RMST 495/520: Long Books

Reactions

Reading Quiet Chaos has been overwhelming! I have to say so much happens that it feels a relentless level of emotional trauma unpacking, yet I couldn’t stop turning pages. I felt heartbroken, empathetic, and at times frustrated, drawn into Pietro’s temporary world where grief isolates, disrupts, and transforms both him and those around him. As I get closer to finishing the book, Veronesi truly captures how mourning can be private yet socially tied to others. He writes so heartbreakingly, leaving me emotionally bothered and deeply reflective.

Commentary

For me, the most striking moment is when Pietro’s brother Carlo stays overnight. Their brotherly conversation is raw, vulnerable, and deeply affecting: Pietro confesses how much he misses his wife, while Carlo admits that he misses his brother (i.e., the man he once relied on, now emotionally unavailable since the accident).

VS.

It is clear to me that this scene was about vulnerability. It resonated profoundly with me because it shows how grief is not self-contained. Pietro’s mourning ripples outward, affecting those who care about him. We see this more and more through each and every interaction since he started crying alone in his car. I’m starting to see how his personal loss can create unintended emotional voids for Pietro’s daughter and his brother. The quiet, yet almost masculine honesty of two men confessing their emotions felt painfully real and tender.

The narrative tension really heightens up when Eleonora, the woman Pietro saved at the beach, finally contacts him. Meeting at the park bench, she thanks him and recounts that day. Pietro recalls a man shouting at him in the chaos of the waves, warning him he wouldn’t make it in time. When Eleonora shows a photograph of that man, I felt a jolt of suspense and curiosity, realizing that a plot twist is about to happen!

The emotional weight peaks and the plot twist drops: As Eleonora leaves the park, Pietro sees her dropping a wedding ring into the gutter, revealing that the man who doubted him is her partner. Actually, we later learned that Eleonora is not married, but rather she is the mistress of the man who is sabotaging Pietro’s company. So !!! The man whom she loves told Pietro to not bother saving her was her fiancé – PLOT TWIST, OMG !! What is Veronesi writing, blending personal, quiet trauma with professional chaos?

Anyways, Pietro’s sister-in-law suggests returning to the summer home in Roccamare, where his wife fell to her death, to help him and his daughter face the trauma, grieve and seek closure. Due to an unforeseen last-minute obligation, the sister-in-law could not make it, and only Pietro and his daughter made the journey. I am now curious to see what is going to happen once he is in Roccamare, because I am sensing that Pietro’s confrontation with the past would demand an emotional reckoning that is long, long overdue.

Discussion Question

You can answer the question in any way you like, whether related to literary works or personal experiences.

Pietro confesses that he misses his wife because of her absence from his and his daughter’s lives; his younger brother Carlo admits to him that he misses him because of his absence from his life. Both men clearly talk about absence, but in two different ways: one who passed away, the other who is stuck in grief and distances himself from others who are still in this world.

Hence, absence can be felt in two ways. How does grief or trauma change the way we act toward our loved ones, and how does our distance affect the people who care about us most?

As we continue to transit through the life of Monje’s mother, we encounter an interesting collapse of narratives. In the year 1983, “tu madre’s” year, chapter 1983 for Monje, we encounter the moment in which Monje decides to write the book the way we are reading it now. The moment in which he decides how to tell his family story:

“Sólo habrá un personaje y ése serás tú, sólo puede haber un centro múltiple, madre, y ésa debes de ser tú, sólo hay un ojo de huracán, madre, y ése serás tú.” (p.314)

"There will be only one character, and that will be you; there can only be a multiple center, mother, and that must be you; there is only one eye of the hurricane, mother, and that will be you." (p.314)

What feels especially mind-blowing here is that, as readers, we are not just reading the story, we are also reading the exact moment in which the author decides how to tell it (crazy, please tell if you have encountered this before in another book). The narrative folds into itself, the time collapses, in a way that makes us aware of the process behind it, almost like we are being let into the decision-making (being let into something so personal and intimate), the hesitation, the need to structure something that is otherwise overwhelming.

