04/9/24

FIN

And here comes the last week of classes of my first year. RMST 202 just may be one of my favorite classes I’ve taken this year, and it was such an eye-opening experience about university level classes in general. I’m not sure if it will be the same in the future for my remaining three years or if this is just one of those really cool and unique classes that I got lucky with.

Anyways, I remember that in one of the first classes, during the snowy week, we talked about the difference between reading and reading, which is something that sort of stuck with me as we went through the course. I was never really a reader..  I mean, I used to love reading as a child, so much that I would finish the thin children’s books on the way home from the bookstore, but somewhere along the way, probably when I got introduced to technology, I just stopped reading for leisure. From last year though, I made a promise to start reading more and get back into novels (which I didn’t really succeed in), and it only took this class for me to fall in love with literature again, or maybe for the first time, in a way I have never before. I remember reading the ratemyprof comments before taking the class and reading stuff like ‘be ready to get called on’ and getting really scared of the first class. It still does kind of terrify me but it was much better than I expected, and I loved writing blogs on what we read however we want, without any pressure to be academically ‘correct’. I think that is what makes this class different than the others; other than the obviously unique contract system, the fact that we can express our opinions and discuss with each other in the blogs and in class makes me think about how much I can learn from my fellow classmates as much as I do from the professors. Everyone has a unique perspective on the novels – some hate it, some find it hard and confusing, and some adore it!

For me, my absolute favorite would have to be If on a winter’s night a traveler by Calvino.. As much as I enjoyed reading the others (not Combray though..), that book stayed with me and will probably make it in the tops of my list of less-than-50 books I’ve ever read in my entire life. Reading about the process behind the books that we read, reading different books every other chapter, and reading about ‘myself’ as the reader was evermore enjoyable and fun to read. I would love to find more books like that!! I think I just really like meta-fictional stuff, even in movies and tv shows. For my least favorite, I would unfortunately have to say Combray, I suppose since it was the first read, especially for a non-reader like me, I found it hard to enjoy. BUT I will definitely give the book one more try and read it again soon. I think, as I’ve said in a previous blog, that the books have been getting easier and more digestible the further we get into the course, which is likely because we have been getting more used to and have been learning how to read not just read for the sake of reading. Something I realized from this change is that it is much easier for me to get into the focus and read for long periods of time without getting distracted after like one paragraph, which is something I’ve always done when reading. Not only that, I just found myself enjoying every novel, even more so after our class discussions and the video lectures our professor makes. The difference between scanning a text and summarizing it and really understanding it to form your own opinion is crucial, as someone who never really talked about their opinions on literature nor had people to talk about it with.

For this I would like to say thank you to professor Beasley-Murray, the lovely TAs, and my classmates, for expanding my horizon and helping me enjoy literature again. Thank you to RMST202 for being such a fun and educating class. I am more than ready to read so much more novels in the future!!

My question is: (I can’t believe it’s the last T.T)

For the previous non-readers who took this course, did it help you read better and do you think you will enjoy literature more now? As for the readers, how did this class change your perception of literature, is it different than the usual novels you read?

Have an amazing summer everyone!

04/2/24

Faces in The Crowd – ??!!?

Faces in the crowd by Valeria Luiselli.

I don’t even know yet.. I wouldn’t say it wasn’t an enjoyable novel but it was very hard to read, or to understand. It was fine during the first part, when the narrator was describing about her life in New York city, all the interesting characters and young adult lives, but I think I lost the flow when the perspectives started to change and Owen started to talk about his life. I even thought the other perspective was from the husband’s until I watched the lecture and got clarification. It probably was the point for the book to be confusing, a non-linear story with changing perspectives, blurred lines and its seemingly unpolished state – and if it was it definitely worked because I was very confused. I suppose it was about a translator being obsessed with an author that the whole narration starts getting blurry and her life starts almost morphing into that of the author’s. Maybe it was a book of maybe’s. Maybe she is a ghost in a living city, maybe everyone else are ghosts, maybe her husband went away, maybe not?? I’m not sure.

