Laura's blog

I saw in a couple other blog posts about Love Me Tender that people say not much really happens in the book. At first I kind of agreed. It doesn’t have the usual kind of plot. There’s no big dramatic sequence of events. The narrator swims, writes, meets women, walks around Paris. The chapters are short and sometimes feel more like quick notes than full scenes.

But I think the interesting part isn’t the events, it’s the way she relates to people.

There’s one moment that really stayed with me where one of the women she’s seeing starts crying because she doesn’t understand their relationship anymore. She says she feels like she can’t talk to the narrator. Instead of reassuring her, the narrator responds in this really strange way:

“I hold my hand up in the air, I say, I don’t love you this much, then I lower it, I say, I don’t love you this much, then I put my hand midway, I love you this much, that’s how it is.”

It’s such a weird response. Instead of explaining how she feels, she literally measures it with her hand. Love becomes something limited, something she can control. Not too much, not too little.

Then,

“I wait for her to leave me. I’ve already done it too many times.”

That line makes it clear like this isn’t a one-time situation. It’s a pattern. She already knows how these relationships end.

What’s interesting is that the narrator left a life she clearly wasn’t satisfied with, her marriage, her career, the expectations that came with it. The whole book is about her trying to live differently. But even in this new life she doesn’t really let people get close, at least emotionally lol.

I read something on Josh Tan’s blog that made me think about this. He asks: “When we renounce everything that chains us, similar to Debré, have we really freed ourselves, or have we built a more comfortable cage?” And honestly that question feels very relevant here.

“She says one day she’ll end up leaving me. I tell her she loves me too much to do that.”(155)

hello????what??

The narrator has escaped one structure of life, but she might have created another kind of restriction. Instead of social expectations limiting her, now it’s her own emotional distance. She is emotionally closed off living a life that does not seem like it is fulfilling her.

So maybe the book feels like “nothing happens” because the real story isn’t about events. It’s about the way she moves through relationships, always a little detached, always expecting them to end.

If the narrator leaves her old life in search of freedom, why does she still keep people at an emotional distance in her new one? Is this freedom, or just another form of control?

Faces in the Crowd was definitely my favorite book we have read so far. It gave me a strange but interesting feeling, mostly because parts of the narrator’s life felt surprisingly relatable. When she describes her younger self living alone in New York, it made me think about what it means to be a young Latin American girl in a big western city. Her life and the stories she tells feel random and really fun, but also relatable in some way. She moves between apartments, lends keys to friends, sleeps in borrowed rooms, and even steals furniture at some point. It feels very “in your twenties,” where nothing is fully settled yet and life is mostly improvised.

“I would lend my apartment to people and seek out other rooms, borrowed armchairs, shared beds in which to spend the night. I gave copies of my keys to a lot of people. They gave me copies of theirs. Reciprocity, not generosity.”(7)

To me, it captures perfectly the feeling of being a foránea, living in a place that isn’t fully yours, where friends or lovers are your network of support. 

One thing I also really enjoyed about the novel was the narration itself. The story constantly moves between different timelines and compared to other books we have read in this course, I actually did not find this confusing at all. Instead, the fragmented structure made the story feel dynamic and unpredictable. The novel constantly blurs the line between truth and fiction. The narrator is writing about her past, but we never fully know which parts actually happened and which parts might be invented. I especially liked how the narrator’s husband reads the pages she is writing and questions them. At one point he asks, “Did you use to sleep with women?” (39), which made me laugh because it shows how even the characters inside the story are unsure about what is real. There are also moments where the narrator casually drops things that make you question EVERYTHING, like when she mentions “the kisses I gave my girlfriend’s boyfriend; the ones I gave my girlfriend” (45), which again blurs the line between confession or lies.

Another thing that stood out to me was the casual relationship with ghosts. The narrator mentions a ghost named Without who lives in their house, saying, “Sometimes Without rocks the baby while I’m writing. Neither of us is frightened by this, and we know it’s not a joke” (13). The narrator and her husband do not treat the ghost as something shocking or terrifying. Instead, it feels almost normal, like part of everyday life– very Latin American I would say.

I also liked the humorous tone throughout the book, especially the ironic tone. It is interesting how it is used to make kind of a social commentary (maybe?). For example, when describing her boss White, she says: “And in contrast to the majority of gringos who speak Spanish and have spent some time in Latin America and think that gives them a kind of international third-world experience that confers on them the intellectual and moral qualifications for—I don’t quite know what—White really did understand the fucked-up mechanisms of Latin American literary history” (27). Or the description of  “trustafarians,” which the narrator uses to describe certain Latin Americans who come from money but perform a kind of activist or bohemian lifestyle abroad, as if they could not actually afford it.

