Monthly Archives: April 2024

adiós, au revoir, tchau!

Final week, final blog!

In a blink of an eye, I have somehow managed to read 11 books; it certainly doesn’t feel like it somehow. I have a feeling that this blog is going to go over the word count so I’m going to jump straight into it. First off, to get the negativity out of the way, my least favourite book of this semester was Combray. There’s actually multiple reasons for this. I think that since it was a chapter of a really long story, like we only read to a certain chapter so for this story overall it felt a lot more confusing, in the sense that I can’t tell what the point is for laying the story down in the beginning since we didn’t follow up the rest of the book. I also didn’t really enjoy the writing style and I feel like looking back the highlight of the book is eating a Madeline and having flashbacks with is lowkey boring (oops) compared to all the other books. Like all the other books gave me something stronger, more interesting to work with. Also this book was the first book we read so maybe it’s just my memory of it being more cloudy. But yea, those are my personal reasons, which I would like to emphasize doesn’t really speak about the quality of the book- it’s more of a personal experience kind of thing.

I have a couple favourites of this semester. honourable mentions include The Lover, Time of the Doves, Hour of the Star, Shrouded Women, Agostino (I know I’m listing all of them but I actually really enjoyed them all almost equally). For most of these, I found the story and writing to be intriguing and the discussion of the books to be enjoyable. I think my favourite is a tie between Money to Burn and Faces in the Crowd. Money to Burn kind of felt like it had it all- a somewhat thrilling story, based on an interesting contextual background especially since its based on a real event, interesting themes and amazing execution (moral corruption, money, societal values, cycles of violence, even political ideology at times), and creative writing style choices (changing to pov of interview pieces and police reports, references and images invoking Christ, etc.) that were really intelligent and thoughtful choices. All of these elements made reading and especially dissecting the book and discussing it really enjoyable. Faces in the Crowd is my other favourite primarily because of the writing- I would say reading experience wise this one was my favourite. the language and writing was really beautifully constructed and I guess this one also felt a bit more poetic but not over the top which I enjoyed. I also feel like the story telling 3 stories at once and the ending of the book where settings merge was super interesting. This book also grappled with interesting themes in really intricate ways, with blending the real and not real, the idea of truths, folding time, all of it are really hard concepts to grapple and talk about, so I feel that Luiselli actually did a really stellar job doing it all.

Looking back at my first blog post, I said that “I foresee a lot of exposure to texts rooted in various regions featuring different kinds of stories- some great, most weird, very few unenjoyable”. This is so spot on I was practically a soothsayer. I will say that surprisingly this semester had a weaker dose of learning about the backgrounds the novels are rooted in compared to my experience taking the Span 312 class. Also I just saw that Daniel the TA commented that there might be something Borgian esque about some of the books we read and damn he really was warning me. Thanks for that Daniel. Standing at this point in time, I look back now and realized that I’ve actually changed and learned a lot more about reading from all the experiences so far in this course. I really feel like I read somewhat differently, and learned to appreciate different things. I think if I ran into Agostino in the wild I would’ve called the author an incest weirdo and rated it 1 star on Goodreads. But this course has taught me to learn to look more into the void, and appreciate and understand whatever might be staring at you back.

Ok this blog is long enough- time for the last question to you all. I bring back the worst man awards now that we have seen all the worst men this course has to offer. Who is truly the worst and why? please let me know. Cheers everybody!

 

Word of the day: phantasmagoria (Faces in the Crowd)

Hello everybody- the book this week was Luiselli’s “Faces in a crowd”, which I don’t even really know how to describe the plot…think ghosts but not really, a wife with a husband and 2 children but not really, and a girl working in a publishing firm as a translator that’s a bit obsessed with this dead author.

Im not exactly sure how this came to be but for every week I can sort of mentally imagine the story, and it was always tinged in yellow a, bid faded and fuzzy like how old TV was. But this weeks reading was finally in colour, and also above 840p resolution wise. Maybe it has to do with the electronic copy of the book being a super crisp white, but I think it mostly has to do with the tone of the writing now, as we are at the last book of the semester, meaning it’s a lot more recent. But even then, with the choppiness of the book and jumps between first person narration, none of the mental images I have count as “coherent” either.

The husband and wife of this book is quite interesting to me because I find that building a house (architect-ing it, like designing it) feels quite similar to writing a book in some ways- to design the foundation of the story, its progression, overarching themes and writing styles; each of it is an element to build a coherent story just like you would build a house with its foundations, walls, stairs etc. But at one point, the narrator compared her work to her husbands (an architect) and says “I can’t make spaces from nothing. I can’t invent. I only manage to emulate my ghosts, write the way they used to speak, not make noise, narrate out phantasmagoria” (to save you the Google, it means a constant shifting complex succession of things seen or imagined- which also applies to faces you would see in a crowd wink wink). I would think that any sort of writing is invention in a way, but given the shifting perspectives and stories with this book I sort of get where the author is coming from as stories seem as if they are from ghosts both real and not real at once. 

This book is one of the few books from this class that I would’ve picked up for myself to read (the other is probably The Lover) and I actually quite enjoyed it- both the book itself and the experience reading it. Also as a complete side note, from the GLIMPSES into the wife’s familial life, I finally realized that I really just want to read a normal book in this class for once ???????????? I forgot how much I missed reading a book where the ordinary things happen (although this book is only 1/3 that; normal and not normal at the same time).

my question for all this week is: if you were to write your own book somewhat based on yourself and somewhat fictionalize it, what would you choose to write about?