Categories
Uncategorized

When a small detail becomes a big mystery

The Trenchcoat by Norman Manea is probably my favourite reading of the course so far. One reason I liked it was that I was finally able to read a story in one sitting. Lately a lot of the readings have felt extra long so it was nice to sit down and finish a story from beginning to end without stopping. Reading it all at once also made it easier to follow how the tension slowly builds throughout the story.

The story begins with two couples driving to a third couple’s house for a dinner party. At first, everything seems like a normal social evening as the group eats, drinks, and talks, and a lot of the story is made up of their conversations with each other. The characters belong to the same intellectual circle, so the discussion turns into politics, culture, and everyday frustrations. While the dinner seems polite and friendly, there is also a slight uneasy feeling when everyone chats with each other. The conversations don’t completely flow naturally and there seems to be an awareness that certain things cannot be said openly.

The strange detail that drives the story is the discovery of a trenchcoat (or raincoat) that is left hanging in the hallway. No one claims it and no one can fully explain why it’s there. It is also an ordinary trenchcoat and could belong to anyone, which definitely drives up everyone’s uneasiness about it. No one in the novella can stop thinking about this coat.

The coat can be seen as something so insignificant, but it turns into something so much bigger. If you were looking at this story in today’s day and age, it wouldn’t seem like a big deal. But the story takes place in a society where surveillance and informants exist and there are rumours that the secret police – described as “creeps who keep an eye on us all” (239) – have been using residential homes to conduct interrogations. Although the trenchcoat is a simple, ordinary object, the political unrest at the time makes it feel suspicious. The uncertainty surrounding the coat grows into paranoia and the characters start overthinking the entire evening.

The ending passage especially stood out to me. Even long after the dinner party, the characters continue discussing the mystery of the trenchcoat. They come up with different explanations for why it was there and the narrator describes their conversation as animated and passionate which shows how much this ordinary coat has affected their lives. In the end, the mystery of the trenchcoat is never solved and the readers, alongside the characters, have to sit with the uncertainty.

Honestly, by the end, I kind of liked that there was never a clear answer. The trenchcoat might be important or just a random coat someone forgot. But the characters keep thinking about it which shows how easy it is to overthink small things, especially when there’s already a sense of uneasiness in the background. In the end, the mystery sticks with you.

Discussion question: Do unanswered questions reveal hidden truths, or do they just expose our need for explanations?

Categories
Uncategorized

When the book reads you back

Reading If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler felt disorienting right from the start. Instead of easing me into a story, Calvino throws you straight into the act of reading itself. He even addresses “you” as if he is watching you open the book and read the first few pages. At first I found it unsettling and kept waiting for the real plot to begin. It felt like I was stuck in the introduction. But the longer I sat with it, the more I realized that confusion was intentional. The book is telling you a story, while also making sure you are a part of the experience.

I usually read the books for this class on my LONG commute to work. What made the opening surreal for me was reading it on my commute, especially when Calvino says, “Now you are on the bus, standing in the crowd, hanging from a strap by your arm… you’re elbowing your neighbors; apologize, at least.” I was literally on the skytrain, holding onto the overhead strap with one hand and my phone in the other. I could feel myself bumping into the people around me as they entered and exited the train and I felt like Calvino was talking directly to me. It was lowkey kinda trippy and felt like the boundary between the story and my own life had disappeared for a moment.

As I kept reading, I realized there isn’t one single plot to follow. Instead, the novel keeps starting new stories that abruptly stop just as they begin to get interesting. One moment you’re in a foggy railway station with a mysterious suitcase, the next you’re in an entirely different narrative voice, setting, and genre. The “Reader” and the “Other Reader,” Ludmilla, try to track down the correct versions of these interrupted novels, turning the search for the rest of the story into the story itself. Rather than building toward one resolution, the book becomes a chain of beginnings, with each one pulling you close and then denying you closure (kinda like a toxic situationship LOL).

