That Hair: Ornament and Caricature

Posted on July 12, 2026 by Jon

Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s That Hair (2015) is hardly a conventional novel. It has no obvious plot, for instance, and consists instead of memories (presumably, mostly autobiographical; the narrator’s history seems on the whole to mirror Pereira de Almeida’s biography) and reflections braided around the persistent topic of the narrator’s hair. The hair itself is both the book’s subject and its excuse, its content and in many ways also its form in so far as the narrator’s thought processes curl and crimp, get matted and entangled, despite periodic efforts to brush them straight or give them more recognizable shape. 

Strangely, perhaps, the hair itself is not in fact described at great length. We are merely told that after it was first cut, when the narrator, Mila, was till basically a baby, only six months old, it grew back or was “reborn coiled and dry” (1). Presumably it is dark, curly and, well . . . stereotypically “African.” It is characterized as a “rebellious mane [. . .] a lion’s mane” (5), further reinforcing the notion that her hair is what ties the narrator to the land of her birth, Angola, as well perhaps as indicating a dash of the primitive and the exotic.

But Mila is not exactly what, in Africa at least, would be called Black. She is, rather, a “mulata das pedras, as they say in Angola, not the idealized beauty that mulata conjures for them but a second-rate one, and with bad hair to boot” (6). Her father was “a blond-haired, prematurely bald young man who in past lives had been the blondest kid in the neighborhood, the child-elect to play Baby Jesus for a Beira nativity scene” (60) and she grows up with her paternal grandparents, Grandma Lúcia and Grandpa Manuel, in Portugal, in a town very close to Lisbon, to which she has moved when she was still a young child. She is, in other words, at least as much Portuguese as she is Angolan. Not that it is always so easy to disentangle the two.

After all, her Portuguese relatives have a long-lasting relationship with southern Africa. Grandma Lúcia was born to a Portuguese travelling salesman and his wife in the Congo. Grandpa Manuel was an engineer who moved to Mozambique to help to construct dams for a hydroelectric company. Their family history is evidence of flows and fluxes across Europe (the narrator’s great-grandmother is described as an “unmistakeable Jew” [62] and some distant aunts as “Viennese girls lost in Mozambique” [63]) as well as between colonial center and far-flung periphery. Another great-great- grandmother had been “the spouse of a celebrated colonel in Macau” (64). They are all, in various ways, servants, handmaidens, or children of an Empire that lasted surprisingly

In Africa, the Portuguese colonies (Angola and Mozambique, but also for instance Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, all first colonized in the sixteenth century) only gained their independence in the 1970s, after years of bloody guerilla warfare (of which, however, Pereira de Almeida makes very little mention). The Portuguese withdrew after a peaceful coup (the “Carnation Revolution”) that in 1974 overthrew the authoritarian regime originally established by António de Oliveira Salazar in the 1930s. It is as though Mila, and her hair, were a displaced remnant of that long colonial enterprise. Or as the narrator puts it: “The truth is that the story of my curly hair intersects with the story of at least two countries and, by extension, the underlying story of the relations among several continents: a geopolitics” (2). 

Yet Pereira de Almeida’s narrator is unwilling to see her hair as simply a symbol or metaphor. It is too stubbornly material to be reduced to mere signifier. This is indeed a history of her hair–or rather “that hair,” which is not entirely part of her, and not entirely not. Over the course of the book “that hair” emerges almost as an entity in its own right, “its own persona, an alter ego there in the room” (38), not so much a part of the narrator as a prefigurement of what she herself might yet become, or could once have become. That hair has a life of its own, a life to which the narrator herself sometimes aspires.