There is something almost cathartic about this. Instead of presenting the story as already complete, Monje exposes the moment of its construction, as if writing becomes a way to process and hold together everything that cannot be told linearly. The mother becomes both the center of the story and the reason the story needs to be written in this fragmented way.

Monje’s mother becomes the ghost itself of the family trauma, the bridge.

She is not just a character, but a site where memory and absence accumulate and return. A kind of territory that calls on others to listen to what has not been fully said, to what never received closure. In this sense, her presence feels like a demand, almost a call for help, in trying to make sense of everything that happened to her.

Maybe before developing this idea further, I should explain a bit more the role of the ghost in the book.

As I wrote in my first blog for this book, I believe ghosts are a kind of unifying character in the book. Monje’s mother sees ghosts everywhere in her childhood home, in the house next door, in the office of her dad. Sometimes, it’s not only the dead who appear as ghosts. At times, the living also become ghost-like in specific situations, when they interrupt a conversation, when their presence feels out of place, or when they carry something that cannot be fully said outloud

Even objects can take on this shape. For instance, the testicle that Monje’s father lost in an accident is literally referred to as a “ghost testicle.” It is no longer physically there, but it continues to exist through a joke, through absence, through the way it shapes how the identity of a character and the story are understood. Naming things like a testicle a ghost gives its absence another meaning. In this case, the ghost testicle could point to a form of masculinity that is already fractured, a father figure who appears fragile, incomplete, and in some ways absent even while present.

There is a moment when Monje’s mother claims that:

“desde que empecé con esta mierda [..] he vuelto a ver a los fantasmas de mi infancia.”

"Ever since I started with this crap […] I’ve started seeing the ghosts of my childhood again."

* The crap meaning the informal interviews Monje conducts with her.

Here, the act of telling her stories brings the ghosts back. However, we can also understand how the ghosts are the ones allowing/pushing?/forcing? her to speak; they surface so she can confront, narrate, and transfer her stories to Monje. It is what makes it possible for her stories to move from private experience into narrative, and for Monje, and the reader, to encounter and hold them.

Hi Ava, this may contain spoilers! I was going to divide this post in two, because I finished Conversation in the Cathedral. Then I thought I could write my final blog post on One Hundred Years of Solitude, so I’m putting everything here.

First, I promised to talk about more characters in my last post, so here’s a brief analysis of Queta and Hortensia. I thought they were both Cayo’s mistresses, while the two of them are a couple in secret — my guess wasn’t far off. In this section, we find out that Cayo uses them both almost as prostitutes to entertain his political friends. Cayo only bought Hortensia a house to use it as a private nightclub for the senators. But Hortensia thinks Cayo loves her (although she despises him), and that she’s found a reliable patron. Queta is more realistic and knows Cayo is using them, but she cares deeply about Hortensia, whether out of love, friendship, or pity — I’d say bit of each. In a way, Hortensia and Queta reflect two different mindsets among people who thrive under a dictatorship. One has faith in the strong political leader, she may not love him, but she believes him invincible, and believes herself completely safe under his protection. The other remains mistrustful to the leader and know that her fortune is only momentary.

My jaw dropped when this last part of the book revealed that Hortensia was blackmailing Santiago’s father Don Fermín, the government minister, not because she was his mistress (as I wrongly assumed), but because she knows that he and his chauffeur Ambrosio have a secret sexual relationship. Ambrosio has a strange admiration (certainly not love) for Fermín, he feels responsible for helping Fermín take care of the blackmailing, so he kills Hortensia. This final reveal was not climatic. It’s just sad. He leaves Fermín, gets married, loses his money to a bad business investment and his wife to childbirth. He returns to Lima with nothing, runs into Santiago, and they start drinking and talking in the Cathedral bar. The book ends where it began. We spent a few hours in a bar, but we also went through a dramatic 15 years (with a dictatorship thrown in there).

