Conclusion:

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When reflecting back on this class and all the novels I had the pleasure of discovering and reading I find myself a bit awestruck by the sheer amount of incredibly diverse, yet astoundingly reminiscent of one another these various works were. While I do love reading I found this class a tad challenging in that I’m a prolifically slow reader however I found that each and every novel we tackled left a lasting impression on me. Some where distinct in their form and style, others their subject matter, while others still in their commentary or the ideas they inspired in me. The most gratifying thing about this course has been that each story or piece created a space for my mind to explore the various messages, both explicit and implicit, being communicated through writing and that on its own is a wonderful thing to me. Compounding this, however, is the rich discussions we all had during class as well as in sharing our thoughts in these blogs. The particular format of the class, allowing for creativity and insight through sharing and comments on blog posts, allowed us to engage with the material and with each other in a way that strengthened our understanding of the material while also socializing and strengthening our ideas through collaboration. On the topic of the shared latin history of these stories I cannot say for certain if the romance languages link these narratives in any mutually exclusively way. What I can say however is that the threads of indivuality and place in society, as well as in finding meaning are present throughout all the novels and perhaps that’s one way in which each of these novels is connected. I had a truly wonderful time reading and exploring these novels. My final question to the class is what do you think links these stories together? Did you enjoy the novels you read? Were your experiences in class shaping your interpretations of the text?

 

 

 

 

 

Thoughts on Elena Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend” The Brilliance of Life and Writing

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After reading Elena Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend”, a novel I found out late is the first in a four part series titled the “Neapolitan novels”, I found myself completely spellbound and enraptured by a novel in a way that I hadn’t been in a while. On its surface this feeling perplexed me, as I found myself loving nearly all the books that I have read over the course of this class and in many ways, this novel is far more stripped back then the rest of our catalogue. Comparatively, this story is told without grand stylistic experimentation and sparsely uses poetic language, in favour of a style of prose that is of a more familiar, comfortable vernacular. It also is not as mysterious or illusory as other stories have been, replacing mysticism and interpretation with direct and explanatory language. What the novel may lack in stylistic experimentation it more than makes up for in constructing a narrative of a girl, her best friend, and the lives of the people in their impoverished neighborhood in Naples that is full of all the vigor of genuine life that managed to ensnare me in how epic, yet personal, this narrative feels. While I do admit I am generally a fan of coming of age stories more generally, I believe that this story is a masterclass in this style, effortlessly weaving between the different points in our character’s lives and how their outlooks may change with their changing circumstances. Elena’s relationship with Lina is in particular, an incredible display of genuine friendship, not because it is perfect and idealized, but because it is at times joyous and at other times confusing. Their friendship is often transactional, and while their relationship twists and turns, with both girls oscillating between admiration and envy of each other, culminating in an eventual divide that must inevitably lead to the resentment a 60 year old Elena holds for Lila. This relationship, along with relationships of various kinds, rivalries, friendships, animosities, loves, are described intimately by our narrator who is keen to describe her feelings openly to her audience in a way that pulls you directly into her headspace, the first person perspective and style of prose pulling you directly into Elena’s life in a way that closes any distance between reader and narrator. While the particularities of Elena’s life and relationships are front and center narratively, they all exist atop the backdrop of the growing economic divide driven by the capitalistic expansion of global post-war consumerist markets. The impact this has is that Lina, naturally gifted in anything she sets her mind to and rebellious to a fault, is crushed under the weight of the ever increasing economic disparity and depravity being placed upon her. Elena in contrast, is a hard worker and is also a wonderful student however much of her success, which in ideal circumstances could have just as easily been achieved by Lila, is informed by socioeconomic fortune such that she could claw her way out of their communities’ economic hardships while the bright and driven Lila is left behind like a light slowly engulfed by blizzard that slowly muffles it despite how brightly it tries to burn. This frames the intimate narrative around a scathing commentary on classist socioeconomic structures and how these various oppressive forces serve to interact with and inform these relationships in ways that tend to hold people back from their greatest potential. The novel ends on our protagonists around the age of 16, and I was delighted to find out there are more volumes in this narrative as I found that it so fully enthralled me in its simple yet deeply intimate and emotionally salient story that I can’t wait to read more.

My question for readers is what did you think of Elena and Nina’s friendship/rivalry? Did you think it accurately reflects many real-life friendships? how do you think socioeconomic status influences the opportunities of our characters? How would you compare Ferrante’s prose and writing style to the other author’s we’ve covered in class?

