April 4, 2024 · 2:44 pm

I CAN ALMOST TOUCH SUMMER!!!!! :)

Hello FOLKS! Last one. Wow. I have learned that when I am reading the book the way that I see it in my head and the messages I get from it aren’t always the same as what other people are seeing. Like that my worldview affects my view of the story WAY more than I ever thought. My favourite book was probably “the shrouded woman”? and my least favourite is a tie between Agostino and money to burn. “Agostino” was just too much for me, and “Money to Burn” was pretty boring. A theme that stood out is just generally being lost, and untethered. In a lot of these books it felt as if a character had been cut loose from something, some stability, and was floating. Which is what most stories are about, but especially in the “shrouded woman” and “the lover” I got this strong sense of a hot air balloon floating along and trying to make sense of blips of life. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but the books all felt very floating and untethered to anything. I think a lot of them pushed back on expectations and tropes by asserting the real thoughts of real minds. I did achieve my goals! I am going to miss weekly reading. I’ve just started reading Anna Karenina, which is not in the Romance Languages, sorry. But I like it a lot, and I would probably not have picked up a book over 300 pages before this class so thank you for that confidence! We’ll see if I finish it! I think this class did a lot to help my perception my own writing. Comparing what works, what doesn’t work, and what I liked in the writing styles of every author has given me ideas about things I want to try.

I believe I have completed my contract. I’m basically certain, if I didn’t that would be a miscalculation due to me and I would be so pissed at myself. In fact I’m going to double-check right now. Okay, we are good.

 

I hope everyone else enjoyed the class. I definitely think it could have gone either way, it could have made me hate reading, so I am super thankful it actually made me appreciate reading more.

Anyways, final question:

Did other people in the class usually perceive the books how you thought they would? Or sometimes were the discussions way off what you thought the meaning of the book was supposed to be?

Goodbye all!

Dalia Currie 🙂

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March 18, 2024 · 12:58 pm

Oh my oh my, jeepers, wow. Hmmmm. (money to burn)

Not sure what to say about this one.

I didn’t like this book in most ways; the actual story, the writing style… but there was something in the subtext that I enjoyed. In my reading and writing I am ALLERGIC to plot, but I eat up characters and commentary on the human psyche.

More so than Calvino, I felt this story taught me something about how I read by showing me what interests me. For pages on end during the writing about the showdown in the building, I would zone out, and would only be brought back to active attention in moments of reflection.

I suppose another way of interpreting this is that I don’t like true, nonfiction, writing.

But what I found written in the subtext, or maybe what I created from the subtext through putting my own thoughts onto the book, was a story about the making of a criminal. Gauncho Dorda goes deep into his development as a criminal. He is frequently described as a psychopathic killer who killed animals as a child and whos mother always saw him as destined for evil. This is backed up by this description on page 52:

“The Gaucho acts as the body, solely responsible for executing the action, a psychotic killer; the Kid is the brains and does the thinking for him.”

However, the story also goes deep into his backstory, more so than any of the other characters. He talks at the end about sewing sacks for his dad at the plantation at 10 – 11 years old.

“He was semi-retarded, they said, but it wasn’t true, he just found it difficult to talk normally, because he was always kept busy arguing with those women muttering things inside his ear. Sewing the words, stitching them to his body, with greasy thread, a tattoo worn on the inside, the words of his dead mother engraved in him as if on a tree trunk.”

He also details his time in prison, being raped throughout his life, and the people talking to him in his head, more specifically, the WOMEN speaking to him in his head. This seems to be there as an attempt to get some sympathy for him, and it works. Although he is a deplorable horrible person I couldn’t help but feel sadness for him at his intense loneliness. Especially when The Kid dies and he loses not only the only person he ever felt as loving him but also half of this symbiotic relationship that they had. At this point he is left alone with the voices. They become the main focus of the narrative, and everything else seems to disappear. It is never said what actually leads Gauncho Dorda to crime, but it is hinted it is his constant need for drugs.