At the start of the book, the narrator worries that this is too frivolous a topic; it seems such “a trivial matter” (51). And of course, we can easily live without our hair: it is surely more ornament than essence. “Are you still talking about your hair, Mila?” someone unknown person (perhaps, Mila herself) is imagined as asking (86). At times it is as though it is an unworthy subject, when so much is going on in the world. At times she “cut [her] hair to forget it even further,” and yet she discovers that “What I can’t do, I would later admit to myself, is forget this hair without also forgetting myself and plowing forward while leaving myself behind, like two people who lose sight of one another at a street market” (83). She has to come to terms with this quasi-alien excrescence, precariously attached to her, and to which she is only precariously attached.

There is a lot in this book about photography and photographs. The narrator leafs through her own, or her family’s, photo albums, real or imaginary, as well as an album given to her by a hairdresser: a catalogue of ideal types of haircuts, “featuring women who’d just had their hair done, their look of pride [. . .]. The album is the antithesis of my own disheveled albums, and, at the same time, it describes the arc of my hair’s drama, showing day one, the best day of each woman’s hair” (115). There is also a discussion of a photograph taken in 1957, amid the civil rights struggles in the USA, of a Black student attending Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, surrounded by a baying mob of white protesters. The narrator sees herself in all the people pictured, Black and white: “little rock, the mulata das pedras. I see now that I am the persecuted and the persecutor, the disfigured, disfiguring myself” (97). Her hair, here, is a gateway to history, allowing (or perhaps forcing) her to take both sides in a visceral clash that is also, of course, based on an appearance mistaken to be essence.

There is something intolerable in the feeling of being split in this way, in being compelled to identify with such discordant positionings, but the narrator’s hair is also an entryway into language and writing, which similarly revolves around what she calls (in the context of a school party in which she “dress[es] up as an African”) “distancing and duplicating” herself. “This was perhaps the only mask that could reveal me, exposing the distance that separates me from what I am as an auspicious and not irretrievable idea” (112). It is by performing or recording (writing) the caricature that she can never quite become that she may also be able to come to terms with who she is. “The hair and the writing would one day need to come together like a couple after a long separation” (124). Yet this resolution never quite arrives in the novel: its last words are (still) “who then is Mila?” (148). 

After all, if this “whole hairy drama” (146) were ever fully unknotted, then it would no longer be her hair; it would no longer be her. The knots, the entanglement (expressed often in language that is equally convoluted), are what make “that hair” what it is, and similarly what make Mila who she is: someone whose identity can never quite be pinned down, caught between her “own particularity” and the “stock black woman” to whom she can only aspire, and who “today deserves [her] deference How to be worthy of her? I don’t know how to do my hair on paper without this story slipping from my grasp” (86). Just as her hair can never fully be “tamed” (95), except through an imaginary encounter with the Little Rock photo taken before she was born, so her story remains unruly, “leaving literature waiting at the door” (124). Hence That Hair never quite takes shape as a novel. How could it?

If reading this book is therefore often frustrating, then that is surely part of the point. As the narrative only comes in and out of focus, without ever settling in one place or time, does that not mirror what the narrator terms her hair’s “cycles” of growth and regrowth punctuated by new cuts and stylings (85)? So long as Mila has hair on her head, old stories are abandoned and cut short as new ones emerge without ever coming to any single conclusion.

Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on That Hair: Ornament and Caricature

When I Sing, Mountains Dance: Songs of Selves and Others

Posted on July 8, 2026 by Jon

The subject of the assertion contained in the title of Irene Solà’s When I Sing, Mountains Dance (2019) is, in the first instance, a young man by the name of Hilari who composes poems–though he does not write them down. He comes up with poems mainly for people and animals, and one of them (shades of Walt Whitman) is a song for himself, a “Poem for Me, Hilari”: 

I sing to the moon when it blossoms full, 
Round fang in the kindly night, 
[. . .]

I sing like someone plowing a garden,
Like someone carving a table,
Like someone raising a house,
Like someone climbing a hill,
Like someone eating a walnut,
Like someone lighting a fire.
Like God creating animals and plants.
When I sing, mountains dance. (69)

But throughout this book–a book that is itself surely Whitmanesque in that it, too, “contain[s] multitudes”–we see plenty of others also carving tables, raising houses, climbing hills, and the like. Many sing, and many mountains dance.