Thoughts on Javier Cercas’ “Soldiers of Salamis”: The Truth in Stories

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Javier Cercas’ “Soldiers of Salamis” was a gripping tale about the nature of ideology, truth, narrative, and the power these things can hold. Calling to mind the novel “W”, “Soldiers of Salamis” also features two distinct narratives in which the second is presented as being written by the protagonist of the first. The story surrounding our first protagonist, named Cercas for the author, describes his life as a struggling author and journalist as he finds himself enraptured by, and constantly seeking the truth of, the life of our second story’s protagonist Rafael Sanchez Mazas. Sanchez Mazas is presented, mirroring his real-world counterpart, as a man with bombastic, fervent, and ultimately destructive ideological pursuits whose writings spurred on the fascist Falange movement and led credence to the insidious insurrection of the Francoist faction during the Spanish civil war. Cercas’ account, however, is not that of a fierce soldier or general, but instead of a man whose rhetoric forces him and his country into such a violent and disorienting situation that the passionate ideologue seen at the beginning of his story is present only in name once he is subjected to the horrors of the war. Unlike the novels, The Time of the Doves, and Nada, where the horrors of the war effect our characters like the invisible radiation after a nuclear explosion, this portion of the present narrative displays the horrors of the war as if the bomb dropped directly on top of you, where Sanchez Mazas, incarcerated, dehumanized, and fated for death, is brought down to his lowest point before he miraculously escapes his capital punishment due to the actions of an at-the-time nameless soldier. From this point onward his grand ideological pursuits are replaced instead with a fervent need to survive and take back his humanity. His finding that the faction inspired by his words won the war gives him no peace either, as his ideals were bastardized all in the name of holding power. This exploration of ideology is tied in a way to the overall discussion of truth that informs the narrative. Much of the fiction of this work is based in the lives of real human beings, however it is not in an objective account of their lives but a fictionalization. While an initial appraisal here may be that this is simply lying, in a way all memories of people and things passed involves some degree of interpretation and piecing together of information. In this way, the novel comes to fully encompass, in its narrative surrounding Cercas’ construction of the story as well as in the story of Sanchez Mazas itself, the truth inherent to reconstructing history. That truth being that remembering an event past is much like a novel, there takes a bit of creativity and fanciful thinking to bring the past to life. Much like Sanchez Mazas constructs his own reality in the narrative through his writings, Cercas constructs Sanchez Mazas narrative by putting together pieces of a puzzle in which each piece is constantly shifting, creating a mosaic of the past rather than an identical photo

My question to readers is how much of Cercas’ narrative may capture the spirit of the real people he’s conjuring, especially Sanchez Mazas? What do you believe is the relationship between constructions of truth and systems of ideology?

Thoughts on Roberto Bolano’s “Amulet”: Time and the Creation of History

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Roberto Bolano’s Amulet was an interesting read particularly because of the way its central motifs interact with one another in a way that feels very natural. On the one hand, the narrative is centrally concerned with time, however its dissection of time is not one of some objective or empirical account of time’s nature, rather the way that time is subjectively experienced by an individual, as well as the way that one’s perception may inform the temporal perceptions of others and the histories they share. Our protagonist Auxilio Lacouture, in a pivotal scene in which riot police storm her university as she sits helplessly in a bathroom stall, describes the moment not just of surviving for her own life’s sake but surviving because she may be the sole arbiter of this moment, a living testament to the reality she experienced in that moment. However, as Auxilio readily admits, her memory of events passed is not photographic and many of the details that surround her life are either obscured through the fragmentation of her memory or have become dissolved into similar memories of different years, such that much of the narrative is framed as though Auxilio is half-remembering and half-conjuring the details of her story. While admittedly the novel’s prose is often times tedious in how mundane it is, it is successful in that it presents the narrative as if Auxilio was simply recounting events passed. Minor details are rarely embellished and there are extended passages in which our narrator simply recounts what she was doing in the past, however the embellishments are reserved for particularly salient memories, much as many of us are likely to think of salient memories in hyperbole and metaphor.

Auxilio’s memories do not serve simply as the slightly fractured recounting of one’s life however, as she frequently reminds us that she is, in a sense, the matriarch of Mexican poetry. She has many friendships and relationships throughout the course of the narrative, each with a particular observational element in which Auxilio sits and observes her friends and their surroundings, encoding them not only into her memory, but conjuring up a memory of a future yet to come. This makes her initial assertion of needing to survive in order to recount what had happened on the day the university was infested by police not just something for her own sake, but that her memories exist to inform the future as well.