In the end, it just feels like everyone took a violent beating and then grew old. Is this the closure I want? The government ministers don’t get any consequences for fucking up Peru, but go on with their comfortable lives in their beautiful houses with pools. However, every plotline did get closure. The murder mystery was unveiled, though the truth was depressing, pathetic. The family drama ended when Fermín’s died and all his children established their nuclear families. The political drama ended with “Cayo Shithead” getting expelled. Ambrosio and Amalia’s romance soap-opera turned out a tragedy, and Santiago’s Bildungsroman too, in the worst way — no triumph, no growth, no romantic self-sacrifice…oh, I’ll give you that one, Zavalita, when you broke with your family to be independent, you sacrificed a life full of potential for your ideals. You threw your life away, but you did stick out with your decision to the end.

“The only things is that I really wasn’t the one who made the decision. It was imposed on me, just like the job, like everything that’s ever happened to me,” Santiago says this of his marriage and his whole life. In this book, I identify with Santiago the most: we are hesitant, we have vague ideals but are not brave enough to imagine them to the detail. We resist what we don’t like in a discreet and futile way, often failing make a statement against anything…

“Mediocre” is a word that appears repeatedly, mostly to describe Santiago. It seems like artists (and I consider novel-writers artists) have a problem with mediocrity, Vargas Llosa being no exception. They despise it. Who lives a more mediocre life in this book? Santiago? His petit bourgeois life, his wrinkled suit, weekend movies with the family… But there’s still a “small worm” gnawing at him from inside, a worm left over from his communism days. He never truly reconciles with his family. Or is it his siblings, Teté and Sparky — still holding up the family business, marrying the right people in their class? They never had ideals. Is that mediocre? What if they all are, in some way! And what if none of them deserve to be blamed for it! What is mediocrity anyway? Is it an observable lack of something in life, or is it something interior, related to our ideals, some kind of flame inside? Are we readers, most of us leading less exciting lives than the writer, just going to let the writer bully us into self-deprecation? I refuse to be. — look, another discreet, utterly useless resistance on my part.

Does your book talk about mediocrity? If so, how does the author define mediocrity? Is it criticized?

Or does your author criticize another quality?

Back to Les Misérables for this week! Here’s a quick summary of the book so far:

Jean Valjean was convicted for a crime in his youth. He repented and became a beloved mayor, but then tenacious police officer Inspector Javert found out about his criminal past and started hunting him down. Along the way Jean rescued a little girl named Cosette, whose mother he knew. Last we left off, Jean and Cosette were living on a farm, Javert still hunting to no avail (yet anyway).

The next section of the book is called “Marius,” which is what I read for class today. Marius Pontmercy is a new character, though linked to the story so far: Thénardier, the barkeeper who raised (read, abused) little Cosette, fought in the Battle of Waterloo alongside Marius’s father. Thénardier scavenged a medal off of almost dead Monsieur Pontmercy, who mistook his actions as trying to save him. Thénardier really is no good, and contrasts through with Jean as a man who appears noble yet is cruel behind closed doors.

Marius is a young man raised by his royalist grandfather and his unmarried aunt. After his estranged father’s death, Marius learns that his grandfather had intentionally kept the two separated; he then rejects his grandfather in memory of his father, leaving home for Paris. With this rejection we see a return to the ideals of the French Revolution: where his grandfather represents the royalists, Marius turns away to embrace a more Napoleonic stance. Marius meets new friends along the way, which brings me to my next discussion point.

I would like to discuss the relationship that I see between Les Misérables and The Savage Detectives. Though as we discussed in class, it seems that long books are long for many different reasons, in this section I found that these two long books anyway share a few similarities. First of all, Marius reminded me a lot of Juan García Madero: orphans raised by family members, now young men, pushed to be lawyers but reject this path in favour of wandering, and then leaving home to look for answers in other people and ideals.

