Agualusa’s The Society of Reluctant Dreamers

Hi Everyone!

I have to say, I feel quite sad writing the (second) last blog post for this class. This semester went by incredibly quickly and us already being on the last text seems crazy to me.

Anyways, regarding my thoughts on Agualusa’s novel, The Society of Reluctant Dreamers, I really liked it! This novel was defiantly one of the more impactful and enjoyable readings for me this semester. There were many instances within the novel that caused me to reflect on my own thoughts, especially regarding the theme of identity (I’ll talk more about this a little later). Having said that, these past few weeks have been pretty busy for me and I read the novel quite quickly, therefore, wasn’t able to spend enough time truly understanding and appreciating it to its full extent. From what I’ve gathered from this novel so far, it feels like a text that keeps giving. The more you think about it, the more you start to connect concepts together and the more you gain from it altogether. Moreover, my lack of knowledge regarding the historical context made it a little challenging to follow initially, however, after watching Professor Jon’s lecture many of these confusions were cleared up, making it easier to keep up.

A concept or theme that stood out to me was that of identity, or rather what the relationship between identity and nationality is. In the text, there is a passage where the characters talk about embracing a new country’s culture and whether or not that leads to a change in one’s nationality.  I found this conversation really intriguing because being an international/”third culture kid” myself, I often find myself having a similar internal conversation –constantly debating how to answer the “where are you from” question and figuring out how my identity relates to and reflects my nationality.  Moreover, in line with the theme of identity, Agualusa’s exploration of what extent the past influences an individual’s present and in turn their future within this novel was also something that really fascinated me. Again, this is probably because of the psychology student in me, but I also think it’s because of my past and how having moved around a lot and lived in many places outside of my national land, I always reflect on how this experience impacted my current self.

Overall, I really enjoyed The Society of Reluctant Dreamers and believe that this novel brings forth many avenues for discussion and reflection. I think it was beautifully written and explored really engaging topics. Similar to some of the other texts we’ve read this semester, it was also quite challenging to follow and figure out what was real, imagined or dreamed. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed following the story of how Agualusa connected characters who at first seemed very different from each other and brought them together through dreams or more specifically, through appearing in each other’s dreams.

And lastly for the question of this post: I am curious to know in what ways, if any, did this novel evoke a moment of reflection within yourself? Where there any parts of the novel that caused you to pause and think about your life and how it relates to and/or reflects something that was mentioned in the text?

: )