My question for the class is what do you think of the way our narrator Auxilio recounts the story in terms of her memories? what are your thoughts on her misremembering some events and how do you think that impacts the narrative?

Thoughts on Carlos Fuentes’ “The Old Gringo”: Two Places and the Spaces Between

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Reading Carlos Fuentes’ “The Old Gringo” felt like being taken into a place somewhere between two cultures, somewhere between past, present, and future, somewhere between sleeping and waking. This feeling, of occupying a space in between seems to me a central theme of the novel, in which it’s primary premises are the exact interrelations between these things and the way these simple dualities inform our lives, constraining them in some ways and yet opening pathways to new ways forward in other ways. Fuentes’ prose similarly occupies an interesting state between pure narrative prose that would be expected of a traditional fictional narrative (despite having been a dramatized interpretation of the disappearance of real-life author Ambrose Bierce) and the embellishments of poetry. Many of our central characters’ motivations and observations are embellished by symbolism and repetitions that serve to accentuate their thoughts while clouding them in a sort of haze. This is often done in such a way as to blend our characters’ recollections from their present thoughts, which is fitting given that the central conceit of the narrative is that one of our protagonists, Harriet Winslow, is remembering the events being told to us. This blurring of past and present informs much of the novel as each of our central characters is grappling with understanding and coming to terms with their own pasts through their involvement in the Mexican civil war. The General Thomas Arroyo grapples with his unfortunate history in the hacienda, all the while clinging to those same lands that he suffered in, chaining him to this land. The old gringo, burdened by a past wrought with personal tragedies, seeks the tumult of the war seeking the refuge of death. Even Winslow, who we can infer plays some role as narrator of these memories, consistently “sits alone and remembers”, this motif itself repeating many times throughout the novel. This idea of being constrained by the past, of ghosts of one’s memories, unites our characters regardless of their cultural heritage. This intersection of culture also permeates the narrative as the backdrop of our story, the Mexican revolution, was a turning point in redefining Mexican sovereignty and identity. The rebel band takes up arms for this reclamation of their own agency and yet Arroyo stays chained to his past, incapable of truly seeing a path forward. Meanwhile the Americans, Bierce and Winslow, seek out Mexico in spite of the danger of this time as a refuge from the constraints placed upon them by their old lives in America, them too chasing demons away. While the old and new, remembered and perceived, and disparate cultures clash in this place, the novel creates a space between these things, and in attempting to reconcile the inherent differences it asks whether or not one can gleam a path forward in the spaces between old and present to truly find something new.

My question to readers is what did you think of Fuentes’ prose? How do you think time, perception, and/or culture impacts the narrative?

Thoughts on Georges Perec’s “W, or the Memory of Childhood” Postmodern Form; Style and Substance

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“W, or the Memory of Childhood” by Georges Perec immediately struck me in its incredibly inventive form of storytelling. The idea of weaving together two narratives was fascinating to me, especially considering that it was not intertwining the narratives of two characters inhabiting the same world, but rather it was combining a pseudo autobiographical account of the author’s life with wholly fictional narratives that Perec had seemingly been thinking about and concocting over an extended period of time. While admittedly I found Perec’s prose to drag on in places (which may have simply been impatience as a reader on my part), I found that this form was interesting as it led to a great deal of interpretation on my end as I would try to find ways in which the narratives could coalesce, be they thematically, emotionally, narratively, or otherwise. Much in the way Paris Peasant’s style informs its substance, I believe that these particular stylistic decisions inform much of what makes W such a fascinating read. It also brings up debates around media and “style over substance”, which briefly states that stylistic choices that may appear vapid are always inferior to substantive prose or narrative heft. Novels like Paris Peasant and W, in my view, are testaments to the fact that style can BE substance, as the individual aspects of W often feel fragmentary and incomplete, however when presented in a manner such that one must consider the fragments as forming a narrative collage, the fragments then become a puzzle whose individual pieces are arranged in a way that create a vivid image. Having said all this the image presented in W is multiform and multifaceted, as it tackles a variety of subjects such as the ambiguity in memory and imagination, the breakdown of strict social hierarchy into barbarism and chaos, and the nature of identity. This disparity fits into the postmodern art movement that Perec operated in, in which there is no clear explanatory narrative that seamlessly blends each element together, however as previously stated the connections can still be parsed in the margins and in the comparisons. The connections between the memories and imagination are not explicitly stated, but they are distinctly felt. They are felt in the way our narrator grapples with memory and personal history just as the character known as Winckler discusses his given name. They are felt in the way our narrator tries to grasp at memories of a life seemingly lost to him from the destruction of the second world war as we are given a meticulous tour of a society where ‘might makes right’ and barbarism triumphs. This is best exemplified by the ellipsis that separates the two distinct parts of the book, which can be interpreted in many ways, but is a deliberate stylistic decision that does not distract from or exist outside of the substance of the novel, but is rather inexplicably linked to the novels substance, using the ellipsis to signal to the audience that nothing more will be said in this section. Nothing more about identity? imagination or memories? what about the rest of the text? It is a stylistic element meant to embellish, yes, but also to be substantive, to make you think.