As the book says and the lecture quotes,

“I know I need to generate a structure full of holes so that I can always find a place for myself on the page, inhabit it”. 

in this structure of holes and loose ends, I’ll talk about what I found interesting. More than the main story about the slow descend to obsession the narrator is going through and the weird coincidences and parallels(?) like the 3 cats :0, I found the different characters to be most interesting. The narrator talks about each of their traits like how they smell (which was very prominent for some reason), their routines inside the apartment, or their mannerisms; they just kind of made me think about the different characters we meet throughout our lives. It is kind of cool but also sad to see the differences of the livelihoods the narrator had in the past versus the present. She would live in a small apartment with a few furnitures, sharing them with others who she would then become friends or lovers with, while in the present in Mexico city, she lives with this responsibility of a mother of two and a husband who I’m not sure if he’s happy in the marriage or not, and she can’t even write her novel in peace without the husband making comments of jealousy on it. It’s also interesting to see how the family members are not named when the ‘characters’ in her past lives all have their names. This makes me wonder if they are truly fictional or not (in the novel). The narrator almost creates this life for Owen from his perspective, talking about the people he meets, his prostitute lover and how he’s fat and almost blind.. so it could be that she was making up these characters in her past life as well. Maybe the real faces in the crowd were not the ghosts but the people she met.. maybe the faces were the friends we made along the way.. (i;m tired)

I found the parallels at the end really cool even though I was not sure what actually was going on, like how Owen had three cats and the narrator with her children were walking around like ‘three little cats’, the buzzing of the flies and mosquitoes and the children’s singing and crying, until it clashes in the end to one when the children finds Papa, or otherwise, Owen? It reminded me of those movies with multiple universes and how they overlap or clash in the end..

My question is:

Who was the most interesting character in your opinion? Mine was definitely Dakota; I really liked their (Dakota and the narrator’s) relationship for some reason.

03/26/24

The Book of Chameleons – me when I have an identity crisis

The Book of Chameleons by José Eduardo Agualusa.

I really enjoyed reading this week’s novel; I honestly feel like the books get more easier to read the more we go further into the course, and I’m not sure if it’s just me learning how to ‘read’ books or if the books get more digestible as time goes, as they become more modern.? Anyways, I loved the short chapters – it suited my easily distracted mind and I could read them without getting bored fast.

As I got into the story, as much as I enjoyed the plot-twist and drama happening at the end, I loved the concept of Ventura’s job as a changer of the past. I have seen something like that before in the series Breaking Bad, where you can change your identity as a whole and start your life fresh, but I never thought of it in a way of pasts. It makes me think how our identity is so tightly connected to our pasts, that it basically defines us as a whole. More than your hobbies or interests, your past experiences, the people you have made relationships with, the things you saw, those are what shapes you as a person, and furthermore changes your personality, which is a large indicator of our selves. I’ve been thinking about identities a lot, in such I was wondering if I could change my identity as I came here from across the world with almost nobody to know my true self. That meant I could start my life anew, change my personality, the way I talk, the way I dress, etc.. just like Buchmann. But overtime, I really got that I can’t change who I truly am even if I tried, and the concepts of authenticity in building relationships stuck with me. I think this correlates with the idea of how you can’t really change your past that is illustrated in the novel.

Related to authenticity, also with duplication and dissimulation as the lecture mentions, the concepts of truth and lies are significant. Nothing in life could ever be free from the notion of dishonesty, whether it be jobs, relationships, everyday life. Try to imagine a life without lies, a world consisted only of pure truth, because I don’t think I can. I think it is just human to lie, or atleast be ambiguous about the truth. This is mentioned in the conversation between Eulalio and Buchmann in their dream, when they talk about truth.

“Truth has a habit of being ambiguous too. If it were exact it wouldn’t be human.”

