Lullaby: Caring for Life and Happiness

Posted on August 2, 2026 by Jon

We know from the very outset of Leïla Slimani’s Lullaby (2016) the conclusion of the story it tells: this is the tale of a nanny who murders the two children who are in her charge. The book is therefore in part an investigation into how such a tragic event could come to pass. How does a woman described as “this perfect nanny” (202; also the US title of the English translation) come so dramatically to turn from being the embodiment of care to being the agent of destruction and violence against two young innocents? But the book is equally–and perhaps even more–powerful as an exploration of the ambiguous and ambivalent relationship between employer and employee in domestic service. The murder that caps this story merely plays out the worst fear of a relatively common condition, when well-meaning middle-class parents invite an unknown quantity into the heart of their familial arrangements.

The parents here, Paul and Myriam, are generous and full of good intentions. He is a music producer, and she is a lawyer. She is more interesting than he is, or at least the book is more interested in her, perhaps because she is the mother, traditionally expected to find fulfilment and satisfaction in nurturing her off-spring. Indeed, at first that is her intention: initially she gives up her high-powered job to commit to full-time motherhood but to her “secret shame” (8) she cannot stand the restrictions on her life that this entails. When she runs into her old boss, Pascal, and he hints that the firm would take her back, she becomes a child herself: “She had wanted to hang on to Pascal’s leg, to beg him to take her with him, to give her a chance” (11). This is an early sign of a theme that runs through the book: that everyone needs mothering, but there are just not enough mothers to go around. When Pascal does agree to take her on again, she and Paul decide to hire someone to mother their children, but who will also end up largely mothering them, too.

But the decision to take on paid help is fraught with guilt and uneasiness. Paul comes from a left-wing family–“His parents had raised him to detest money and power” (106); his mother is full of “stories about her youth, her past political commitments, her revolutionary comrades” and once “believed that a revolution led by both sexes would give birth to a very different world, where her grandchildren would grow up. A world where there would be time to live” (115). Myriam’s work as a lawyer focuses on legal aid cases, defending those who cannot afford to pay for representation, “sleazy dealers, halfwits, an exhibitionist, talentless robbers, alcoholics arrested at the wheel” (29). She even finds herself defending men accused of hate crimes or domestic abuse. This despite (or because of?) the fact that she herself, it is implied but not directly stated, is of North African origin. So she is alert to the endemic racism of the agency where she first looks for help, where initially the agent assumes that Myriam is looking to be a nanny, rather than to hire one.

Ironically, perhaps, though most nannies are women of color (later in the book we are given a glimpse to the way they “swarm” with their local charges in the park, murmuring “snatches of Baoule, Dyula, Arabic and Hindi, sweet nothings whispered in Filipino or Russian” [178]), Myriam is set against hiring a North African:

She fears that a tacit complicity and familiarity would grow between her and the nanny. That the woman would start speaking to her in Arabic. Telling Myriam her life story and, soon, asking her all sorts of favours in the name of their shared language and religion. She has always been wary of what she calls immigrant solidarity. (16)

From the outset it is important, in other words, for Myriam to be able to maintain her distance, to establish clear boundaries, to avoid thinking (or letting the nanny think) that she has much in common with the person they hire. She and Paul therefore end up picking one of the few white women on the market, a forty-year-old named Louise. But for all the assertions of distance, one of the first things we hear Paul saying to her is “Make yourself at home” (21). The ambiguous overlap between workplace and home is already built in. 

If anything, Louise starts off with a better sense of the contradictions and struggle inherent in her situation. Shown around Paul and Myriam’s home, “she observes each room with the self-assurance of a general standing before a territory he is about to conquer” (22). And it is not long before the “apartment is completely under her powder, like an enemy begging for forgiveness” (24). This is because she soon establishes her indispensability, as a “miracle worker” (22) who brings order to the chaos, and swiftly breaks down any initial resistance from the children, baby Adam and primary-school-age Mila. Louise can play games and tell stories; she can cook and clean and sew. It is not long before she is not so much commanding general as not-so-secret agent: “she has embedded herself so deeply in their lives that it now seems impossible to remove her” (159). A fellow nanny visiting the apartment one day, when Myriam and Paul are away, sees that they have on display a photo of Louise holding the children. “You’re part of the family,” she tells her (121). By this time, it seems that this has become Louise’s fantasy, too.

