Monthly Archives: March 2024

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?