Additionally are the expansive lineups of characters, as well as portraits of them, Victor Hugo stating explicitly, “This is the history of many minds of our time” (206) to justify these lists. Marius, his grandfather, father, and aunt, down to the parakeet that she owns, are described in detail as each are introduced, which is different to the first-person snippets that we get of characters in The Savage Detectives, but still provides an equivalent portait of characters.

Here is one (abbreviated here – it lasted a page!) portrait that cracked me up: “Monsieur Mabeuf’s political opinion was a passionate fondness for plants, and an even greater one for books…he had the appearance of an old sheep” (231).

Marius meets a host of like-minded friends in Paris, “The legitimate sons of the French Révolution” (a very visceral realist-esque), and they discuss, instead of poetry, revolutionary ideals at the Café Musain. Here, visceral realism and the Revolution reach a similar status of the young folks, Enjolras, a friend of Marius, declaring that “Citoyens: my mother is the Republic” (222)

Marius, living nearby where we last saw Jean Valjean and Cosette, observes in the Luxembourg gardens a father and daughter – the father is nicknamed Leblanc and the daughter Lanoire. Though they have new names now, we have met Jean and Cosette once again. At first, he finds Cosette homely, but six months later he is beguiled, and falls in love with her beauty. This novel was written in 1862, so some of the ways that Hugo describes girls is disturbing from a modern standpoint: “that pure and fleeting moment which can only be described with these two words: sweet fifteen” (237). Marius then proceeds to what we might interpret today as staking Cossette/Lanoire, following her around the park and to her home, though here it is presented as innocent and genuine love. Eventually, freaked out by this persistant follower, father and adopted daughter move.

For a discussion question building off of this relationship, what do you think about navigating past standards that do not live up to modern expectations?

I only read five chapters of The Shadow of the Wind this week (maybeeee 65 pages), which means I have about 190 pages to read next time to finish off the book (hoping for some nice weather so I can read outside). I did read some spoilers on another blog post, which was my own fault, but I am looking forward to seeing where the ending goes. I mentioned in last week’s blog post how I wondered whether authors of long books owe their readers something in their ending that differs from short books, but now I’m wondering whether/how that changes when the long book is not a standalone but rather the first of a series.

This short part that I read included a twenty page experimental(?) interlude, when the characters were interviewing the elderly Jacinta about Penelope and Carax and how they came about deciding to get engaged.

This was only the second (I thought there was a third but couldn’t find it) time the author has used this interlude style of prose, the first being back when they were asking the priest about Nuria Monfort (209).

The way it’s written feels like a flashback scene in a movie (quite dramatic). It’s all italics and is supposed to be the narrative of the person being interviewed (eg. the priest’s section gets interrupted and they mention that he paused in his narrative) but it’s told in third person and doesn’t sound like it’s being told the characters’ voices: “As a child, María Jacinta Coronado was convinced that the world ended on the outskirts of Toledo and that beyond the town limits there was nothing but darkness and oceans of fire” (268). Following Jacinta’s interlude, she continues her narrative for two half-pages in her own voice.

I thought that this flashback writing style choice was kind of weird in its inconsistency, especially since it’s only happened twice (again, maybe) and not every time the characters interview someone about Carax. Now I’m sitting here wondering if it has a structural purpose or if it is just a neat little writing quirk.

My questions for this week come back to ideas of pacing (from our class discussions) and endings. I would say that The Shadow of the Wind (for all I complain about slogging through it) (and it isn’t just me, here is the top review on Storygraph from when I went to make sure people agreed with me that it was medium-paced) is a medium to fast paced book.

I guess when we’re talking about pacing for a long book, should we have longer beginnings and more drawn-out endings? Would this help our middle sections (which has too many pages to be entirely fast-paced without tiring the reader out) to feel like they can cut out some of the excess that takes away from the main story arc?