At first this felt frustrating, but I started to see why it matters. The interruptions highlight the desire that keeps readers hooked: the need to know what happens next. Calvino seems less interested in finishing stories than in exploring why we crave them in the first place. The novel also plays with questions of authorship, translation, publishing errors, and authenticity, reminding us just how many unseen forces shape what we read.

By the end, it feels like the real subject isn’t any of the unfinished plots, but the relationship between reader and text. The book suggests that reading isn’t passive consumption but an active process shaped by curiosity and imagination. In that sense, the novel isn’t incomplete but about the endless act of reading itself.

Discussion question: If the novel never gives us a complete story, what does Calvino suggest about why we read and our desire for narrative closure?

Categories
Uncategorized

Feeling Trapped and Carrying On in The Time of the Doves

Reading The Time of the Doves didn’t feel like following a dramatic war story. Instead, it felt like being placed inside someone’s everyday struggle to keep going. The novel follows Natalia (often called Colometa), whose life is shaped not by political speeches or battlefield scenes, but by marriage, poverty, motherhood, and the slow exhausting life one lead while trying to survive the Spanish Civil War. Rodoreda shows how history is lived at the level of daily routines, where survival becomes the central task.

Early in the novel, Quimet renames Natalia and calls her Colometa and for me, this moment is when her identity begins slipping away. What sounds affectionate is also controlling with Quimet changing her name, her routines, and eventually the space she inhabits. His decision to fill their apartment with pigeons turns their home into a suffocating environment. The birds are not just a hobby but they crowd the room, create filth, and take up precious resources. Over time, they come to symbolize Natalia’s sense of entrapment. As the pigeons multiply, her freedom begins to shrink.

When the Civil War begins, the novel avoids heroic narratives and instead, everything becomes more difficult. Natalia is left waiting, hungry, and exhausted, trying to keep her children alive while the world around her collapses. War appears through empty cupboards, relentless work, and constant anxiety. At times she seems emotionally numb, moving through tasks mechanically, as if shutting down her feelings is the only way to endure what is happening.

For me, one of the most striking aspects of the novel is how quiet Natalia’s endurance is. She is not portrayed as strong in a dramatic or triumphant way. She simply continues despite everything falling apart around her. That persistence begins to feel like its own form of resistance, especially within a society that restricts her autonomy as both a woman and a widow of war.

Rodoreda’s plain, direct prose strengthens this emotional landscape. The focus on domestic details such as preparing food, cleaning, caring for children, and managing cramped spaces, shows how large historical forces reshape ordinary life. War can be found in all aspects of daily life as it enters kitchens, bedrooms, and bodies and alters the rhythm of everyday existence.

By the end of the novel, survival itself feels meaningful. Natalia does not emerge heroic or transformed, but she slowly rebuilds a sense of stability and opens herself to the possibility of care and tenderness. I really liked this novel because of how quietly powerful it felt. Although nothing dramatic happens, the emotional weight stays with you. It also reminded me of Nada, which similarly shows how war and its aftermath shape everyday life, especially for women navigating scarcity, uncertainty, and limited choices.

Discussion question: Do you think Natalia’s quiet endurance represents strength, or does it reveal how limited her choices truly are?

Categories
Uncategorized

Deep Rivers

Reading Deep Rivers by José María Arguedas kinda messed with my head. It feels less like learning a story and more like learning how to perceive the world differently. Rather than explaining Peru’s colonial history or Indigenous suffering in direct terms, Arguedas filters everything through Ernesto’s body: what he touches, hears, and feels before he can fully understand it himself. I think this choice made the novel quiet, immersive, and at times, disorienting, but also deeply powerful.

One moment early in the novel captures this approach perfectly. As Ernesto stands in a narrow street in Cuzco, he presses his hands against an Inca wall and observes that “the wall appeared to be alive; the lines I had touched between the stones burned on the palms of my hands” (6). This is not a metaphor Ernesto explains or analyzes but is a physical sensation he feels. The past is not something he learns through stories or lessons, but something that makes itself known through touch. The stones resist being reduced to history and instead, they insist on presence.