I was left with a doubt, actually many doubts but this is the main one. This novel felt kind of autobiographical, and I wonder, if the novel actually is about Luiselli’s life, and if Luiselli did actually work translating novels when she was younger, why didn’t she translate hers?

I think my first thought after finishing this story was how strange the situation felt, but also how familiar it seemed in a different way. Nowadays, people gather, have dinner, talk about random things, and often avoid discussing politics, even when the political situation around the world feels chaotic or upside down. The difference is that today we usually avoid those conversations because they are considered awkward or “impolite.” In The Trenchcoat, however, the characters avoid speaking openly about certain things because they are living in Communist Romania, where speech and political opinions could be dangerous. That context changed the way I understood the small events in the story. 

Overall, it was a short novel and quite an easy read for me. However, I felt like bringing up so many different characters and even using different names for the same characters became a bit confusing. I am not sure if the author did this on purpose to show how unstable identity becomes in a world shaped by secrecy and suspicion. Instead of feeling like fully fixed individuals, the characters often appear through labels, impressions, or roles, such as innocence or simplicity. This makes them feel harder to pin down, which mirrors the uncertainty that runs throughout the novel.

What really stood out to me was the question about the trenchcoat that appears after the dinner party. At first, it seems like such a small and ordinary thing, just a coat left behind in the apartment. Normally, someone would probably just assume a guest forgot it and move on. But because of the political environment the characters are living in, I think it suddenly feels much more suspicious than it should. Instead of treating it as a simple mistake, they start to wonder if it could mean something more. The narrator even asks whether the coat might be a “trace” of something hidden, which made me think about how easily everyday objects can start to feel threatening in a place where surveillance and informants exist. I also think the fact that it is a trenchcoat might symbolize a spy or investigator, since that is the type of clothing they are stereotypically associated with.

To me, the trenchcoat mostly becomes a symbol of that constant tension and uncertainty. I imagine that when people live in a society where they feel watched or monitored, it probably changes the way they interpret normal situations. A forgotten object might not just be a forgotten object anymore—it might feel like evidence that someone was there secretly observing. I think this is why the characters start questioning everything: who left the coat, whether someone else was present at the dinner, or if someone brought an unexpected guest. What seems like a small mystery slowly turns into something much bigger because of the atmosphere they live in.

At the same time, I also kept thinking about the possibility that the coat might actually mean nothing at all. I think that idea is one of the most interesting parts of the story. It made me think that maybe the characters are projecting their own fears onto something completely ordinary. Because they live in a political system where hidden threats are real, it becomes difficult for them to believe that something could just be accidental or meaningless.

Personally, I think that unresolved ambiguity is what makes the story so interesting. The trenchcoat is never fully explained, and as a reader, I felt the same uncertainty the characters experience. In a way, the trenchcoat stops being important as an object and instead becomes a reflection of the environment the characters live in. It shows how living under authoritarian rule can shape the way people think and react, making them constantly question what might be happening beneath the surface of ordinary life.

To be honest, I did not like If on a winter’s night a traveler. I get why it’s considered creative, but my experience was mostly confusion and distance. In the beginning, when the narrator tells you where to sit, adjust the light, relax, and prepare to read. I remember thinking: why is he telling me what to do and how to feel? But it worked. It pulled me in immediately and made me aware of myself as a reader. For a moment I felt excited, like the book was personally inviting me into it. That is why I would have preferred a physical copy, to focus and settle into one world. On a screen I skim. This novel almost encouraged skimming because the stories kept restarting, and I never stayed in one setting long enough to care about the characters.

After chapter 1, the novel started losing me. The second-person narration confused me. Sometimes “you” are just reading a book, and sometimes “you” are actually living events: going to the bookstore, meeting Ludmilla, chasing manuscripts. I often couldn’t tell if I was inside a story or watching the Reader live his life. Instead of immersion, I felt like I was constantly trying to figure out what level of reality I was in. The plot felt almost plotless because every time one of the stories became interesting, it abruptly stopped and restarted somewhere else.

The one story I actually wanted to keep reading was the one in Malbork. The guy comes back to what he thinks is his hometown after being away for years, but everything feels slightly wrong. His family treats him like a stranger, the house doesn’t feel familiar, and even the girl he always believed was his sister might not actually be related to him. I found interesting the idea that your memories might not even belong to you, and I actually wanted answers. When it suddenly stopped, it felt like the first time the book took away a story I was actually invested in.