The mountains here are the Pyrenees and we are in Catalonia (Solà’s novel is translated from the Catalan), a rural retreat for city-dwellers seeking picturesque “authentic[ity]” (62) or a respite from all the “noise” and the “cars and all the buildings and the pointy corners and the straight lines” of Barcelona (129). Here, one might imagine, is natural peace and age-old tradition, where little changes and perhaps nothing happens.

But we are also on the border between Spain and France, a pathway traipsed by refugees and soldiers fleeing the Nationalist advance of Franco’s forces during the Civil War. This is a countryside strewn with the detritus of war, such that many decades later young children can still come across bullet casings and unexploded grenades half-buried in the earth.

Moreover, this is a landscape of unquiet forces that traverse the boundary between natural and human history, between life and death, between reality and myth. There are the four women, for instance, hanged as witches in some previous century and perhaps not without reason, in that they laugh at authority and “piss upon” the crosses that are “sullying the mountainside” (19). These women are among the many ghosts or revenants that never quite go away (or always come back) as they permeate the stories and songs related and recited by this novel’s many characters.

Almost every chapter, in fact, introduces a new narrator, some of whom are human, usually residents of this precarious existence on the hostile mountainside, and others of whom are more than human. Again, however, these boundaries blur. A bear narrates its violent history with humans and its undying desire for revenge–“Wake up, ye men who hunted us. [. . .] We were here first. Long before men and women” (147). But in the very next chapter, a woman plays the part of a bear in some folk ritual of “the Bear Festival in Prats del Molló” (152), albeit adjusted to the times in answer to the question “When are we going to have a woman bear?” (151). And a little later we hear from Jaume, a man who has escaped the region (but will soon, of course, go back) and who goes by the nickname “the Pyrenees bear” (170).

This is a novel that humanizes great natural forces (even the mountains themselves, or the vast geological pressures that give rise to them, are given a voice, speaking almost sub specie aeternitatis: “Because nothing lasts long. And no one remembers the names of your children” [107]). But it also gives vent to the inhuman fears and desires that both shatter and consolidate the bonds between men and women.

If this novel has a center (and arguably it does not; arguably it is as polycentric as it is polyphonic), it is the story, told in fits and starts, of the family living in the farm or smallholding that goes by the name of Matavaques (“cattle slayer,” as we’re helpfully told [131]. The books opens as a young father, Domenèc, is killed by being struck by lightning, with the weird sisters of course in shadowy attendance. We later pick up on the story of his widow, Sió, his daughter, Mia, and his son, Hilari, he of the oral poems and songs.

Hilari, however, is struck down young, like his father before him, but in his case not by random lightning but in a hunting accident, out with friends. His killer (Jaume, known as the “giants’ son”) is the man who goes by the name of Bear who we meet much later, in self-imposed exile from the mountains after he has spent some time in jail for his crime . . . presumably manslaughter, which goes to show that it is not just cattle that are slayed around here.

It is not clear whether Jaume’s story is one of the “bad stories” that, we are told, are the stories men tell, as opposed to the tales told by the witches and other women, “stories we love because they’re never in the voice or through the eyes of those men who write the bad stories” (112). As a whole, Solà’s novel is a remarkable patchwork of ventriloquy that allows a whole range of entities to speak–and often we hear the same events retold from very diverse viewpoints. 

We do not necessarily have to resolve the differences between these different perspectives, or to know how things will ultimately work out, because we know that this is merely a partial snippet from a much longer history of mountains and the people who live on or near them. Indeed the book ends on something of a cliffhanger: one revenant has returned to Mia’s (Hilari’s sister’s) life, and we do not know what will happen to her relationship with another man who has helped briefly to obscure her loss in the meantime. 