This moment stuck with me because it shows how the novel understands memory and power. The Inca wall exists beneath colonial buildings, literally supporting structures that tried to erase it. Ernesto feels this contradiction before he can name it. His body registers the tension between what endures and what dominates. In this sense, the novel suggests that colonial violence is not only ideological or historical, but spatial and physical, as it is built into walls, streets, and institutions.

Throughout the novel, Ernesto continues to respond to the world in this embodied way. Spaces like the cathedral or the boarding school overwhelm him not because he fully understands their authority, but because he feels their weight. By contrast, rivers, stones, and Indigenous songs offer moments of connection and clarity. Arguedas does not romanticize these experiences, but presents them as alternative ways of knowing that do not rely on explanation.

One of the most striking parts of this novel is the way it refuses to translate everything for the reader. Ernesto cannot always articulate what he feels, and in this way, the novel resists smoothing out cultural difference. Instead of making Indigenous experience fully legible to an outside audience, Arguedas asks readers to sit with uncertainty and sensation, just as Ernesto is doing in the book.

In this way, Deep Rivers challenges how we read stories shaped by colonial histories. It suggests that not all knowledge arrives through language or clarity and that some of it burns quietly, like stone warmed by memory.

To end with a question, if Deep Rivers presents history as something felt rather than explained, what does that suggest about the limits of language in representing Indigenous experience?

 

Categories
Uncategorized

A book about nothing (that somehow meant a lot)

When I first finished Nada, my immediate reaction was kind of anticlimactic. After a full year of Andrea’s life in Barcelona, she leaves feeling like she’s taken nothing away from the experience. She didn’t have a crazy transformation, didn’t really take away a clear lesson, and the story ended with no dramatic resolution. Just… nada. And honestly? I still really enjoyed the book.

What makes Nada interesting isn’t what happens, but how it feels to live through it and how Andrea remembers it after. The novel is filled with images of death and stagnation. For example, the way Uncle Juan’s face is described as “skull-like,” and even the beds in the house resemble coffins. The apartment feels less like a home and more like a space where life is slowly paused. Everyone seems exhausted, emotionally drained, and trapped in routines that lead nowhere. This links to the Spanish Civil War; even though it is never explicitly mentioned, the war hangs over everything, shaping the characters’ bitterness, poverty, and inability to move forward.

What I found most compelling, though, is the way Andrea tells her story after it has already happened. She is not telling the story as it happens; instead, she is recalling her year in Barcelona later in the future. She insists that the year she spent amounted to nothing and that she leaves unchanged. However, the fact that she can still narrate the year suggests otherwise. This shows that memory gives shape to what felt meaningless at the time. The year only gains significance through retrospection.

This is where Uncle Román’s comment really stuck with me, when he tells Andrea that she has been “dreaming up stories with us as characters.” On the surface, it sounds dismissive, like he’s accusing her of turning reality into fantasy. But he is also accidentally naming exactly what she is doing as a narrator. Andrea is turning real people, conflicts, and moments into a story. Storytelling becomes her way of surviving a suffocating environment and making sense of the emotional chaos she is going through.

In a world marked by war, mourning, and stagnation, narration is one of the few forms of agency Andrea has. While the adults around her seem stuck in the past, Andrea processes her experience by observing, remembering, and eventually leaving. Even if she doesn’t recognize it in the moment, she gains perspective, distance, and a voice.

Overall, yes, Nada really is about “nothing.” There is no dramatic plot or satisfying payoff. But that is kind of the point. The novel captures what it feels like to live through a period of emotional emptiness and only later realize that it mattered. In the end, the irony is that a book about nothing leaves you with quite a lot.

To end with a question, is Nada really about the absence of meaning, or about how meaning can only emerge once an experience is over?

Categories
Uncategorized

The Shrouded Woman: I’m still thinking about this book

I feel like every book I’ve picked up so far in this class has just left me confused. I thought books from the 1900s were easier to understand than the ones I read in RMST201, but these books might be more confusing??? Anyway, The Shrouded Woman felt like a novel that exists in this strange in-between: not really the world of the living but not fully removed from it either. The story felt very intimate and with the setting being literally a deathbed, I felt like I was reading someone’s death story and I didn’t belong there at all.