Myriam and Paul encourage this fatal confusion, because they do not want either to see themselves as employers or Louise as employee. So they invite her to be guest as well as cook for a dinner party with their friends. Here also we see similar denials of power relations when Myriam introduces Louise to “Pascal, my boss” only for him to reply “‘Your boss? Oh, give me a break! We work together. We’re colleagues” (51, 52). It seems to suite everybody to blur the hierarchies that divide them. Yet at the dinner Louise still feels “nervous as a foreigner, an exile who doesn’t understand the language being spoken around her” (52). It is easier for those who hold the upper hand to deny that fact that for those who are supposedly included within a relationship that goes beyond labour to feel that they truly belong. But at the dinner, fortified by the flowing wine, Paul goes a step further: “This year, we’re going to give ourselves a treat and take our nanny writh us on holiday! You have to enjoy life, right?” (54). To whom is he speaking? Who has to enjoy life here? Is this the nanny’s holiday, too?

The irony is that for many jobs, the requirements for being a good worker involve denying that you are indeed a worker. By refusing to recognize your exploitation by others, you also become willing to exploit yourself, going beyond your contractual duties, working late, thinking about work in your leisure hours, confusing work with life. It is after all precisely their investment in their careers, and their identification with their jobs, that has led Myriam and Paul to turn domestic care into paid labour. But they want and expect from their nanny a similar self-sacrifice, which indeed she provides, going above and beyond expectations at every turn. Myriam and Paul want Louise to care for their children in the double sense of not only performing a service for pay (something a hired baby-sitter begrudgingly does one weekend when Louise is ill), but also being emotionally attached, even perhaps loving them. But not too much, of course, because one day this service will no longer be required. When Adam and Mila no longer need her, Louise’s contract will be terminated.

This is the anxiety that starts to grip Louise: that she will become (literally and figuratively) redundant. She therefore hatches a plan, to encourage Paul and Myriam to have another child: “Her obsession with the child spins endlessly in her mind. She thinks of nothing else. This baby, which she will love madly, is the solution to all her problems. [. . .] It will protect Louise’s place in her kingdom.” The problem, however, is that Louise’s don’t see the need for a new child: after all, they have two already. The children they have block the arrival of the one who is to come, and in more ways than one: 

She feels sure that Paul and Myriam don’t have enough time to themselves. That Mila and Adam are an obstacle to the baby’s arrival. It’s the children’s fault if their parents are never alone together. Paul and Myriam are exhausted by their tantrums; Adam wakes up too often in the night, cutting short their lovemaking. If the children weren’t constantly under their feet––whining, demanding cuddles–Paul and Myriam would be able to forge ahead and make a child for Louise. Her desire for that baby is fanatical, violent, blindly possessive. She wants it in a way she has rarely wanted anything: so badly it hurts, to the point where she is capable of choking, burning, destroying anything that comes between her and the satisfaction of her desire. (183)

For a desperate woman, perhaps touched with madness (and we also get something of Louise’s context and backstory, to which her employers are almost entirely oblivious), all this is no doubt reason enough for the dramatic act of violence that has unfolded as the novel opens (and with which it ends). She kills the children because they can never be enough, because one day they will grow up and pass her on the street without recognizing her; she will become no more than the faintest of memories, like the “ghost” to which she is several times already compared (110, 155). She kills the children for the sake of new life, of continued life, and because “Someone has to die. Someone has to die for us to be happy” (193), although she never realizes that, whatever Myriam and Paul say (“Louise will be so happy” [55], they convince themselves as they invite her to work through their holiday), her happiness is the very least important factor in the labour contract that fleetingly binds her to this bourgeois existence.

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The Days of Abandonment: Writing a New Story

Posted on August 1, 2026 by Jon

Olga is a writer, a mother of two young children, living in Turin. Her husband, Mario, has just announced that he is leaving her. So begins Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment (2002). What follows is an exploration of her response to her new situation, which veers from grief to anger, tragedy to something like comedy. Along the way, there is a fair amount of overlap with Annie Ernaux’s The Possession, which covers much the same territory. What distinguishes Ferrante is, first, the materiality of the world she describes, whose very thinginess at times seems to conspire against the novel’s protagonist. Second, the fact that Ferrante’s heroine has children (where Ernaux’s does not) changes almost everything. This is as much the portrait of a mother as it is of a wife. After all, as Olga discovers, the maternal bond has to endure even as the marital relationship breaks down.