There are still stories to be told. “He’ll say some things,” Mia tells us. “The ones he remembers, the ones that light up like firecrackers when it’s time to say them and you’re able to say them. [. . .] Then I’ll say some things. The ones that I can” (197, 198). And at the end of it all, perhaps “when we’re done, we’ll see who we are” (197). This is a song of their selves, a point-counterpoint of stories of creation and recalibration that is as unending as the tectonic forces that make and unmake the very ground beneath their feet.

Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on When I Sing, Mountains Dance: Songs of Selves and Others

Discontent: Calling Out Bullshit

Posted on July 7, 2026 by Jon

Marisa, the narrator and protagonist of Beatriz Serrano’s Discontent (2025) has what anthropologist David Graeber calls a “bullshit job,” which he defines as “a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence” (Bullshit Jobs: A Theory 3). In her case, her pointless employment is as a mid-level manager in an advertising agency. In meetings, she comes up with clichés or finds ways to fend off deadlines and decisions–“Let me check a few things” (7)–while she daydreams, scans Twitter (now, of course, X) and doodles tiny penises in her notebook. Later, she will hand off any actual work she has been asked to do to the students she is teaching in a course in “a master’s program at a private university that hired me thanks to the English diploma I listed on LinkedIn” (10), passing off the task as an assignment for academic credit. 

Her students at least are still eager and enthusiasm. Marisa is long past jaded: “I’ve been doing the same thing for eight years, and I know it doesn’t help anyone. I know the world would be a better place if jobs like mine didn’t exist” (8). She once wanted to be an artist or a curator–she studied Art History at university, and still likes to tour the Prado when she takes one of her many midday breaks, playing hooky while still on the agency’s clock. She originally took her job as a temporary thing, staying on in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis because “the advertising world seemed safer and more reliable than the hypothetical and increasingly distant world of art. I guess I made the wrong decision. Or maybe, between the possibility of being happier and buying more things, I chose to buy more things” (17). After all, she has bills to pay. And it is nice to be able to take off at short notice for a week or two to the Canary Islands. Any residual anxiety can be dealt with by popping Lorezapam (Ativan) a few times a day.

Indeed, her life is hardly all dismal. She has enough money, few commitments (no children or partner, but a guy in her building is a regular “friend with benefits”), stable employment, and sufficient distance from the demands of her employment that she is happy to see it as a performance or a game: “Work is just a role you play and I’ve mastered it perfectly. [. . .] I know what to say to make the time flow faster, without actually doing anything, until I can go home at six” (6). She may well be alienated, but she knows it (no illusions), and she is not exactly mining coal or being sent up chimneys. She does not really care whether her agency does well or otherwise, and she knows how to keep up the pretense that she is contributing willingly and productively to whatever success it may have.

The worst she has to endure is the vacuous small talk and naïve sloganeering of her colleagues (“teamwork makes the dream work” [25]). And she has at least one co-worker, Rita, who thinks much the same as herself, and they can entertain themselves by rolling eyes at each other during meetings. At the end of the day, rather than feeling downtrodden or oppressed, Marisa feels that she has “tricked capitalism for one more day” (27). After all, Capital has hardly appropriated much if any of her labor power. And what would she be doing otherwise? She spends most of her spare time (and much of her “work” time, too) watching YouTube videos.

She does recognize, however, that this is a game that is not without victims, even if she is not one herself. She indulges in a measure of hypocrisy that we might call post-post-feminist. She has, after all, (she tells us) read her way through the feminist canon: “Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Virginia Woolf, Kate Millett, Silvia Federici, Angela Davis, Judith Butler, Virginie Despentes. None of that matters” (29). Not only does she still shave her legs and buy expensive face cream, she is called in to shield her company from accusations of sexism, such as when she helps come up with a “sorry not sorry” apology for an ill-advised tweet made by a freelancer on their social media team. She has “been branded the office feminist who needs to be consulted on all gender-equity issues. I’m a token; what I read outside of work and the fundamental beliefs I fight for when I’m not too tired are used by the company to improve their image” (29). “A part of me is disgusted,” she admits, “like I’m betraying my gender” (61).

