Tag Archives: obsession

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.

01/23/24

Nadja – not a love story

Nadja by André Breton.

 

Surrealism as a form of art is one of the most intriguing concepts ever. I have seen surrealist films like Charlie Kaufman’s, art pieces like Salvador Dali, but never really dove into the world of surrealism in literature (Does Haruki Murakami count?). Looking more into it, I just now discovered that Breton was one of the founding fathers of surrealism and a major figure of the movement. So, it was my first time reading something that would be really defined as ‘surrealist’.

I wouldn’t say I enjoyed the entirety of the reading, especially the first part. I was anticipating for the introduction of Nadja, so I barely got through the first chapter of rambling about french artists and writers, the theater and whatnot. Perhaps with a second read, when I come back with an increased proficiency in handling complex texts, maybe then I would be able to appreciate it. Also, I chose and read the book with the impression that it was a poetic romance story, with obsession as an element. This was not a love story, but a written portrayal of obsession and self-knowledge. It certainly did not feel like a novel either, but a journal. I found it intriguing, the way Breton jumped from one story to another, like a collection of diary entries with random stories and thoughts and ideas.

Nadja was indeed an interesting character. As every other student has said, I too thought about the ‘manic pixie dream girl’ trope while reading the novel. The way the protagonist diminishes a mentally ill woman into an abstract idea, a vision, a hollow concept, almost a ghost, felt like those movies where the depressed male main character gets infatuated by a quirky girl (who, in most cases is, mentally ill), then as they learn more about the girl and get the hint of an idea that the person is indeed, a real person with real life problems, then their illusions are shattered and they stop getting interested. Moreover, the fact that he did not visit Nadja during her stay at the sanitarium further strengthened my perspective that this is not a love story, but a one about obsession. He was not in love with Nadja, but obsessed with the idea of her, romanticizing her symptoms of mental illness and screams of help into poetic expressions. However, in the last part of the book, Breton starts writing about another character addressed in second-person, which was about Suzanne Muzard. Despite the real life events of her ending their short-lived affair to keep her marriage, the last part felt like it was written with love, in contrast with the main body about Nadja.

As he says: (proving that Nadja was just an enigma for him)

“I know is that this substitution of persons stops with you, because nothing can be substituted for you, and because for me it was for all eternity that this succession of terrible or charming enigmas was to come to an end at your feet.
You are not an enigma for me.”

I also really enjoyed the incorporation of photographs to help us not imagine but really immerse ourselves into the world, see through the lens of the character. It felt almost ironic that a work so surreal in nature could stem from a real life event.

My question is:

What do you think of Breton as a person after reading the novel? Is he an unpleasant character?