The characters did help me understand what the book was trying to do. I actually relate to Lotaria. I don’t naturally read novels for fun very often, I mostly read for school and interpretation. Because of that, I was analyzing it instead of enjoying the story, which I think the book was partly criticizing. 

I don’t approach reading hoping for some huge discovery, sometimes it honestly feels like another academic responsibility. By the end I understood the book’s point: readers search for closure, but reading itself might matter more than endings. I can respect that idea, and the writing is definitely clever, but for me a novel should eventually let me stay somewhere. This one kept moving, and instead of being inside the story, I mostly felt like I was studying it.

Cool ending though

Question: Why does the novel give a clear ending to the Reader and Ludmilla’s relationship but refuses to resolve any of the stories they try to read?

Reading The Time of the Doves I kept noticing how Natalia’s life is shaped more by what she’s missing than by what she has. No one ever showed her what a healthy relationship looks like, so when Quimet appears she doesn’t really choose him; she just drifts into him. And Quimet? Major red flag. Immediately. The pushiness, the jealousy, the public humiliation— and making her kneel in the middle of the street? Outrageous. He isn’t slowly becoming controlling, he starts that way. Even small things feel wrong, like when “he told me we had to go fifty-fifty on the apartment. Like we were just friends.” (38). On paper that sounds fair. Emotionally it’s cold. He treats her less like a partner and more like someone he’s arranging into his life, besides, of course, being really emotionally and physically abusive.

What I actually found really interesting is Rodoreda’s narration style. Natalia repeats phrases or memories, like “That rubber waistband digging into my waist and my dead mother couldn’t advise me,” even when they don’t logically fit the moment. I think this shows her anxious personality, her trauma, and also the things that really stuck with her. She isn’t analyzing her life, she’s just experiencing it as it comes. Her thoughts don’t move in straight lines; they circle back to whatever unsettles her. She never directly says she feels abandoned, but the narration keeps proving it, and the repetition made me feel her anxiety instead of just reading it.

The injured dove scene really stayed with me because it feels like the novel quietly preparing us for what Natalia will later go through. When they find the bird, “Mateu said the best thing was to kill it, that it was better for it to die than to live tied up like a prisoner.” (65). At first it just sounds harsh and kind of unnecessary, but later, when her children are starving, Natalia ends up thinking in almost the same way. I don’t see this as her becoming cruel, I see it as her running out of options. The book made me feel like ethical judgment is, in a way, a luxury, something you can only really apply when you actually have choices. Hunger shrinks the space where you can think ideally, and the question stops being what is morally pure and becomes what causes the least suffering when every option is bad. She still feels the weight of what she is considering, which shows her morality is still there, but the normal ethical categories stop making sense in a situation built around survival, and that is what makes the foreshadowing scene stick for me.

The war in this book never feels heroic. We don’t see battles; we see empty kitchens and closed businesses. Even Quimet’s death is anticlimactic, at the time she barely reacts, and I think it’s because she was preoccupied with what will follow up to having no husband and two mouths to feed. What I found powerful is that she doesn’t really grieve then; she grieves years later. When she goes back to the old apartment and screams, it feels like delayed grief and trauma finally catching up to her. The scream, “A scream I must have been carrying around inside me for many years…,” (197) feels like she leaves part of her trauma there. When she says “it’s all over now,” I read it less as happiness and more as release.

Question: Who do you think “poor Maria” is supposed to be?

Being Peruvian definitely shaped how I read this book. I probably would have enjoyed it even more if it had not been midterm season, but I still ended up liking it a lot. Through Ernesto’s inner conflict you can understand a lot about the society around him. He is mestizo, and because he grew up around Quechua speaking communities he understands and empathizes with that world much more than the other boys. What stood out to me the most is that even though Deep Rivers reflects Peru of roughly the 1920s to 30s, the social hierarchy still feels very present in the country a century later.

The use of the word cholo/a really caught my attention. In the novel it works mostly as a social classification, not automatically an insult. In peruvian society today, it often carries a strong negative racial meaning and is usually used as an insult toward Indigenous and working-class people. Growing up in Lima, society always felt and still feels very classist. Indigenous culture is often celebrated symbolically (food, festivals, traditions), but in daily life many people, at least in Lima from my perspective, still distance themselves from Indigenous identity and look down on Indigenous people, even when that heritage is part of their own ancestry.