The most striking thing about Bombal’s writing is how she makes time collapse. The narrative does not move in a neat line from childhood to adulthood to death. Instead, memories show up how they do in real life, often triggered by a sound, a touch, or even a presence in the room. Compared to Proust and Nadja, the structure of this book did confuse me at times, but it was definitely an easier read. In this book, time does not matter in a conventional sense but the moments that carried emotional weight do stay.

One moment that stayed with me is when the narrator becomes aware of the people gathered around her body and listens to their reactions during the wake. She cannot move or respond but she hears their words and can sense their emotions, which creates a strange tension between presence and absence. This scene made me feel almost like an intruder as if I were overhearing something private. When she looked at the difference in the way she understands her own life compared to other people, I think she gains a self-awareness that she is no longer part of the living world.

In the book, the people around her are defining who she was but her own thoughts were resisting these interpretations. In this way, The Shrouded Woman felt less like a story about death and more like a reckoning with a life that never fully aligned with the self she carried inside, the person she truly was.

By the end of the novel, my confusion shifted into a sort of discomfort. Bombal does not offer the reader any closure but instead, she leaves us with the awareness that maybe some lives are not built around fulfilment and happiness, but constraint. The language is so beautiful while the sadness of the realization is what makes this novel so haunting.

To end off, my question to you is if the narrator only gains clarity and narrative control after her death, what is Bombal suggesting about women’s ability to understand themselves and express themselves how they want to while they are alive?

Categories
Uncategorized

Nothing really happens in Nadja but maybe that’s the point?

When I first picked up this book and started reading, I literally had no idea what was going on. I kept sitting there waiting for something to happen, be it a plot, a conflict, or anything that would make me understand the storyline better. Instead, it felt like I had opened someone’s diary and was reading their private thoughts as they wandered around Paris with no plan and no clear destination in mind. I was so frustrated.

This book is the first one I’ve read in the surrealist genre. I thought Proust was hard to digest, but this one might have been worse. Nadja doesn’t behave like a normal novel. There is no traditional storyline, the writing jumps between conversations, observations, and reflections, and nothing is explained. The book is clearly not meant to be an easy read.

However, as I kept reading, it kinda made sense why it felt so difficult. Surrealism isn’t about clarity or logic; it’s about intuition, coincidence, and the unconscious. Breton writes about wandering the streets, random encounters, and moments that feel important even though he can’t explain why. I thought the confusion I was feeling was wrong. I genuinely thought I was the only one that was finding this novel really difficult to read, but the whole thing was an experience, and I think it was an experience Breton wanted us to have.

The woman, Nadja, also added to this feeling for me. She was so strange, emotional, unpredictable, and so so hard to understand. When I read a novel or consume any type of fictional media, I want to understand the characters and get in their heads to figure out why they do the things they do. But with Nadja, I never fully understood her. Breton didn’t give us enough information about her and I feel like he didn’t want to either. This disconnect between the reader and the character the book is named after made me feel uneasy.

When I neared the 3/4 mark of the book, I decided to stop trying to read it the traditional way and gave up on looking for a plot altogether. Instead, I started thinking about the way this book made me confused, uncomfortable, and even slightly detached. I think Nadja is not meant to be an easy or satisfying read. It is meant to resist structure and explanation and that’s why it’s such a good surrealist novel.

Anyway, Nadja was so much work. Too messy, annoying, and weird. Even though it sounds like I figured it out at the end, I am still very much confused and probably won’t pick up another surrealist book in the future. Sorry…

Categories
Uncategorized

Proust???

WOW this text was hard to read. I found myself getting lost and having to re-read sections an embarrassing amount of times. As I mentioned in my introduction, I don’t pick up books written before the 1980s so staying attentive the whole time and trying to navigate Proust’s long, winding sentences within this book was hard. I think what allowed me to keep reading and not give up on this book was the way Proust talks about childhood and how even small, insignificant moments in our childhood can leave a deep, meaningful impact on our lives.