At first, Mario offers little in the way of explanation. But soon enough it becomes clear (and despite his initial denials) that he has in fact taken up with another woman. To add insult to injury, it turns out that his new girlfriend, Carla, is significantly younger, the daughter of a woman who had once been the couple’s friend when the two of them had first moved to Turin. Indeed, at the time the young girl’s apparent infatuation with Mario already caused ructions within their marriage, and now Olga concludes that far from cutting off contact with Carla then, 

For almost five years he had secretly enjoyed that body, had cultivated that passion, had transformed it into love, had slept patiently with me abandoning himself to the memory of her, had waited until she became of age, more than of age, to tell me that he was taking her definitively, that he was leaving me. (70)

Olga realizes all of this only when, by mere accident, she comes across Mario and Carla out on the street. Any previous sympathy she may have had for her husband now vanishes. A woman enraged, she attacks him physically, shoving his face against a shop window. “Hold the commas, hold the periods,” she says to herself. “It’s not easy to go from the happy serenity of a romantic stroll to the chaos, to the incoherence of the world” (70). She wants to drag him with her to this unpunctuated experience in which the narratives providing sense and meaning to everyday life suddenly no longer hold. And yet, of course, in their own ways each of the two of them is playing out their part in one of the oldest stories in the book: the cheating husband; the betrayed wife.

There is then a double challenge here. Ferrante’s challenge is to tell this well-worn tale in a new way. And this then echoes or is echoed in Olga’s challenge to reconstruct her sense of self, and perhaps particularly her sense of self as a woman, without falling into familiar traps and stereotypes.

For Olga is now haunted by a story from her childhood, a story that at the time she perhaps did not understand but which now gains new meaning, of “a dark figure of my Neapolitan childhood,” a woman whose husband had abandoned her with her children and becomes the subject of cautionary gossip in the neighbourhood:

My mother talked about it with her workers [. . .] while I played under the table [. . .], repeating to myself what I heard, words between sorrow and warning, when you don’t know how to keep a man you lose everything, female stories of the end of love, what happens when, overflowing with love, you are no longer loved, are left with nothing. The woman lost everything, even her name (perhaps it was Emilia), for everyone she became the “poverella,” that poor woman, when we spoke of her that was what we called her. The poverella was crying, the poverella was screaming, the poverella was suffering, torn to pieces by the absence of the sweaty red-haired man, and his perfidious green eyes. (15–16)

How to avoid becoming the poverella, who lost her name and her individuality, transformed into an archetype? And how, now for Ferrante, to avoid simply writing another poverella’s tale?

Of course, one way to avoid the same old story is to give the scorned woman voice, and this is fundamental to Ferrante’s novel. We may perhaps intuit or (from Olga’s point of view) fear what others may be saying, but here we still rigorously close to Olga’s own perspective, even if it may leave us in the dark about other aspects of the story. We know little to nothing substantial about Carla, for instance: she becomes simply the girlish seducer, childlike in her presumed infatuation. Her perspective will have to be left for others to tell. Olga by this point has no desire to be “fair,” and neither does Ferrante.

And perhaps another way to reiterate the same old tragedy of the helpless victim is to veer into comedy. At times I did wonder if this was intentional, but to me much in the novel approached a dark slapstick humor, especially as Olga comes to be betrayed not only by Mario, but by the physical world around her. Her telephone is broken, for instance. She has to replace the locks to her apartment, and even getting in and out becomes a struggle. Everyday, habitual acts become a mystery:

Maybe I was too tired to maintain the usual order of the world. I shouldn’t have gone out. What had I done? Had I put the coffeepot on the stove? Had I put in the coffee, filled it with water? Had I screwed it tight so that it wouldn’t explode? And the milk for the child? Were they actions that I had completed or had I only suggested to myself that I complete them? (95–96)

There is also a sex scene, in which Olga tries to seduce her downstairs neighbour, a musician she hardly knows, that is also surely funny in its spectacular failure as the musician comes too soon (here the object that betrays her is his penis). Dragging herself up the stairs afterwards, “Crouching in a corner, beside the banister, I saw the poverella of so long ago, who said to me in a weary but very serious tone: “I am clean I am true I play with my cards on the table” (87). But who is that phantom from the past to give Olga her advice?

The novel is entitled Days of Abandonment, though in fact it covers several months: it starts on “one April afternoon” (9) and continues until at least August, because we are told that “the hardest day of the ordeal of my abandonment” is “Saturday August 4th” (88). Indeed, almost a third of the entire book (pages 88 to 151) is devoted to this single day, which proves to be a catalogue of disasters that range from a sick kid to a dead dog (possibly poisoned, she imagines), fights with her children (one of whom stabs her with a paper cutter), and Olga accidentally locking them all into the apartment. To cap it all, by the end her indignity is witnessed by her downstairs neighbour, who has come up with “a rose, a single long-stemmed rose, a ridiculous rose offered with a ridiculous gesture by a man not at his ease” (148). Again, it is hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

No wonder the children periodically add to Olga’s woes by suggesting they might be better off with their father. But she perseveres and by the end, when Mario asks her to take them more often because “Carla is exhausted, she has exams to take, she can’t take care of them, you’re they’re mother” (185), this is truly the last straw for Olga, the point at which she realizes “He wasn’t even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print made by a hand on the wall” (186). And it is about the same time that she also senses that she has somehow broken from the paths set for her by the stories she has read (Anna Karenina) or been told: “I had even buried somewhere the abandoned wife of my Neapolitan childhood, my heart no longer beat in her chest, the veins were broken. The poverella had become again an old photograph, the petrified past, without blood” (184). The present does not always have to repeat the past. 