Also during this scene, I thought I caught the drink for the week for the first time, the pitanga juice, but I was disappointed to see that it was not a pitanga juice, but papaya :(. (I went back and found the mention of the papaya juice tho)

Ventura’s job revolves around lying, making up a past from nowhere for people, creating duplicates. Almost everyone in the book lies, and Buchmann even uses lies for his mission, which makes me wonder about how lies are sometimes integral, even significant in our lives. This being said, in the end, the truth does come out. I am not sure what I’m trying to say here anymore.. Maybe that truth is indeed a ‘superstition’, and that without enough witnesses, any truth can be changed, or atleast dissimulated into something other, whether it be a small action or a whole identity. This also reminds me of the Akira Kurosawa’s movie Rashomon or the Rashomon effect, about the ways of thinking and interpreting of a single event, by different identities.

Anyways, I think the constant shift between the real life narration as a gecko and its dreams as a human could be similar to that of the multiple identities, or ‘present’ and ‘past’ identities that are shown throughout. It was a very interesting book, something I never would’ve thought to read!!

My question is:

Do you think you could live a life of lies successfully like Buchmann, act and talk like your other self? Furthermore, if you could change your past, what would you think you would’ve changed it to?

03/19/24

Money to Burn – i blame money

Money to Burn by Ricardo Piglia.

This week’s novel was completely different than all the other ones I have read so far, I think it’s my first time reading a criminal book not watching a show about it. With heists and gun battles, social commentary and the criminal system as well as the complexity and sexuality of the characters, it was unique and different than the ones we’ve been reading, which had less actions, more streams of consciousness and repeated themes of growing up or Freudian concepts. Anyways, it was easier to read so I was less likely to get distracted or lose focus like I did for some of the other books.

I was very surprised to read that it was based on a true story, but was a bit disappointed to hear that the money burning bit was fictional. I think it would’ve been much more popular in the papers if it was true, in terms of the powerful message the action would convey. Probably the climax of the whole story and the idea of the title, the money burning scene caught my attention. It made me wonder about how money is such an integral part of our society that it even hurt me as a reader to see it burn and fall off to grounds, and it’s funny to think about how such a small, fragile piece of paper holds so much worth. I mean it’s understandable that the criminals burnt their money, it was no use for them as they knew they were going to die sooner or later, and it was their last act of rebellion, some sort of a last ‘fuck you’ to the cops who were part of the system. The citizens complain that they should’ve given the money to the poor, those living in need of basic necessities, but I doubt that’s how it would’ve played out if they did try to do that. It manifests a more complex message about the corrupt system that is of criminal justice. This may be unrelated but I, just today learnt about the disproportionate rates of indigenous people in prisons, and that around one third of the population of female inmates were indigenous, which is a clear overrepresentation. That astounded me! The people and the journals say that they are ‘crazed killers and immoral beasts’, but we can see that they are just as sentimental and complex humans that come from difficult backgrounds, which almost made me empathize with these people, except they probably really are what the people say, ‘pure evil’. It made me think about innocence and culpability, if money is separate from its owners or how it’s used as, and if it itself is innocent, guilty, or ‘neutral’, as it says in the book.

“Burning innocent money is an act of cannibalism”.

I also really enjoyed the style of the narration, it was written in mixture of telling the story as a third person narrator but also how they were written as in journals, which adds to the realistic, almost non-fictional? element. I kept imagining a sick thriller show like ‘Money Heist’ when I was reading the book.

My question is:

Did you empathize with the characters or would you hate them for their criminal acts? Why?

03/12/24

The Lover – just no

The Lover by Marguerite Duras.

I cannot say I enjoyed reading this week’s novel as much as I thought I would. Maybe because it was confusing, with the change of perspectives and no clear chronological timeline throughout the novel but with different paragraphs mentioning different events or people in the girl’s life. One page would talk about her son and then the other about when she was fifteen, which was a bit confusing for me. In addition, I thought the younger brother she was talking about was the smallest child until like the last half of the book when she mentioned them being seventeen and eighteen, so I had to look at them from another perspective again.