Which takes me to another point. This divide is not only social, but also cultural and emotional, and Arguedas shows it through Ernesto’s relationship with nature and sound. I loved the descriptions of nature and sound. The rivers, chants, and myths feel intimate and alive, almost like a home Ernesto understands deeply. The way the boys describe Lleras turning into a creature also reminded me of many myths and legends I have heard when I traveled around the highlands of Peru. The importance of the zumbayllu and its sound shows how deeply Ernesto feels these connections, and it made me remember how every time I travel there the culture is so beautiful and diverse it almost feels overwhelming. However, for me it feels slightly different. I didn’t grow up fully inside that culture, but I recognize it and admire it from a distance. In that way I related to Ernesto, not because our lives are the same, but because of the feeling of being close to something culturally meaningful while never fully belonging to it.

Because of this, Ernesto siding with the chicheras during the salt rebellion felt important. He isn’t choosing an ethnic identity but making a moral choice to sympathize with those suffering rather than automatically aligning with his own “social group”. The novel shows how groups like the colonos and the chicheras are essential to everyday life and the economy, yet they are still looked down upon within the social hierarchy. The salt rebellion matters because the women are not criminals at all, just people trying to keep the poorest alive and do what they believe is right, yet they are still treated like criminals.

When Ernesto tells Doña Felipa, “You’re like the river, señora… They’ll never catch you,” he links her to a force of nature that cannot be controlled. This connects to the title itself. To me, the “deep rivers” symbolizes deeper cultural currents: memory, culture, and resistance flowing beneath official society. By the end, when Ernesto crosses the bridge and leaves Abancay, the river also marks a transition in him, showing that he now recognizes these forces and carries that awareness with him even as he leaves.

On that, I also found it interesting that the novel doesn’t really have a clear ending. We never learn what ultimately happens to many characters, and that feels intentional, suggesting the conflicts the book shows are not solved but just continue beyond the story. It made me wonder: if Ernesto only understands both worlds because he doesn’t fully belong to either, is that actually a kind of advantage, or does it mean he’ll always feel out of place no matter where he goes?

“But now, now that I am dead, it occurs to me that possibly all men once in their lifetime long to make some great renunciation… in order to feel themselves masters of their own destiny.”     

wow…. 

I really liked this novel. The narration through a “ghost’s” POV made it interesting in a way that didn’t feel confusing or heavy. It was like she moved between memories, emotions, and anecdotes really smoothly, almost like everything was just flowing together

I think the novel reflects on a lot of themes that still feel very relevant. One of them being how women revolve their lives around men. Ana María says it herself: “Why must a woman’s nature be such that a man has always to be the pivot of her life?”(pg.226) This really stuck with me because, even though women in the novel technically have some freedom to choose and live, most of them still base their emotions and day-to-day decisions around men.

We see this clearly in the competition among women: who is prettier? who comes from a higher social class? who is more desirable? The suicide of Silvia was the strongest example of this for me. She kills herself out of jealousy and comparison, over Maria Griselda’s beauty. Or another example is Anita having sexual relations with the guy she loved just to tie him down. Honestly insane, but it shows how deeply women internalize these pressures and insecurities, and how destructive they become. 

On the other hand, men are allowed to do as they please in the book. They have affairs and leave women, without facing the same judgment. Antonio and Ricardo both renounce Ana María in different ways, and that renunciation gives them a sense of control (as the quote in the beginning of this blog says). Ricardo convinces himself that he’s meant for bigger and better things, so leaving Ana María “pushes” him to do so. Antonio, on the other hand, only loves her when it’s light and one-sided, and the moment she loves him back, he pulls away and turns cold to stay in control.

Women, on the other hand, are not allowed to do the same, they would be called shameless or sick if they did so. Instead, they are expected to suppress their feelings: love, desire, passion. This repression is framed as “wise behavior.”  This idea still exists today. Women are often labeled “too emotional” or “crazy” for caring deeply, which makes this book feel surprisingly current. 

Because Ana María spends her entire life repressing her emotions, it makes sense that the moment of real clarity only comes on her “second death”. That’s why the question “Must we die in order to know certain things?” stood out to me so much. I read it as the idea that people often only allow themselves to feel, reflect, and care once someone is gone. It’s only after dying that Ana María realizes how much she mattered to others: Ricardo goes to her grave even though she thought he had erased her from his life, Antonio cries, and her children show grief. She can’t undo the suffering she lived through, but being dead allows her to finally understand it, and in that sense, her death becomes a kind of clarity, almost an act of life. 

Do you think this clarity finally “frees” her from the repression she lived her whole life?