She can even return to the site of her earlier embarrassment and clumsiness, looking for someone who “knew how to make meaning stronger, to invent a feeling of fullness and joy” (188). The book ends with the acknowledgement that this is a fiction, but at least it is a new one, and she is prepared to pretend to believe it. She is writing herself into a new story.

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Last blog post ever.

Posted on April 9, 2026 by Carlina

That’s right. This is the end. But when certain things come to an end, I like to think about how it can lead to new beginnings. For me, one of those new beginnings is a growing appreciation and desire to read more Latin American literature. As a French Studies student who also did a major in French as an undergrad, this course served as my introduction to the world of Latin American literature. Of course, the course didn’t focus solely on that. After all, the theme of the course was “long books”—a topic we explored from multiple angles, including through the lens of students’ blogs, which was honestly one of my favourite parts of the course. I LOVED reading my classmates’ blog posts. I can’t say blog-writing is something I will continue, as I am a very private person. But perhaps that will change…perhaps, after being obliged to share my thoughts and ideas with others, I will learn to open up more. This can be another new beginning for me. As an undergrad, I was always one of the quietest students. When I would finally work up the courage to raise my hand, I would tremble in fear, which was usually followed by an immense worry that I would sound stupid in front of others. One aspect of this course that I appreciated was the fact that I felt a lot more comfortable and less nervous than I usually do in class. For that, I give credit to our professor Jon, as well as my wonderful classmates. As a grad student, there are many instances in which I feel inadequate. Unfortunately, I tend to compare myself to others far too often. So I want to say thank you to everyone for setting a tone and creating a classroom atmosphere that was welcoming—an environment full of open-minded individuals, from different backgrounds and fields of study, who invited thought-provoking discussion, without judgment.

So, has my opinion of long books changed since the beginning of the course? The Savage Detectives was the second longest book that I’ve read in my life (the books we read in my other courses are usually less than 300 pages). I didn’t love it, but I did like several aspects of the book (if you’re wondering what those aspects are, you can read my previous blog posts). Les guerriers de l’hiver was significantly shorter in length (459 pages) and overall, I did prefer this novel over The Savage Detectives. Norek’s novel was definitely more conventional and less experimental than Bolaño’s. However, I appreciated Bolaño’s unique (and sometimes bizarre) writing style. In fact, I’d say that I preferred his writing style more than Norek’s. But, I would say that I preferred the story of Les guerriers de l’hiver. On the other hand, Amulet was the real gem of this course. Reading the short novel put me in a bit of a trance-like state, as I embarked on a surreal journey through memories of the past and visions of the future, while constantly being reminded of the present situation of our narrator (I loved her), who faced incredible challenges as she survived through a week or so of absolute chaos. It was beautiful. And I’m looking forward to reading it all over again. I probably won’t be rereading the other two books, at least not for a while. And it’s not because they’re much longer books. I’d say that I now have a greater appreciation for longer books after taking this course. Perhaps that was one of the goals of the course? Well if it was, then it worked on me. I haven’t figured out which books I’ll be reading this summer, but I already plan on looking into books that are lengthier than those that I usually choose to read. In the past, I’ve often chosen shorter books over longer books, simply because I figured that I would be more likely to finish those books. I’m the kind of person that usually gravitates towards books that are less than 400 pages long. If I’m in a bookstore, I will pick up books that look like they’re 400 pages or less, then proceed to read the back in order to see whether it might be something I’d enjoy reading. They say that one should not judge a book by its cover (I’m also guilty of this), but I’d say that one should not judge a book by its size either. Sure, it might take a lot longer to read, especially for a slow reader like me. However, that extra time and effort might just be worth it. Not every book is worth reading. But I don’t want to miss out on those that are worth reading, simply because of their length. This course has helped me gain the patience and focus to read through longer books. And for that, I am incredibly grateful.

I hope everyone has a wonderful summer :)

Question for the class: If you were to recommend a book for me to read this summer, what would it be?

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I’m sorry for this but I do not know what else to write about

Posted on April 9, 2026 by julsanta

I am late with this. It’s been increasingly hard to do anything. Fuck depression.