“His sole interest was in drugs,‘his obscure pathological mentality’ (according to the reportby Dr Bunge, the prison psychiatrist), he rarely thought of anything else apart from drugs and the voices to which he paid secret attention.”

It is also described that the drugs help quiet the voices. Perhaps with proper care, and an understanding of his mental health struggles he would not have turned to drugs and violence.

The fact that almost everything about Dorda’s backstory and internal dialogue is fabricated shows the human desire to empathize with and give even horrible people explanations. The horrific crime is just a horrific crime, but the fact that Piglia feels a need to write fictional sections to better understand the minds behind the horrific crime is what actually says something interesting in this book. It says something about the human urge to understand other humans.

My question is, did you enjoy the fictional or the true parts more? Did you feel they blended together well or did they contrast each other in their message?

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March 7, 2024 · 11:00 pm

The most misleading title ever… The Lover by Marguerite Duras

I keep forgetting to ask a question, so I am going to start with it this time: If you could title this work differently, what would you title it? Based on my own experience reading the novel I would title it something like: “The Surfacing of Fears Sunken in Her Pond of Yellow Soap.”  Maybe a bit long, and not so much a title, but that scene where the mother cleaned her house was the most impactful for me.

Now that the question has been asked (I’m sorry for forgetting y’all) my thoughts on “The Lover”

I liked it. The writing style was probably my favourite of all the novels we’ve read. The story itself was not very plot-heavy, which I like. I like reading stories about people and their relations so all the stuff about her family and mother was very compelling to me.

I think that the sexual relationship between her and the older Chinese man was interesting, but her relationship with Helene Lagonelle was the most intimate to me. Although she doesn’t talk about Helene frequently, in two of the times she does talk about her she describes intense sexual and personal attraction to Helene. Especially on page 102 the descriptions of wanting to have “whispering conversations” with her shows the deep intimacy that she sees herself capable of having with her. Although she and the man from Cholon have physical intimacy, on page 74 she describes wanting Helen as a part of this physical intimacy. I wonder why Helen is brought up in the story at all? Is Marguerite expressing homosexual attraction? If not, what other purpose does expresssing your attraction to another woman have? I see Helen as as women to be compared in opposition to Marguerite’s mother, like the beggar. On page 102 Marguerite expresses how H.L. waits up for Marguerite, unlike her mother, who doesn’t care and even tells the school to let her go with whoever she wants. Another thing that I found powerful was the line that describes H.L. as: “not lying down decorously like the other girls”. Marguerite sees her mother as a faker who tries to seem more wealthy, and mentally well than she is; she lies about her sons, she has houseboys even though they don’t have much food, etc. H.L. is not that, she is true. Despite many nights spent together, even the man from Cholon is never described when he is sleeping (although it is said that Marguerite is seen sleeping by him). In this way, even though they don’t have sex, her relationship with H.L. is expressed as more intimate than her relationship with the man. Clearly, H.L. was impactful enough on Marguerite’s life to make it into the book, despite not having any significant role in her life such as family or lover. I think she shows how Marguerite is just beginning her journey, with the man from Cholon. Her curiosity about H.L. shows how the man from Cholon is not capable of being the intimacy that Marguerite needs, she is deeper than he understands with more to explore and discover within herself (likely because she is FIFTEEN!!!)

anyways, those are my thoughts, (again sorry about the question lacking previously)

Beyond my question at the start, does anyone have any thoughts on ol’ H.L.?

Dalia

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March 4, 2024 · 11:43 am

I am Calvino’s nightmare Reader. Sorry Italo.