My question to those reading is your opinion in the “style vs. substance” debate? Do you think good stylistic elements do not improve art that seemingly lacks in substance or does the style inform substance? What stylistic elements of W stood out to you?

Thoughts on Mercé Rodoreda’s “The Time of the Doves”: An Acidic Apathy

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My initial reactions throughout the first two thirds of Mercé Rodoreda’s “The Time of the Doves” was one of a character whose agency is constantly in question. The novel is structured almost as though our protagonist Natalia is simply recounting the events of her life. As the narrator, she often describes events in her life with a passing disinterest and she very rarely explicitly states how she feels about most situations aside from extreme circumstances that truly test her patience such as her decision to finally rid herself of the doves that were plaguing her home. If anything this moment served to solidify my first impression, that this was a story about a woman being taken advantage of by the people around her and being forced into a state of passivity. Natalia is placed in many of the same social boxes that character’s from previously covered works are (in particular I thought of how trapped Maria Griselda from Maria Bombal’s “The Shrouded Woman” felt and compared that to Natalia’s situation). This is why the scene of her revolution against the doves feels so salient emotionally, as it is a visceral reaction against the constraints caging her in and ruining her life. The narrative takes a great deal of time to establish the conditions of Natalia’s life, both the positives and negatives, in order to dash them completely when the Spanish nationalist insurrection reaches all out warfare. Once the war begins the narrative violently tears down everyone’s life to the extent that everyone is made to barely even subsist let alone truly live. This moment serves as a point of contrast between Natalia’s life before the war and her current existence. While Natalia is presented as borderline apathetic in many instances before the war, with her emotional state being inferred through her projection of feelings onto her environment, after the war that apathy is, almost paradoxically, dialed up to its extreme. In this way, the narrative presents the barren existence of war-torn Spain as fostering an apathy that was not dull like a flat wine, but corrosive like a deadly acid. This form of apathy is not one of boredom or disinterest but an apathy where one realizes that their life is empty and everything has already been ripped away from you so you no longer have anything to lose. This metaphorical acid turns literal, as Natalia finds resolution in her second act of retaliation against her situation as she decides to use acid to kill herself and her children. This horrid act arouses conflicting feelings that are not truly lost on Natalia, and are presented almost as an act of mercy in which death is greater than a life not truly being lived. However once the fighting stops, Natalia and her family must look towards somehow stitching her life back together, and while nothing is ever quite right she can somehow try and return to a life that is worth living.

My question to those reading is how would you compare Natalia’s life before the war to that after the war? Did you feel she had significantly more agency before the war as compared to it? What are your thoughts on the conditions of war and what led to Natalia’s decision with the acid?

Thoughts on Joseph Zobel’s “Black Shack Alley” The More Things Change, The More They Stay the Same

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When thinking back on Joseph Zobel’s “Black Shack Alley” I am struck by theme of the individual seeking liberation from the limitations placed on them socially. The journey that young José embarks encapsulates the duality that many people, especially marginalized people, experience trying to affirm themselves and establish their own voice within a society whose rules deem it just to shut them out. Initially this plays out through the limitations a young José and his friends contend with at the hands of their parents, grandparents, and elder community members in the shack alley, who impose strict rules for them and harsh punishments if these rules are broken. As José furthers his education, eventually entering into the lifestyle of the affluent white middle-class, he realizes that the limitations that his mother and grandmother expected him to overcome through opportunities his education and subsequent upward socioeconomic opportunity afford him have not vanished but simply been replaced by the racism and classism deeply rooted into all layers of the society that he is now placed in. It is in this white middle-class that José finds himself deeply alienated, not just from the culture shock but in the fact that his existence, and even the existence of his entire culture are treated as though they are invisible, or that if they aren’t invisible they should be. Interactions between individuals and their oppressions, be that classist capitalist exploitation or the narratives of a Eurocentric global order, permeate the narrative in a way that nearly recedes into the background. This is not to say that marginalization is not present, rather that it is omnipresent and it’s effects are constantly felt without our protagonist needing to affirm its existence in every passage. The implication of the pain of poverty, for example, are exemplified in descriptions of the adults’ of the shack alley’s homes having the scent of sweat and being generally more run down then those of the town, as if the entire shack alley is possessed by the specter of oppression. While this interpretation appears a tad dour, Zobel’s narrative is not depressing or grimdark. For all the struggle that those living in the shack alley must face, there is an undeniable sense of community that permeates the harsh economic conditions and even José and his friends can find great joy not only in each others company, but in the simplest aspects of life. The joy of playing with friends, having good food, and even learning in an elementary school (a chore for many modern children) are narrated with a joy that imparts a nostalgia for simpler days and a time when one isn’t weighed by responsibility. However José realizes that because his community is racialized and impoverished, their stories aren’t considered legitimate by the White French community. Despite the rich narratives that abound in the shack alley, they are considered illegitimate at best and non-existent at worst. In this way José, despite realizing that the writing he loves is just as racist and classist as the world he lives in, he decides he will write about the lives of his community and whether or not the white middle-class accept his stories, he will present his narratives regardless as the words deafened by the limitations of society deserve to be spoken.