I am at the part where Bea came home late after hanging out with Daniel. During this part, the line that stood out to me was: “You really don’t understand women, Daniel. I bet you my Christmas bonus that the little chick is in her house right now, looking languidly out the window like the lady of the Camellias, waiting for you to come and rescue her from that idiot father of hers and drag her into an unstoppable spiral of lust and sin” page 190-191. The first part that stood out to me is the word “chick” and the language being used not only in this sentence but throughout the book to refer to women. Secondly, it exposes how the characters really view women and only think of them in a lustful manner. Similar to the Savage Detectives even in the Shadow of the Wind Daniel only views women in a sexualized manner because he was the same way with Clara as well. It shows that they reduce women to this idea of being lustful and waiting to be pulled into “sin.” It’s just really weird. It also shows the patriarchal world we live in because even though this book’s setting is so long ago I still see a lot of it in today’s time as well. 

It’s so much weirder considering Bea is Tomas’s sister and Tomas is Daniel’s best friend. I just do not understand how you can risk your friendship with your so-called best friend for his sister who is already engaged. Even though he told Tomas after it was still just weird and odd to me. And me personally I would not like it if someone was trash talking my best friend’s family yet Daniel seems to have no problem with Fermin calling Daniel’s dad an idiot. 

I like how the book turns to Carax though because Daniel and his personal life is honestly just so boring to me that I could care less. I only enjoy reading about Carax as that is actually interesting. For example, when they were talking about his whereabouts during the early outbreak of the civil war or when they go into father Fernando’s office that is where I actually enjoy reading but anytime it flips to Daniel’s personal life I feel like never picking the book up again. I do think though I am not as excited about continuing reading this book as I was in the beginning. 

Discussion Question: How do you feel about the way women are described and talked about in most Latin literature?

Hello guys!!

I cannot believe I went this far with Don Quixote , but this has been a good experience.
One aspect of the novel that I find very interesting is the relationship between Sancho and Don Quixote. I talked about this before but now I am noticing that their conversations reveal new patterns as their adventures progress.
While Don Quixote continues to talk about chivlary and his idealism , Sancho is more attached to reality which represents the ongoing clash between reality and illusion.
I find that Sancho (despite of not being as brave/ honourable) is no longer a passive servant. Their bond has multiple layers such as friendship , but also a co-dependency ( even at times a bit philosophical).
“Once or twice, as well as I remember,” replied Sancho, “I have begged of
your worship not to mend my words, if so be as you understand what I mean by
them; and if you don’t understand them to say ‘Sancho,’ or ‘devil,’ ‘I don’t understand thee; and if I don’t make my meaning plain, then you may correct me, for I
am so focile” (863).
Sancho is showing that his confidence is growing and tells his master that communication is more important thatn precise grammar.Sancho does not have the intention to be like him as long as he is understood.
In another scene , we see how Sancho goes along with his master’s illusions but he gives it a little twist ( maybe to make some sense on him).
“Well, to tell the truth, senor,” said Sancho, “when I saw that sun of the lady
Dulcinea del Toboso, it was not bright enough to throw out beams at all; it must
have been, that as her grace was sifting that wheat I told you of, the thick dust she
raised came before her face like a cloud and dimmed it” (874).
This momment shows not only how Don Quixote sees the world through literature and not by facts. Sancho is trying to modify his truth for a second but Don quixote goes back to his inner world.
The friendship of these two is formed through mutual dependence , humour but the understanding of their individual ideologies.
Another exchange of words that i liek was this one:
“Tell me, senor,” Sancho went on to say, “those Julys or Augusts, and all
those venturous knights that you say are now dead- where are they now?”
“The heathens,” replied Don Quixote, “are, no doubt, in hell; the Christians, if
they were good Christians, are either in purgatory or in heaven” (877).
Sancho is not passive. He demands for answersfrom this opposite logic.The characters connect with each other even though they are in opposite realms ( reality and fiction).
Discussion question :

If you get the chance to read this novel , what arguments would you make in support that Sancho is the real protagonist?