“If on a Winter Tonight a Traveller” is the second book I’ve read by Italo Calvino. The first I read was the nonexistent night, which I liked more to be honest. I really like Calvino’s writing style. I find that he balances comedy and real-world humour with existential dread in a way I’ve never seen before in any other piece of media. My time reading this piece was hectic. In thinking of your lecture question about how the choice of physical medium and setting affects the book, I thought about the circumstances in which I read this book. The circumstances were hectic. Hectic in the book’s physical form because I got the book secondhand, and therefore found the pages filled with annotations, highlighted passages, and strands of someone else’s hair. But also hectic in setting, as I read about 200 pages of this book in the waiting room of a vet with a screaming cat (I am housesitting and the cat unexpectedly got pancreatitis, and also a blood infection the day after I started watching him). Beyond the physical medium and setting “If on a Winter Night to Traveller” also poses the question of how one’s mental state affects their interpretation of the book. I was not mentally prepared to read 260 pages. I was stressed for all of the reading. I finished the novel on the third day of pet visits at my wit’s end, and by the end, I grew to resent the book and all that it said. I didn’t care about the Reader, the Other Reader, I didn’t care about war, I didn’t care about Calvino, I thought this book was a waste of time. Had I read this book on a tropical vacation I don’t think I would’ve been nearly as frustrated with the run-on sentences and extensive commentary, I might even have enjoyed it. Something that stuck out to me was what the reader whom the main Reader meets in the library at the end of the book said about only properly reading a book when his eyes and mind drift. This is the kind of reader I am. When I have time to let my mind drift and truly think about the author’s words in my own words, I get a lot of value from books. When I reflect on them through my own personal experiences and let my mind drift to new places I feel a book has actually. However, when I forced myself to read, in the vet waiting room, with physical tension from stress in my body, sitting uncomfortably on a bench, like I did with this novel, I get nothing from it, except its completion. I think this thought would make an author feel his work is futile, since it says that it doesn’t matter how good your writing is, sometimes circumstances that are out of your hands will determine whether people connect with your book or not.

I realize I have barely talked about the actual plot. This book felt less like a story and more like a challenge of the physical act of reading. However, to prove I read it, my favourite character is Lotaria, the sister of the Other Reader Ludmilla. I still don’t understand if she was the woman in Ataguitania who was at the airport and also the prison. While her sister is clearly the epitome of the male fantasy, men find Lotaria annoying, which I love. She reads to learn and she dissects their work for her own purposes rather than just taking the words as they say them. This makes the men uncomfortable but I think it is wonderful.

Overall, a good book that was wasted on me.

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February 23, 2024 · 5:51 pm

The Time of the HOLES! Trypophobia in MercĂš Rodoreda’s Time of the Doves

Woah. The title made me think it would be like a nice romantic novel in Spain with roses and dancing, but it was in fact a not nice and not romantic book, which actually did include roses and dancing. Doves definitely suggest love and softness, and seeing them represented as pests and a source of Natalia’s suffering was very powerful.

Many of the other blog posts talked about her looking back at the doves as representative of freedom, but I felt the opposite. She didn’t really want the doves, Quimet and her kids wanted them, and the doves consumed her family and she could not escape them. As she looks back on the doves they seem to represent Quimet. He was never a simple and loving man who took care of things, with his tapeworm, his leg, the cockroaches his whining, and his insecurities, he constantly dragged her down. But at the same time, she misses him. Even difficult/horrible parts of your life are parts of your life, and leave a hole when gone. This leads to my first example of holes in The Time of the Doves:

  1. Both Quimet and the doves left LITERAL holes (Quimet in the door just above the lock, and the doves in their roof where they built the trapdoor). These are both holes of necessity. Natalia forgives and thinks about these holes long after they are left and she has moved on. Senyora Enriqueta’s words on page 194 I think suggest back up what I am saying. She says that our lives are actually many interwoven lives, that can be broken by death or marriage, and how these interweaving lives are bothersome, and sometimes it’s a good thing these ties are broken. I see this as another metaphor explaining the same thing, that we feel pain when bonds are severed, even if they were bothersome to begin with.
  2. Right before this message on page 194, Natalia reflects on another example of holes in remembering her conversation with Quimet about termites. He hates termites and says they go making holes all the time, but she sympathizes with them. She suggests that termites may be digging themselves out of something. I think this conversation shows how she realizes that sometimes holes are necessary, and maybe holes don’t appear out of malice but rather out of circumstance. She has to appreciate the holes in her life because her life is made up of them.
  3. Another example of holes is the holes in Quimet’s lungs when he gets TB. These may have been the holes that killed him, or maybe he died of bullet holes, but either way.