One moment from the text that stuck out for me was Proust’s desperation for a goodnight kiss from his mother. When looking at this moment from a more surface-level point of view, it seems insignificant and his frustration could even make you think, “Why does he care so much?” but Proust never diminishes his feelings. He does not write it off as being childish or dramatic but instead, he shows it as something that made him feel overwhelmed. I thought this portrayal was so real. It reminded me of how powerful emotions feel when you are younger, even when adults would consider a moment like this minor. I also related very strongly to his fear of being left alone with your thoughts at night because countless times, I have felt overwhelmed before I’ve fallen asleep and I find myself running through the course of my day in a million different ways like I could do something to change it when it has already happened.

The madeleine scene hit differently but almost just as strongly. When the narrator tastes the madeleine dipped in tea, he is almost immediately flooded with memories of Combray. He never actively tried to remember certain memories; they just came to him. The taste and feeling when he ate a bite of the madeleine unlocks something buried deep inside him. This feeling of a certain taste, emotion, sound, or even something you see evoking a memory inside you is something I think people experience way more often than you would think. For me, it reminds me of when I first landed in Vancouver for university and smelt the air. I know this sounds insane but for some reason the smell of the air in Vancouver reminds me so strongly of the years I spent in New Jersey when I was about five years old. There is no specific image or memory that comes to mind; I just feel comfort and nostalgia. It feels similar to what Proust describes and about how emotion arrives before memory does.

Even though I struggled with the pacing and style of this book, these two moments really stood out for me and made me understand what Proust was trying to do. He shows that childhood stays with us, not just in clear memories, but in feelings, habits, and sensations. For me, even though I feel like I barely understood what I read, this book was definitely worth it.

Categories
Uncategorized

RMST 202 Introduction

Hi everyone! My name is Kavya and I am 21 years old in my third year. I am originally from Singapore and grew up with lots of sun and humidity (that I miss everyday). I am majoring in Sociology with a minor in Special Education. I took a Romance Studies class last year and enjoyed it quite a bit and decided to take RMST202 to not only complete my literature requirement, but also learn more about translated texts from the modern and post-modern time periods. In the future, I want to have a career in education, more specifically, elementary education.

Honestly, when I first looked through the website for this class, I wanted to log into workday and drop it immediately. The tabs and information overwhelmed me. However, watching the videos, meticulously reading through all the information, and familiarizing myself with the syllabus made me realize that this class could actually teach me a lot about literature and it’s differences and similarities through different time periods. I also like the flexibility of the class and being able to pick the readings I want to work through each week is an added bonus!

I already have a basic understanding of what a Romance Studies class looks for as I took RMST 201 last year. I enjoyed reading different books and stories and delving into their deeper meanings. I remember speaking to my professor at the time and telling her about how freeing it felt to read fiction instead of academic papers or confusing journal articles. Although I read a lot of books for leisure, I rarely ever pick up a book written before the 1980s. Sometimes the language is too complicated, other times I read through one long, boring chapter that fails to capture my attention and abandon the book altogether. Looking over texts originally written in languages such as French, Spanish, or Portuguese is definitely going to be a challenge but I am excited to challenge myself and read more outside my comfort zone. It typically takes me a week to read through a book that I have picked out as a distraction so I am curious to see how long it will take me to read through one for a class. I am also looking forward to deeply analyzing the texts.

Onto the lecture… One idea from the first week’s lecture that stood out to me was the emphasis on literature as a form of writing that draws attention to language and also to the mechanisms of representation. I like the idea of framing literature as something that forces us to slow down and notice exactly how meaning is produced rather than simply looking at the texts at face value. This perspective connects closely to what I have learned in Sociology as we constantly look beyond surface-level meanings and examine how social realities are constructed through language, power, and context.

Overall, I am really excited to engage with the readings and lectures in a meaningful way. I also think looking at literature through a more critical lens will allow me to see how literature can actually challenge the ways we understand language, culture, and meaning.

Spam prevention powered by Akismet