I hope I do not come off trying to find pity in this post, but if I have to write something this is the only thing I have in my mind and I might as well use this obligation to write a blog post as some kind of shout to the void.

I do not know why did I think I could be a graduate student. I do not know why did I think I could be in academia. Two out of two times I’ve hit a big, painful, life threatening depressive episode at the end of a term. I’ll survive, maybe, but will I finish my masters? Increasingly I think it is not for me. Even though it seems that having an imposter syndrome is a necessary qualification for academia it seems no one does anything to address it. I’ve been told several times, by different professors that “it never goes away”, but haven’t been offered a real solution. I do not know how to write an essay. I do not know how to engage with a class. You would think that after a whole degree in literature I would feel capable to have a thought. The anxiety I’ve been trying to manage this week has made getting out of bed one of the hardest challenges. And now I have two essays in the horizon, no idea what I am going to write about, no idea how am I going to write them, wondering if I should just drop out, go back to Colombia, get in a call center and either die of burn out or depression. Since we are talking about endings that seems the one my life keeps foreshadowing to.

I have no idea how the next weeks will look like.

I am 90 words short.

Well, around 8000 words short.

How am I to survive this degree let alone the academic career that seems to be the only option left for me?

 

 

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Roads Not Taken

Posted on April 9, 2026 by Jon

I ended up teaching a course on long books this semester. Here is the original proposal:

Why are long books long? Beyond its length, what makes a long book different from a short book? How is the experience of reading a long book distinct from that of reading a short book? Should long books be shorter? Should short books be longer? What, if any, characteristics do long books share? Is there a politics of extension? This course sets out to answer these apparently simple questions. Along the way, we will also consider the phenomenology of reading, and ask how we read and why?

We will begin by reading a couple of long books (and, for the sake of comparison, also a couple of short books by the same authors) together. After that, students will choose a long book of their own for further study and investigation.

[Incidentally, students who actually took the course will note that the original plan was to read two, not just one, long books together, and that we would read the books consecutively, rather than in parallel.]

But I was quite tentative and unsure about this proposal, and in fact came up with (and suggested to the department) two other possibilities, one on “Twenty-First-Century Women Writers” across various Romance languages, and the other on “Displacement and Mobility in Latin American Narrative.” I am putting the descriptions of those potential courses below. I suspect that at first sight they would have been more attractive to many students. Indeed, one of my worries about a course with the title “long books” was that nobody would want to take it, not least because it advertises from the start that it would involve a lot of reading…

To my surprise, in fact, more students signed up than I had anticipated. Specifically (in that this was always to be a combined graduate/undergraduate course), more undergraduates enrolled than I expected to do so. And these were undergraduate students, moreover, who were overwhelmingly engaged and outspoken from the start. I had worried that they would feel intimidated and silenced by the graduate students (as sometimes happens with these crosslisted courses), but on the contrary: if anything the undergraduates were more invested and wanted to make the most of the course and what it had to offer.

(Sidenote: This is something I noticed also in the other course I taught this semester, which I also worried about at first. I thought, especially after coming back from a year and a half without teaching–because of sabbatical and leave–AI would basically have taken over. But no: I think we have a rising generation of post-Covid and AI-resistant students who no longer want to be fobbed off by a sub-standard university.)

Anyhow, these other potential courses would no doubt have been interesting and productive in their way, I like to think. But I am very glad that I went with “Long Books,” a course I had in fact long been talking about and hoping to teach, even if at the last minute I almost got cold feet about it.

For one thing, it soon become clear that the initial question–“why are long books long?”–although it may seem trivial and even jokey at the outset (after all, the obvious answer is the banal one, “because they have more words”), is in fact a real question that opens up a whole series of topics and themes. Indeed, we have ended up discussing literature and politics, psychology, economics, aesthetics, sociology, even biology… and fundamental questions about the limits and possibilities of representation.

For another, the course proved challenging but also rewarding pedagogically: I asked students to read one long book that I chose (Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives), but also invited them to pick a long book of their own, which they read in tandem or parallel with the set book. “Teaching” these books that I had not read (that in some cases I had never even heard of before the start of the semester), I have never felt more like an ignorant schoolmaster. And yet now, in the last week of the semester, I have a (fleeting?) feeling that all these texts are starting to resonate with each other, as they come to their various endings.

And finally, I have a new respect for and interest in long books. Adapting Tolstoy, I do think it is true that while short books are short for mostly the same reasons, long books tend to be long in their own ways. Which is not to fetishize length for its own sake (there are plenty of bad long books), but to think about what can be done across a bigger canvas, and how long books postpone conclusions or resolutions for good reasons.