I see this as a story of accepting everything, either good or bad, that Natalia has lost on her journey. Some concluding remarks are:

1. Quimet is an ICK 2. I was SOBBING on page 136 3. its my favourite book so far, I thought the first 50 pages were really funny!

My question: Did you notice any other uses of holes as a metaphor in the book?

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February 11, 2024 · 10:33 pm

Rest in Peace M’man Tine, love you.

Favourite book so far.  The first section of the book where José describes the alley was the most impactful to me. There is a strong sense of imagery and I think the setting is very well built. This section is also the most brutal in a lot of ways, the beating of the children in black shack alley was hard to read. As I was reading this first section I was imagining José to be 11 or 12 years old, but it is revealed that he was only 6 or 7 at the time, which made me emotional. 6 or 7 is so tiny, and even though the narrator is of course older, he was describing his perception of the world at that time with so much fear and pain. Of course, the time in black shack alley is also filled with love, especially with the beautiful connections he seems to have with his community, but the way of life felt so much more grim than it should be for a child that small.

Both Mr. MĂ©duoze’s and M’man Tine’s death hit me hard. I was balling. There is something so beautiful about the connection you have in early childhood, and the book captured JosĂ©’s childlike pure admiration really well. I think the connections feel especially real since JosĂ© ties tangible things to his memories of them, and these things hold fondness when he looks back. Like the stories and songs of Mr. MĂ©uoze, and all the Casava flour his grandmother worked so hard to feed him.

The contents of the book is beautiful and complicated. Knowing it is autobiographical, and knowing some of the history of Martinique, places it in a bigger picture of a horrific shameful history. I think the book speaks well for itself, JosĂ© doesn’t declare pride in his life, he seems to even feel some regret and as if he has left M’man Tine and black shack alley behind.

But he takes pride in telling their story.

I was glad to have read the book. It shows me a sliver of a particular time and place I would otherwise not be able to access had I not read this story. And I think this is a time and place that should be shared, I am glad Joseph Zobel shared it.

I also appreciate the sharing of the small intricacies of JosĂ©’s life, like Carmen’s escapades with mulatto women, the shenanigans JosĂ© gets up to in black shack alley, and JosĂ© and Jojo’s day on the merry-go-round. I find in media where the focus is on oppressed people, especially when white people are creating that media, the oppressed people are made out to be nothing more than their suffering, and hence, are dehumanized. However, this book, despite the heavy and important subject matter, felt the most human of the ones we have read.

 

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February 4, 2024 · 5:51 pm

This made me ill. Agostino

I found this book an uncomfortable read…

I immediately thought of the Oedipus complex, it’s so so very Freudian, but I tried not to think about it too much, because it made me ill, and instead appreciate it as best I could as literary work, which wasn’t easy.

This has been my least favourite reading so far. I found the writing style more plain than I like. My favourite part of every book is always the poetic descriptions, and there were many in Combray, the Shrouded Woman, and Nadja, but in Agostino, the descriptions didn’t resonate with me. Some moments like the green bubbles when his mother dove into the water were nice, but there wasn’t a lot of imagery that I connected to. I couldn’t picture things in my mind. One thing in particular that bothered me was that I could not picture the boat he and his mother take out to sea in my mind. I think that this book could have used like %5 more Proust descriptions.  I think this vagueness has something to do with the move to realism and away from surrealism, which doesn’t make sense, I feel like if something is being described as true to reality you should be able to see it in your head. But the writing style seemed to lose a whole dimension of description that is the description of the essence and feeling of objects and places. This prevented me from being pulled into the story.