For me, more than the relationship between the girl and the older Chinese man, I kept my focus more on the dynamics of her family, probably because the parts with the man was so hard to read that I had to take multiple breaks reading it TT. With a dead father and an abusive older brother, it was clear she had issues with the masculine figures in her life, leading to her perverse, weird relationship with an older man. But also about her mother, I could almost relate to her as I have two older brothers, the oldest of which is much much more loved by my mom. It reminded me of the love moms have for their sons, praising them for the smallest things, turning a blind eye to their misdoings because they’re their oh so perfect son. Anyways every character in the book was too depressing that it made it hard to enjoy the book as much!! As much as I love complex, intricate relationships and sad yet beautiful stories, this one was just a bit too much..

The relationship between the girl and the ‘Chinese man’ (which was emphasized a LOT throughout the novel, perhaps to highlight the racial differences as well as their class and age), was very disturbing yet complex. Because it was written from the girl’s perspective, their true actions and the way he is literally grooming her are blurry, leading us readers to think about and even doubt the man’s role in the relationship. It makes me think about how such sickening relationships can be almost seen as ‘acceptable’? just because of the different characteristics of the person in authority. He was less masculine than the average person and was not deemed as powerful because of his race as well as how he behaved. He was ‘scared’ a lot, trembled when he talked to her, which made her think she was the one in control, the object of infatuation. It kind of reminded me of the movie ‘Lolita’, even though I haven’t watched it I know that it is about a relationship between a little girl and an older man, and is discussed about to almost ‘fool’ other girls into thinking it was a love story when in fact it was not.

“He’s twelve years older than I, and this scares him. I listen to the way he speaks, makes mistakes, makes love even—with a sort of theatricality at once contrived and sincere.”

Also I just found out that the author also wrote the script for ‘Hiroshima mon amour’, which is a french new-wave movie I’ve been wanting to watch for a long time!! There may lie similarities between the two pieces and I will be analyzing them!!

My question is:

Do you think ‘The Lover’ as a title was trying to define the girl or the man? Or does it have a different meaning?

03/6/24

If on a Winter’s night a Traveler – mind is blown, mouth is agape

If on a Winter’s night a Traveler by Italo Calvino.

Forgive me for having an impressionable mind, I can’t help but love every single media I consume, and I say this the loudest when I read this novel. From the beginning to the end, I was obsessed – it was unique, it was new, I had never read a book about books ever! But then again, I hadn’t read that many books before taking this course. Nonetheless, I think it could be said that this book has been the most entertaining and interesting one from all the other novels I’ve read, yet I wonder if the opinion will change the more novels I read.

I found myself relating somehow to Ludmilla, about how I usually stay reading books as a reader, without crossing the boundaries between the author and the reader, and only absorbing the stories as themselves, but I suppose the difference lies in how she prefers to do it that way and I having never tried otherwise. Meaning, I have never thought about what goes beyond the book, or should I say before, about the process of the writer writing it from scratch, to being produced, et cetera.. So this novel really made me think about books from a whole other perspective, about books as their own world! It also does this by involving us, the readers into the narration, with its meta-narrative state and second person perspectives. I could almost imagine myself as the character, inside the novel, in a journey to finish his books that ended with a cliffhanger. I couldn’t really delve into the narration as I couldn’t relate to the Reader himself, as I am a woman, and I couldn’t help but notice how clear it was that the novel was written by a man. As the critic in the lecture says, it assumes that the Reader, the norm is masculine and in that I couldn’t bring myself to fully immerse into the novel as a character in it. In addition, the small stories as the unfinished books always were from the perspective of men and the objectification of women in them were recurrent. This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy the novel and its postmodern, or metamodern? narrative. It sort of reminded me of the tv show Fleabag, in which the main character talks to the audience as we were in on her mind, involved with the story and her thoughts.

Anyways, I really enjoyed the 10 books, and stupidly enough, every time, I kept forgetting that it was going to end abruptly and was disappointed whenever I turned the page and it was either blank or onto the next chapter. This almost deepened my relatability to the Reader, or myself in the novel as I understood the need for continuation and endings of the novels the Reader had. It makes me wonder about books in general, about how as readers we expect every page to be a new addition to the story, a new layer to the meaning it had been trying to entail.