But these are the roads not taken…

1. Twenty-First-Century Women Writers

This course is a survey of contemporary women writers whose work has been translated from Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Catalan, or who are writing within a Romance Language tradition. Their books cover many different topics and styles: from history to memoir, autofiction to thriller, fantasy to horror; migration and violence, politics and family, race, class, and sexuality as well as gender, and much else. Amid all this variety, we will ask what if anything these texts might have in common. Does it make sense to talk of “women’s writing” here? Does the fact that they write or are fluent in a Romance language make this a meaningful category?

Though the set readings are still to be determined, these are some likely contenders…

Spanish: Mónica Ojeda (Ecuador), Jawbone (2018); Samanta Schweblin (Argentina), Little Eyes (2018)
French: Delphine de Vigan (France), Based on a True Story (2015); Annie Erneaux (France), The Years (2008)
Italian: Elena Ferrante (Italy), My Brilliant Friend (2012); Valeria Parrella (Italy), Almarina (2019)
Portuguese: Adriana Lisboa (Brazil), Crow Blue (2010); Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida (Angola/Portugal), That Hair (2015)
Romanian: Ioana Pârvulescu (Romania), Life Begins on Friday (2009)
Catalan: Eva Baltasar (Catalonia), Permafrost (2018)
English: Edwidge Danticat (Haiti), Claire of the Sea Light (2013); Valeria Luiselli (Mexico), Lost Children Archive (2019)
German: Herta Müller (Romania/Germany), The Hunger Angel (2009)

2. Displacement and Mobility in Latin American Narrative

This course examines various forms of displacement and mobility in Latin American narrative, from the conquest to the present. It proposes that displacement and mobility are central figures in the region’s literary imagination, continually reprised and replayed in sometimes surprising variations. From the violence of conquest to the itinerancy of capital, from the desperation of exile to the utopia of migration, the disruption of revolution or the smooth flows of neoliberalism, displacement and mobility have continually reshaped Latin American society and politics, uprooting populations and enabling lines of flight or escape, for better and for worse.

Though the set readings are still to be determined, these are some likely contenders…

Álvaro Enrigue, You Dreamed of Empires
Juan José Saer, The Witness
Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism
José María Arguedas, Deep Rivers
Carlos Fuentes, The Old Gringo
Roberto Bolaño, Amulet
Tununa Mercado, In a State of Memory
Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban
Rita Indiana, Papi
Claudia Hernández, Slash and Burn
Emiliano Monge, Among the Lost
Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

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Another ending: Do you know what you are reading next?

Posted on April 9, 2026 by Amada Libertad

Another ending.

As we conclude this term, I can notice a difference in me. I started noticing this, when I finished The Savage Detectives. My urge to keep reading got really intense, almost to the point where it felt a bit excessive. It was not until I finished the other book that I realized what was actually going on.

It is not just that I want to read more, but that I have gotten used to staying with a text for longer. I keep thinking about it after I finish, going back to certain parts, trying to make sense of things that did not fully click the first time. The ending does not feel as final anymore.

When I finished Justo Antes del Final, the sadness that took over me almost pushed me to start a new novel right away. However, I stopped myself to think about whether that was really necessary, or if starting something new was just a way of avoiding that uncomfortable feeling.

I realized that I am not used to just sitting with what a book leaves behind. I usually feel this need to move on quickly, to fill that space with something else. But this time i held onto that bittersweet feeling a bit longer. The sadness did not go away, and starting another book would not have changed it, it would have only distracted me from it.

How long should one mourn a story? How long should one mourn a book?

If the book is longer, is the mourning harder? I guess now I understand one of the conversations we had in class about endings, and how maybe humans just hate them as much as they hate death.

Maybe that is the beauty of collective reading. You do not have to confront the ending in isolation.

I think that could be one of the reasons why finishing The Savage Detectives did not feel as difficult as finishing my individual book. We were constantly in conversation, sharing thoughts about Bolaño and the events we were reading, engaging with each other’s posts. That made the ending feel less heavy.

Maybe that is also why it did not feel as overwhelming.

Do you feel like that too? Did it feel easier to finish The Savage Detectives than your individual book?

I remember mentioning the page count set in class for a book to be considered “long” in front of students who were not in our class, and a lot of them disagreed. I’m curious to see if my standard for what counts as a long book changes after this class, and actually pushes further.

Do you know what you are reading next?

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The End – Monge’s Goodbye

Posted on April 9, 2026 by Amada Libertad

Finishing a long book feels like a small death. A forever goodbye.