I also didn’t like a single character.

The mother was described by Agostino with so much anger and contempt that I started to think she was selfish and inappropriate around her son and wasn’t able to sympathize with her.

Then the gang of boys were all violent and cruel, which because of their age I can forgive them for, but doesn’t make me like them.

Saro was a pedophile.

And to top it off, Agostino himself didn’t even connect with me. We knew so little about his life that I couldn’t understand him as a character. I think probably this was intended to allow this story to just focus on the events of the summer, and the very specific shifts in Agostino’s character without clouding him, but I thought it made him boring.

The only character with whom I empathized with was Homs, but even in his case it was not that I felt bad for him because he was a well-built character at all, he is rarely touched on and is basically only described as black and weird looking, but more because they are describing racism and sexual violence which are very empathy worthy topics.

The ending was nice, I liked that it left things open-ended.

 

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January 26, 2024 · 12:12 am

Shrouded woman – a soap opera if soap operas made me cry.

I am mixed. On the one hand, I feel guilty about asking that question of whether it is real “literature.” Of all the readings this has been by far the easiest, and the cheapest, going for shock value and chaos. THE CHAOS! THE DRAMA! EVERY SECOND! almost every second.

Amongst all this cheap drama, the quiet moments hit SO HARD. It was almost as if you were sucked into this very separate world from the shrouded woman when she reflects on those vibrant episodes of her life as the living Ana Maria. This makes that return to the world of the dead, introspective, shrouded woman feel so so so QUIET. In contrast to all the chaos, you can sense the extreme quiet in this dead natural place in the earth and the universe. I could hear the silence in death, and at the end, the silence was loudest and I cried.

I also cried around 3/4 of the way through when she describes moving in with her husband and the immense sad loneliness there. I don’t know why, maybe it’s a fear of my own to lose a part of myself through my love for someone else, but that section where she told him she needed to return home was really beautiful to me.

I really liked it, even the cheapness of it, I don’t think it would have been the same without the INDULGENCE in DRAMA and the reassertion of Ana Marias’ suffering in her relations to other people.

Honestly, I didn’t see it as a story of gender inequality at first. When I started watching the lecture I realized the interpretation that Jon took was very different than I had thought it would be. I picked up on her loneliness and isolation from the rest of the world, but for some reason, I didn’t see it as a result of a gender standard. At first, I saw it as her fault, just that she was a toxic and confused person who was unable to accept love into her life (this judgement in itself says something about how women are isolated?), but overall I agree with the lecture. Perhaps the tragedy of womanhood expressed is what unconsciously made me cry? I’m not sure.

Anyways, I liked the book. I thought it was beautifully written at moments but that it was not trying nearly as hard as the other two books we have read to be poetic or profound. I question if it is a great work of literature, perhaps because I enjoyed it, and literature usually bores me, but lovely read!

My question is whether any of you noticed a sense of loud vs quiet and chaotic vs still in the moments of reflection on her life vs moments when she is just in death?

 

*** Attached photo of me standing in a river like Maria Griselda

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January 21, 2024 · 9:43 pm

500 days of Nadja: Breton’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

I visited Paris this summer, and the book reminded me of it so here is a picture!