“Every time I come upon one of these clumps of meaning I must go on digging around to see if the nugget extends into a vein. This is why my reading has no end: I read and reread, each time seeking the confirmation of a new discovery among the folds of the sentences.”

The main story, on the other hand, was very interesting as it was like a detective mystery book, but in the world of publishing and literature. Every aspect of the novel was new and refreshing to me, so I hope to read more works like this in the future!!

My question is: (or /s are)

What are you like as a reader? Do you peek into the ending of the book to give yourself a small view of the novel itself? Do you judge books by their covers? Do you read about the author to know more about what the author was trying to give, or do you prefer to read it as it is, no expectations nor prior knowledge?

02/27/24

Time of the Doves – the female rage

Time of the Doves by Mercè Rodoreda.

It seems the further we get into this course, the better the novels get. I genuinely enjoyed the read for this week, so much I couldn’t put it away. Maybe because it was easier to read. Speaking of that, I found the stylistic choices and the ‘stream of consciousness’ structure very interesting. Some sentences kept going and going, some started with ‘And’. I remember learning in primary school that sentences should never start with ‘And’, or ‘But’. The way she wrote the whole book felt like a diary entry or a rant on what happened throughout her life, with the lack of direct dialogue and its manner of simply retelling a story. The lack of silences or short sentences even felt like she was breathless at times, or in a hurry.

Anyways, I felt like Quimet was a person with a big personality. He was very charming and charismatic, yet possessive and toxic. Right from their first encounter, I think we can see how he almost turned her into something of his possession, something he owns, by calling her ‘Colometa’, or ‘my little dove’. Throughout the story, he reveals more of his personality by being jealous and mad at her for the littlest things, making everything about himself with his little leg pains, and believing he is in the right for everything . And the tapeworm part was actually very funny to me. Nonetheless, it is clear that she misses him after his death, even when she was in a new marriage. This sorrow is mixed with the anxiety and fear of him possibly being alive and finding out about her marriage, but it indicates his impact on her as a person. She even carves her nickname in the door of her old house when she comes back to it. Despite his toxicity and jealousness, he was a good father and had definitely left a big part of him in her.

I discovered a lot of symbols of femininity and the vulnerable and painful experiences of women and mothers during wars while reading the novel. Starting from the mundane, like the step-mother’s obsession with bows (very coquette), and Natalia spending a copious amount of time staring at the dolls behind the windows at the oilcloth shop, to the awful dilemma she faces as a mother living in difficult times of war and poverty, it all reminded me of womanhood. It was definitely refreshing to read another book written by a female author after all the ones from a male perspective. This brings me to my point, which was written in the title: feminine rage. Throughout the book, Natalia feels powerless and helpless, with her nagging husband, her hungry children, the doves, her difficult work, and it all weighs down on her until she bursts. She didn’t seem like an emotional person, but she relieves her anger and distress by killing the birds or (attempting to) her children. This isn’t to say that her thinking of killing the children was from anger, but it was from pure despair, from exhaustion. It really showed the sorrowful reality of how war affects everyone, especially women and children. I would say Natalia was the strongest woman – she took whatever jobs she could just to keep herself and her children alive, yet she never complained, unlike Quimet. However, it is evident how the series of events put a toll on her.

One more thing I noticed is how much beliefs and superstitions are mentioned in the novel, and in the previous ones as well. The step mother and Senyora Enriqueta seem to say the most, like how birds bring bad luck. It makes me wonder about the culture in the romance countries.

“Senyora Enriqueta told me I had to control myself because if I worried too much, the baby inside would turn over and they’d have to pull it out with tongs.”

 

My question regards to when Natalia decides to kill her children and herself with the hydrochloric acid.

Would you have done the same thing if you were a mother in despair, without looking back at the grocer?

 

 

02/14/24

Deep Rivers

Deep Rivers by José María Arguedas.