But (bull)shit gets a bit more real when Rita, who is if anything even more “discontent” than Marisa, stops coming in to work and is found to have died, perhaps by suicide. No longer is Marisa simply “betraying” an abstract concept such as “gender.” Now perhaps a real, flesh and blood person–although hardly a “friend,” as she realizes how little she knows of Rita’s life outside of work–has literalized the daily “dehuman[ization]” (49) that Marisa otherwise keeps at bay through humor and irony. It is a struggle to admit to herself that perhaps humor is not enough, and that maybe she is not “trick[ing] capitalism.” It is almost unimaginable that she might admit this to anyone else, though she fantasizes about telling her mother: 

Mom, I don’t think I’m doing OK. I don’t think anyone is entirely OK, but I think I’m a little worse than the rest. I don’t think I’m as bad as a girl I knew, named Rita, who I never told you about, but who I think killed herself. Or maybe she didn’t. Goes to show you how well I knew her. Mom, I want to escape, I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to live this life. (129–30)

Discontent could, then, be written as tragedy, but though it definitely makes some serious points and lets off some shrewd and cutting barbs, for the most part it is cast as comedy (it is indeed often very funny), and ultimately as farce. It culminates with a company retreat, which is of course the very epitome and culmination of corporate ridiculousness (as also in the magnificent recent TV show Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat). Here, much bitter fun is made of the fact that Marisa’s boss wants her to help him find a speaker who would be “maybe a woman who can empower other women, but also men.” She considers what to answer:

I think about talks on the wage gap, on why women leave their careers to take care of their children, or on the mental burden of housework. I think about talks on destroying gender, sex, the patriarchy. I think about talks on sexism in the workplace, on the need for better applied policies on equality or on companies’ lack of real commitment to equity. I know that’s not what Ramón is looking for. (61)

In the end, Marisa herself speaks at the retreat, but rather than making the broad social commentary that she briefly envisages for the occasion, instead (spoiler alert) she takes the occasion as an excuse to spike her colleagues’ drinks with MDMA (Molly, Ecstasy). This is all very funny (it briefly reminded me of novels such as Kingsley Amis’s classic satire, Lucky Jim), not least the brief coda to this event which consists of a series of emails around the ensuing “internal investigation team-building retreat” (155), all of which are interspersed with Marisa’s automatic out-of-office reply, as she herself has blithely jetted off to Fuerteventura. But it is not exactly a critique. After all, isn’t the point that her colleagues (and maybe also the people who buy the wares that they all hawk) are already basically drugged, pictured here as zombies enthusiastically embracing the banal rewards of consumer capitalism?

But I guess the idea is that sobriety–or the cynicism and even feminist-informed self-knowledge that Marisa, for instance, instantiates–is no alibi. Surely, most of us do already know that work is shit; Marisa is far less of an outlier than she seems to think she is. We can be knowingly complicit or unknowingly so. Either way, simply knowing (however much disillusion and discontent go with it) is not enough.

Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Discontent: Calling Out Bullshit

Little Eyes: Remote Control and Controlled

Posted on July 4, 2026 by Jon

At the very end of Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes (2018), there is a mention of a young boy “staring at his own reflection on [a] black screen” (239). The book’s resonance with the TV series, Black Mirror, could hardly be clearer. As with Charlie Brooker’s show, Schewblin’s novel takes technology, especially the screens with which we are in constant interaction, as a point of departure for examining our all too (post)human foibles and frailties.