Do authors cry when they finish their books? out of sadness, satisfaction, frustration?

Monge finishes the book really similarly to how I expected everything to end. You would expect that if an author is writing about the history of his mother throughout the different years she lived, he would end the book with the last year she was alive. and of course as a reader, I had to witness the death of Monje’s mother. Thus, I not only went through the death of the story, of the book, but also the deeath of the main character that made this book possible.

2014

That’s the year Monge’s moms dies. But the book doesnt end there but two years after. These last two chapters/two years are particularly small, in comparison to others (a great way to denote the absence of our main character).

2015

“Recordarás, entenderás o leerás —aquí, en esta página— que aquel año tu madre fue un torbellino de auroras boreales.”

“You will remember, you will understand, or you will read—here, on this page—that that year your mother was a whirlwind of northern lights.”

2016

“Empezarás, en el silencio de tu mente, a estar con ella otra vez. A sentir, en realidad, cómo se descompone el monopolo, cómo se disemina su energía, cómo zurcen, esos vectores, el caos y los afectos.”

“You will begin, in the silence of your mind, to be with her again. To feel, in reality, how the monopole breaks down, how its energy disperses, how those vectors stitch together chaos and affection.”

These chapters are so short, less than half a page each, and that contrast with the rest of the book feels intentional. It’s like the structure itself changes once she’s gone.

For me, this shift really reads as “the silence of the mind” that Monge mentions in 2016. Not just empty space, but the kind of silence that comes after someone dies. The absence of her, of tu madre’s voice becomes part of the narrative. And it’s uncomfortable, but also necessary because, in some way, that’s what grief feels like. You’re left with fragments, with less to hold onto, and you have to figure out how to exist in that new reality. To a weird extent, it is the same way we have to deal with the end of a book (a book that you care for).

It also changes how we read. The book kind of forces you to slow down, to sit with that absence, and to recognize that the story can’t continue in the same way anymore. In that sense, grief doesn’t just happen in the content, it reshapes the entire form of the book.

Looking back at my first blog post about this book, I’m starting to better understand the two worlds that each chapter holds: the intimate world of the family, especially tu madre, and the broader world of global events (scientific discoveries, political tensions, the rise of narco violence in Mexico, etc.). You can’t take a person out of their context. The mother is not just an individual with her own emotions, memories, and behaviors, she is also shaped by everything happening around her, even things that seem distant or unrelated. In that sense, the book feels like an attempt to map an impossible network of connections: between history and intimacy, between large-scale events and the smallest, most personal experiences.

It’s almost as if Monge is searching for an explanation, not in a reductive way, but in a desperate, expansive way. Like trying to understand: why did she become who she was? Why does trauma take the shape it does?. You can’t understand a person in a vacuum, because their life is entangled with political violence, scientific paradigms, cultural shifts, and historical moments that exceed them.

So instead of offering a clean explanation, the book builds this dense web of references and timelines, where everything seems connected, even if those connections are not always clear or fully comprehensible.

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Final Blog!

Posted on April 8, 2026 by annabelle

Woah, I cannot believe we’ve reached the end of the semester! Thinking of endings: this is always an ending I don’t mind reaching. If we think about each week as a chapter and the whole semester as a book, I’ve enjoyed this one. In this comparison am I writing the chapters or reading them? I guess that depends if we think of the future as determined or variable. Okay well, that’s enough of that, I am getting annoyed with myself.

A takeaway for me is how long books can be helpful. Going into this class, two of my favourite pieces of literature were Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck (about 100 pages) and “Desirée’s Baby” by Kate Chopin (about 8 pages). While I do definitely like long books, I like how short texts are so concise, precise, (when done well) every piece fitting just so. I feel it is harder to argue that longer books achieve the same precision: one of my challenges with The Savage Detectives was whole parts could have been taken out or switched or changed, and the whole story would not have come out much different. In another way, I like how the super short stories we read – like the dinosaur in the bedroom – had a similar effect of causing an amplification of our imagination imbued into the reading.

But there are things only long books can do. Bolaño held us in suspense for some-500 pages and several decades to conclude a story that all started with García Madero joining the visceral realists. That is certainly not a tool shorter books can use – but I don’t think I would have the patience for another book like this.

Reflecting on the long book format, I see another interest in long books: as antidotes. Increasingly, attention spans are shortening as content is shortening to meet them, creating a back and forth that seemingly leaves long books as out of style. Perhaps we can think of long books as solution: to require readers to commit for a longer period of time, to require closer reading than trendy BookTok favourites and commitment to putting away other distractions if we are either to get to the end or to get something out of it. 