 

This week’s read was definitely a ride for me. I don’t think I’ve ever looked up words or referred to the footnote this much when reading a book, but it was fascinating reading about the culture, their language, and the nature of the Andean people. I really liked and appreciated how the translator kept some words untranslated to show the nuance of the language, enrich the narratives with layers of meanings and perhaps to pay respects to it. The stops I had to do while reading the novel to see the translated word almost kind of kept me aware that it was in Quechuan and painted the illusion of what it was like living in Peru in the 1920s. The novel allowed me to see from the eyes of a small boy into maturity, facing various challenges from witnessing social marginalization to experiencing the cultural ‘identity crisis’ himself, while illustrating his young curious mind like the talking Inca walls, or his fascination with the Pachachaca river and its bridge. This reminded me of the previous novel we read about Agostino, and it almost felt precious to be reading from the perspective of a young, naive mind. We can see both childhood elements like him and the boys playing with the zumballyu and more ‘adult’ problems like the chicheras’ uprising. Ernesto goes through this phase of growing up which involves the feelings of isolation, problems of identity and belonging especially as a mixed person, with each people treating him differently, and having to live in a catholic boarding school without his father. He is exposed to injustices in the world as a young child and has to deal with the feelings of sorrow and sympathy but also unending curiosity, which is shown when he follows the women’s protest to the next city. I almost saw myself in him – I find myself often observing more than participating, fascinated with nature and sometimes a bit isolated in society.

Back to the Andean culture, one thing I really liked was the idea of opposites in the book. The narrator compares the Inca stones to the never-stationary, unstoppable rivers, and moreover mentions the meaning of the word illa for describing kinds of lights but also monsters with birth defects. I think this could also be shown by the way society was illustrated in the novel: the owner of the haciendas, the white people and the indigenous people, the oppressor and the oppressed. Moreover, the idea of movement also seemed significant. Just like the river, Ernesto was always moving, always transforming, whether it was travelling from one city to other or growing as a person.

“The wall was stationary, but all its lines were seething and its surface was as changeable as that of the flooding summer rivers which have similar crests near the center, where the current flows the swiftest and is the most terrifying.”

“Illa is the name used for a certain kind of light, also for monsters with birth defects caused by moonbeams.”

I found all the descriptions and introductions of the Andean culture extremely interesting, especially their language and their meanings. It made me wonder about the different languages other cultures have. My question is:

Are there any words or elements in your culture that hold a significant meaning?

02/6/24

Agostino – Freud wins once again

Sometimes I wonder why literature writers (or is it just the romance ones?) get so obsessed with the Oedipus complex and overall Freud’s theory. There must be something poetic or beautiful within the layers of uncomfortable incestuous relationships for these many writers to focus on it. Even though I started reading the book without any ideas in mind, the first paragraph almost gave it out that it was a book filled with Freudian ideologies. In fact, this was my first note in the online book.

Agostino by Alberto Moravia was by far the easiest read so far. And perhaps because it was an easy read, I enjoyed it a lot. Imagining the warm Italian summer in the beach tinted with a nostalgic yellow, I played the movie inside my mind while reading it. Among the themes portrayed in the novel, including the Oedipus complex, class differences, sexuality, adolescence, and even racism, I found myself more interested with the loss of innocence happening throughout. From a sheltered middle class life with his loving mother, to experiencing different situations like the brutality of the boys, the nauseating boat trip with the disgusting man with six fingers (I don’t know why I had to point that out, but it was an interesting concept!), and most significantly, the brothel, shaped his growth like none other. I wonder what would happen if he didn’t follow Berto that day, if he wasn’t exposed to the lives of the gang of boys. Would it just be another summer on the beach? Would his image of his mother stay the same or change from the relationship between her and the young man? We can already see the shift from seeing her mother as some sort of a godly creature to disgusting with ‘acrid, violent, animal warmth’ right after she spends more time with the man.

It is intriguing to read about adolescence in men, about the formation or ‘gang’ of boys and their vicious ways and the sensual yet uncomfortable relationship with his mom, inside his mind, as a woman who had the complete opposite experience growing up. All the literature I’m reading makes me question the thoughts men (the writers) have sometimes. One part of the boy’s innocence that stood out to me was his thoughts on prostitutes and sex work in general – the way he questions the idea of it with such innocence felt bittersweet to me, because we all know that as he ages, his mindset will be molded to be just like the others, changing from empathy to the workers to seeing them as objects, from going to the brothels out of curiosity to out of lust.