Also like Black Mirror, the innovation at the center of this book is hardly very far removed from what we already have with us. No jet packs, flying cars, or hyperdrive here. A “kentuki” is a digital pet or toy, not so different from the Tamagotchi that were briefly all the rage just before the turn of the millennium, perhaps crossed with the Furbies that came out around the same time. They are semi-autonomous digital robots dressed up with the accoutrements of an animal (rabbit, owl, crow, dragon. . .), for which their owners feel a sense of responsibility, and with which they can establish rather primitive communication. They can scurry around on built-in wheels but have no limbs and cannot climb, and they make noises such as squeaks or purring sounds, but cannot speak. 

The difference is that with a kentuki, there is a real live human being at the other end, controlling the creature’s movements via an Internet connection. Moreover, via a camera built into the kentuki’s little eyes, they can see you, but you cannot see them. So if you buy a kentuki, you can choose either to purchase the object itself, of which you become a “keeper,” or to buy a code that establishes a connection with and the means to operate someone else’s object, of which you thereby become a “dweller.” 

There is one connection, and one connection only, between dweller and keeper, which is broken if the dweller chooses to break it, or if the keeper either lets the thing run out of battery or otherwise disables or destroys it. Moreover, nobody gets to choose whose dweller or keeper they become: the pairings are randomly established, and could well cross cultures and continents. The dweller has a built-in on-screen translation so that they can understand a keeper’s instructions, or eavesdrop on their conversations with others. It is much harder for a keeper to receive any kind of message from a dweller, and in the book we find characters resorting to various stratagems such as Ouija boards or Morse code to do so. But while keepers tend to want to speak to and hear from the “other side” inhabited by dwellers, a dweller cannot be compelled to respond, and may well take advantage of the fundamental opacity of their role to be simply a silent voyeur of a keeper’s life. One can already imagine some of the ways in which things can go wrong.

The novel interlaces the disconnected stories of a variety of different kentukis, sometimes from the point of view of the dweller, sometimes from that of the keeper. It thereby criss-crosses the globe, establishing parallels or direct connections between cities or city pairs that lend their names to chapter titles: Lima, Barcelona, Zagreb, Beijing, Lyon, Umbertide (Italy), Antigua (Guatemala), even Vancouver (Canada). Some cities are the setting merely for brief vignettes that either break off or do not go anywhere in particular. In other cities, longer narrations develop with a number of twists and turns as either keeper or dweller develops new perspectives on their experience, but suffice it to say that they rarely end well. 

Again as in Black Mirror, a gadget initially envisaged as improving people’s lives (by providing companionship to the lonely, for instance, or allowing people to travel the world from their bedrooms) ends up complicating and even ruining them in unforeseen (if not entirely unpredictable) ways. We soon run into issues of ethics (can a keeper be accused of “abusing” their dweller? What if anything does a dweller “owe” their keeper?) and also politics (should the kentukis be “liberated” from their keepers?). Questions of epistemology (what can we “know” of what is behind the screen) and perhaps above all affect also abound. People may after all know that these are mere toys, whichever side of the screen they find ourselves on, but they soon become subject to or provoke love, desire, jealousy, suspicion, fear, anxiety, and so on. Even though dwellers cannot “feel,” the kentukis’ tactility comes to the fore, both when keepers are drawn to pet (rub, scratch, caress) their creatures, and when, for instance, a dweller from the tropics sets his kentuki on a mission to touch and even plunge into Arctic snow.

Through these little machines, subjects and selves become fragmented and globally dispersed in technological proxies and prostheses, re-embodiments that feel as real (or realer) than the sites where what one character calls the “brutish hunk[s] of meat” (92) that are our biological bodies actually reside. But all this is hardly science fiction. As with Black Mirror, we quickly grasp that Little Eyes is a reflection of a current condition that has been with us for some time.

Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Little Eyes: Remote Control and Controlled

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?

Comments Off on Last blog post ever.

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?

 

 

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

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

Tagged , , | Comments Off on Roads Not Taken

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?

Comments Off on Another ending: Do you know what you are reading next?

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.

Comments Off on The End – Monge’s Goodbye

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?

Comments Off on Final Blog!