Towards the end of the semester, as I find myself increasingly stressed and without a moment to spare, I find myself increasingly tiring to Instagram feels for respite: a quick scroll really puts my mind at ease (lol!). But then of course, like any other vice, it doesn’t meaningfully  help me. Turning to long books, or books in general, might just. And so, I find myself turning to my next read…

I have the amazing opportunity to visit my good friend Sofia in Chile for three weeks in May! To prepare, I’ve done a VPL spree and I’ve put a bunch of Chilean books – fiction and non-fiction (and also a photography book from 1954? I’m going to try to find the same streets to compare!) on hold – including Isabelle Allende’s House of Spirits, which we’ve talked about in class…not favourably! Haha! Also a book Lily recommended to me, called I Lived on Butterfly Hill, which makes me reflect on the social aspect of books. I love the social aspects of books – how a usually solitary activity can create community and conversations…hmm sounds like I need to join a book club!

Which, now that I think about it, RMST 495 felt like to me. It was a space to share findings, learning, interpretations in an open way that promoted discussion and deeper readings. In not having to worry about writing essays, I found myself doing a different kind of learning: how to read to share. I’ve enjoyed hearing from everyone else’s interpretations and own books, as well as the atmosphere in class! It’s been so fun to be in a class where everyone contributes and is not on their phones the whole time. Thanks guys! I was a pretty quiet student – but I always enjoyed listening to what others had to say.

Well, that’s all from me folks. I am both excited and sad about our final class tomorrow – it’s my final class for the semester, which always feels both exhilarating and daunting! For my final question for you all, do you have a favourite end of year song? I can think back clearly to the song I put in my headphones at the end of each semester (it had to be the perfect song to capture the weight lifted off of my shoulders of course!). So do you have any songs you like to listen to at the end of the year?

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never can say goodbye

Posted on April 8, 2026 by harmela kassa

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endings… and nostalgia; Where do we begin?

Posted on April 8, 2026 by jasmine choi

endings: long books —

I don’t know why I always feel challenged to write an ending that is satisfactory. At this point, I’ve written quite a few conclusion blogs for Jon’s classes. Some are better than others. Some are forgettable. A few are memorable. I wonder if it has to do with nostalgia. Sentimentality, of sorts. Nostalgic for what? A time and place? BUCH B218 on Thursdays from 3-6pm; a grueling time but campus in the evening carries a different weight. Sentimental for the books I’ve read? For Perec? For Bolaño? Have I developed some sort of attachment to the form of a long book? Have I grown weary of it? Have I grown fond of the weariness? (This week, I’ve not been able to complain to anyone about the giant books I’m reading). Maybe, in truth, I have grown fond of talking about the books themselves, learning and discussing new things, and of reading/writing the blogs.

All these thoughts and feelings are most likely accentuated by the fact of my graduation. At what other time in my life will I spend an hour and a half trying to establish a precise timeline of a book that is a chronological labyrinth with only a semblance of rhyme and reason?

I think that I am trying to conjure up some sort of substance in this ending. I think, however, it is my fate to somehow always return to nostalgia when it comes to endings.

I guess the question is: what exactly have I learned?

In this culminating blogpost, I’m thinking about digressions, about pith, puzzles, gestalt, time and the reading of it, windows, knives, and some very long books. I’m thinking about stylistics, and how Lily said mine is “…I think.”

I’m thinking about how I wrote about endings and gestalt some time ago, and how that maybe would’ve been a better concluding blogpost. But alas… Maybe it is indicative of how endings are almost never at the end. How many endings can we have? Where can they be? Where could they end? What makes a good ending? And how often are endings at the end?

I’m thinking about enigmatic endings. Do you think Jon will end the class tomorrow by asking us “what’s outside the window?”.

Onto takeaways. I will sincerely miss writing blogposts and also reading them. Yes, reading long books in this kind of time constraint felt masochistic at times. Yes, I enjoyed it. Yes, it felt like a fun little book-club sometimes. Yes, I will probably endeavor to read more long books now. No, I probably will not read too much more Bolaño.

Here, I am wondering: do you think that nostalgia has to do with a ‘good’ ending? What is a ‘good’ ending to you? Where is it? Is nostalgia or sentimentality tied up with it?

Nostalgia, I think, always has to do with ending(s). The end? maybe not. More so, I think it has to do with the perpetual half-open process of ending. The very core of the -ing part of ending. (It’s never done?) Maybe, we have to differentiate between endings and the end. Maybe, the one thing that never really ends is the ending itself.

Do you think nostalgia has to do with void? Is it the force that establishes gravity, thus keeping the void outside the window? Does nostalgia end? Does it begin?

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