he constantly questions the meaning of survival.

But these stories reflect precisely the life of the underclass in Argentina, and he shows us Astaire’s constant struggle between survival and his dreams. He shows us how Astier struggles between survival and his dreams. He is obviously talented, but he can only work at the bottom of the ladder; he is obviously doing the right thing, but he is humiliated by others; he obviously has a dream, but he struggles to make ends meet every day. The four stories told by the author are similar in the sense that they all depict Astier seeing hope in the valley, desperately grasping it to climb up, and then falling down hard. You can see Astier’s dreams being dashed over and over again, but looking back, this could be the life of the people at the bottom of the ladder: when survival becomes a problem, then of course dreams are just empty talk.

My question is: In this book, we can find the struggle and despair of the underclass people, but is this novel just depicting the darkness, or does the author also hope that the underclass people will catch that little bit of faint hope in the darkness? Is it true that the people at the bottom of the ladder can only run around for survival and do not deserve to have dreams, and that eating bread and counting stars cannot go hand in hand?

Week2: Swann’s Way by Proust

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Swann’s Way is taken from Proust’s book-length masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time. At first glance I was shocked by the length of Proust’s book, In Search of Lost Time. As I read it in detail, I realized that it seemed like a memoir of the author, Proust. Starting from the author’s childhood, he describes his first love, his lost love, his family life, from which we can find his perception of the world and life. Some people say that Proust’s book is one of the most difficult literature in the world to read, and I think the reason why it is difficult to read may be because there seems to be no unique theme in this book. It doesn’t have a very clear theme and carries out an extension around that theme like those novels that we often read. In this book, Proust does not have a very definite theme and often makes the reader think that it has multiple themes, when multiple themes in another way is actually no theme at all.

Of course, if we have to elaborate on the theme of the book, I think we can get a glimpse of it from the first and most famous sentence of the opening chapter: “For a long time, I went to bed early.” This is not written to anyone, it is Proust’s own recollections, his murmurings, his sorrows, and he uses time as a thread to articulate his thoughts and write about his life. We can see at the same time that in this book Proust’s portrayal of emotions is very delicate.

First of all, he first describes the usual sleeping, and then on this day, I lost my sleep. Thus, we are made to understand that this is a story caused by insomnia. Normally, insomnia is a state where you want to fall asleep and have fallen asleep in a trance, but you feel like you can’t sleep all the time a tossing and turning situation. In this half-asleep state, we often have some memories and some imaginations replaying over and over again in our minds. From the perspective of insomnia, the author cuts to the perspective of sleeping habits: I must have my mother give me a good night kiss before I can sleep peacefully. So what was unusual about this day? Unusual in that my mother didn’t give me a goodnight kiss because there were guests in the house. Because adults felt it was rude to have guests, they could not have goodnight kisses, thus causing my insomnia. In this paragraph, we can see the subtlety of the author’s description and the richness of her emotions.

My question for this week is: We can find Proust’s descriptions of emotions or memories are fragmented, not very specific yet focused, so do you think this fragmentation is more or less likely to resonate with the reader? Do you think the book is based on time or on the author’s own consciousness?

Introduction to myself

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My name is Yiwen Guo, a third year student majoring in Economics combined Statistics. I really want my life in UBC to be colorful, so I still learn a lot of science courses even though I am in Arts. At the same time, I am interested in many things, such as reading, singing and playing the piano, that’s why I want to find a course about reading, writing and thinking.

To tell the truth, when I saw the name of this course, I had a strong interest in this course. This course is called Literature and Culture in the Roman World, so I had many questions when I see the name: how do we define romance in literature? What is romantic culture? People often say that France is a country of romance, and is there any connection between French culture and romance? There were so many questions I wanted to explore, so I chose this course without hesitation.

At the same time, we all know that literature and culture are inseparable. Since I can speak both Chinese and English myself, I find that the language of a country is a very important reflection of its culture. Then, when we study this course, I believe that I will also know about the history and culture of different countries by reading the literature works of different countries. These books are not just words, they are windows through which we try to touch the temperature of history. I was also amazed by the number of books read in this course, and I was really excited to read books from France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and other countries in the same course, almost all of which are from Europe with a long history. They have experienced the glory of the Renaissance and have countless cultural and artistic treasures, and I am very much looking forward to the inspirations that writers from these countries can bring to me.

What’s more, I really like the grading of this course. I found out that it was graded using “contract”. Because, we all know that reading is a very subjective thing, just like Shakespeare saying “there are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people’s eyes”, but if it takes the form of “contract”, I no longer need to worry about whether my ideas can get high marks, but just need to express them directly. At the same time, blog also gives us a platform to express and discuss, we can discuss our opinions about books freely.

I am looking forward to meeting you in class!