“The idea of the money he would pay in exchange for that shameful, forbidden sweetness seemed strange and cruel, like an insult, which might be pleasurable to the person who delivers it but is painful to the one who receives it.”

I mean, I think we can see it happening when he starts calling his mother ‘nothing more than a woman’, confusing with the idea of a maternal figure and a woman capable of desire and lust. It doesn’t help that his mother is such an attractive, single woman, carefree with her choice of clothing like see-through negligees. The way he describes his mother’s seemingly normal activities like taking her earrings off into slow, sensual activities makes it even more uncomfortable to read. The innocent love for his mother turned into a confusing mess of repulsion and attraction, which evidently shows his loss of childlike purity.

Let me open up the questions I had to you. My question is:

What do you think would’ve happened if he didn’t encounter the boys? Would there be another event like this, something that makes him lose his innocence nonetheless?

Moreover, did you have any experiences that was a start to your shell of innocence breaking apart during your childhood? It doesn’t have to be sexual. Mine was when my older cousin would force me to watch horror videos with jumpscares on Youtube, not to add to the unrestricted internet access I had. I turned out great!

01/30/24

The Shrouded Woman – no ragrets?

‘The Shrouded Woman’ by María Luisa Bombal.

There is a theory that says your brain is still active for 7 minutes after you die. I think about it a lot, I was reminded of it reading this novel as well. During that seven minutes, I like to think every person would just think back on their lives and evaluate the ups and downs. As much as the book is a work of fiction with a dead woman literally seeing her surroundings and recounting her life, none of us would ever know what really happens after death. Perhaps we drown into eternal darkness, or we turn into a ghost and be able to see everything in third perspective, or perhaps we pass the bridge between life and death like the book described.

“Oh! to cross that bridge and to stretch out full length on the snow on the other side, so that seconds, minutes, hours, days and years of silence might fall and fall on her face, on her limbs, on her tired heart!”

I guess this is why reading fiction about death, and hence life is interesting, because we have not yet solved the great enigma that is death, because we can let our minds wander with creativity when writing about it! Anyways, this novel is, of the three books we have read so far, my favorite, partly because it was easier to read with shorter sentences, or because it was from a woman’s perspective which I could relate with while reading it. Ana Maria, on her death bed, starts reminiscing about her life filled with pain, regrets, jealousy as well as love (painfully so). It is implied that her life was not the greatest to look back on, especially with the regretful decisions of staying with the loathsome husband Antonio, or less significant ones like not forgiving a once dear friend Sofia after her betrayal.  It makes me wonder how much of our lives would we regret after dying, after not being able to fix anything. Ana Maria seems to be excited for the death awaiting her, for her ‘second’ death after a life lived like the dead. A ‘death of the dead’. Her accepting her death without protests, eager to finally rest her tired mind in peace seemed sad yet beautiful to me – it was a bittersweet ending. What was more tragic to me was the reality of women stuck in unhappy marriages, not knowing whether her feelings are coming from love or hatred. The women in the novel were painted with such negative undertones in my opinion; of jealousy, betrayal, and pain. Also, one part that felt odd and a bit funny was how Maria Griselda was so gorgeous that it brought suffering wherever she was, to herself and to others. It is ironic to think that this beauty would bring such sorrow.

I read the book from the PDF that was on the website, which was a scanned version of the book already read and annotated. It was really fun to read the little notes with the texts, and some of them even helped me understand parts where I had challenges comprehending.

Another thing I want to mention is I was listening to random movie soundtracks while reading the ending, and a weird coincidence happened! Right during the priest’s speech of how Ana Maria would think heaven is like the Garden of Eden as a child, this soundtrack of the movie Minari, ‘Garden of Eden’ by Emile Mosseri was playing in the background!

My question is: If you had a chance to review your life on your death bed, would you think more about the regrets or the joyful moments?