The first thing that came to mind as I read the summary on the back of the book was “Oh, Nadja is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” and I stand by that. She is only there to forward the male protagonist’s understanding of himself/the world (which is discussed in the lecture), she is a quirky artist, she has weird makeup, she is poor, she has an unreal way of seeing the world, and she is quite literally MANIC and suffering from mental illness. I enjoyed the writing, some passages were so beautiful, and I was cheering along at the harsh critiques of psychiatric care around p. 139, however, after getting to the end of the novel and reading about the real-life woman that the story is based on, I was angry. This glorification of female mental illness is a popular trope in all genres and is one of my least favourites. Breton cheats on his wife with a struggling woman whom he then gets close to and then abandons. In the beginning, he is obsessed with her, but his obsession is based on her need for him, this is enforced by passages about how he is the sun and how he is her god, not to mention the passages where he is brought to tears imagining her existence separate of him and laments on how the thought of it pains him. Although he claims to love her, the novel ends with him leaving her in a mental asylum (because he’s scared of psychiatrists? coward…,) and proclaiming his love to a new woman (still not his wife lol). He describes this new woman as his true and real love and says Nadja was just a moment in time. I also read about the real woman who the book is based on. I was angry to find out those are her real drawings that she was not given credit for them, and that she died in a sanitarium in 1941, just as he predicted he would. This book SHOULD be a heartbreaking confession, but not once does he say sorry or express deep regret. It is framed as an experience in HIS life as if SHE isn’t even a real person (surrealist or narcissist?). I think the quote that he remembers Nadja telling him sums up the meaning of this book well: “With the end of my breath which is the beginning of yours,” Breton frames Nadja as a stepping stone in discovering himself. He uses her, even in the writing of this book he is personally profiting off of her suffering. It is an entertaining and thought-provoking read, but I don’t feel it is worth the exploitation of a woman whose traumatic story will now only ever be seen through the eyes of a guy who slept with her.

My question is: is the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope ever redeemable or used well? What’s an example.

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January 15, 2024 · 3:19 pm

It’s raining Proust, hallelujah! Why the grandmother in “Combray” is my kindred spirit

Frankly, that was not the easiest read!! I found many of the descriptions were hard to follow and quickly lost my interest. A particularly difficult one for me was the seemingly neverending description of the church around p. 81 – 90. However, the parts that I DID really enjoy I decided to read closely, and in those moments I enjoyed the flowery tone of the writing.

For example, the descriptions of rain and storm really pulled me in. I love rain, it’s my favourite weather and for that reason, p.14 – 16 were my favourites in the whole book and the grandmother is definitely my favourite character (followed by Françoise). The line “At last one can breathe!” on p. 14 completely relates to me. Rain always brings me such a beautiful feeling of relief that only a small number of people I know relate to. P. 143 when the grandmother leaves for a walk in the rain and Françoise says she’s “off her head” made me giggle. I also love p. 185 when the grandma says that one shouldn’t waste time visiting people when you’re by the seaside and tells the narrator to go outside and enjoy the sea. I also feel sorry for her since it’s hinted that her husband is, or at least was, an alcoholic, and that her sister antagonizes her. Although she doesn’t show up much in the story the grandmother is by far my favourite character!

Marcel himself seems to not hate the rain, although the thing in nature he seems most enamoured with is flowers. The descriptions of flowers were my second favourite parts of the book. The hawthorns in particular were a big focus of the story. I looked them up while was reading and, man, I get it Marcel, they’re so gorgeous!

Another thing I noticed from the very beginning was how odd Marcel’s descriptions of women are. He seems to try very hard to describe them as sexual, but always ends up drifting off to some other description of flowers or something else. When he meets women in real life and decides that they aren’t nearly as good as they are in his head, it made me giggle. This book largely actually seems to center around women, I noticed how little he focuses on the male characters, besides Swann and M. Vinteuil. The most standout characters were his mother, his aunt, Mlle. Vinteuil, the Duchess of Guerrmantes, and Mlle. Swann. This makes sense since it’s in a way a coming-of-age story. But again, the way he describes women is like I’ve never seen before, it seems to balance awkwardly between sex, adoration, and hatred? I can’t quite place it

I definitely found this was a really good read with some really beautiful passages (even if it was tiring sometimes).

My question is: who was your favourite character and why? Like which one would you be friends with, not which one was most interesting to you.

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