My question for the class would be how do you think José’s seeming upward social mobility intersects with race and culture? Do you believe he is better off in the more affluent French middle class and if so is it only due to the greater material wealth afforded to him?

Thoughts on Carmen Laforet’s “Nada”: Paralysis and Trauma

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To say that Carmen Laforet’s “Nada” is both incredibly gripping and deeply unsettling would be an understatement and in my opinion is an excellent study in reciprocal trauma, the weight of a toxic environment on one’s psyche, and the ways in which one’s environment can contort them in many ways. The backdrop of the Spanish civil war serves to ground the story in a recent and vivid trauma that every Spanish citizen would have had to face to some degree or another, however it is in the dynamics of the house in the Calle de Aribau that we see how trauma can act almost as a symphony, where each instrument interacts with the others to create such bombastic furious noise that every individual instrument gets drowned out, becoming almost unintelligible amongst the sound. In this way, Andrea serves as a perfect protagonist, narrator, and narrative focal point. As she has not been in Barcelona and has not seen her family in so long, she acts as an uninitiated outsider whose life is, as of the beginning of the narrative, mostly unaffected by her extended families’ toxic dynamic. As the novel progresses, we see Andrea’s disillusionment towards her family, first feeling trapped by the rules imposed upon her by her aunt, but eventually being crushed by the weight of the household’s dysfunction. We are presented with many scenes in which Andrea, forced to witness horrible cruelty being inflicted upon her family members by each other, and while she comments on her changing perspectives of her family members, she is unable to act, to do anything that could otherwise alleviate these dismal situations. In a sense, Andrea is paralyzed in this house, and is constantly yearning for some semblance of freedom. Andrea however, is not the only family member seemingly paralyzed by their trauma, as every member of the household is presented as being crushed under the weight of their own family. Each family member hurls insults, screams, and some physical abuse towards each other and each of them refuse to take responsibility for any of their actions. As uncle Román notes to Andrea on page 26: “As for the rest of it, don’t make up any novels about it: Our arguments and shouting don’t have a cause, and they don’t lead to any conclusion”. So deep seated and long lasting is the trauma this family has endured and inflicted on one another that their dysfunction is seen as simply their primary way of life, how could it ever be otherwise? It shows that the wounds of trauma cut deep below the skin and that even if one doesn’t remember how a scar got on their skin, it had to have come from somewhere painful. And in this way, the novel’s title, “Nada”, can take on a somber meaning, referring not only to the emptiness Andrea feels being consumed by this household, but in the idea that so many of this families scars fade into nothingness, their causes unknown or unpondered, while their effects still linger. However in the end, when Andrea contemplates whether she truly got something out of her time in the Calle de Aribau, we find a short moment of contrary action, in which the contemplation of trauma, and the hope that maybe somehow some good may come from unpacking those events, cap off a bittersweet narrative in a way that one may hopefully break the cycle, albeit in a subtle way.

Thoughts on Maria-Luisa Bombal’s “The Shrouded Woman”: Life that’s as limiting as it is vigorous

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After reading Bombal’s “the shrouded woman” I am left with many thoughts about life and the many intersecting joys and miseries one experiences in it. This is likely an intended thought process, as the peculiar method of narration, where a disembodied voice describes protagonist Anna-Maria’s post-mortem journey through memory, subsequently switching to her first person perspective from beyond the grave, leaves one in a constant state of awareness of our protagonists fate. However, this framing mechanism, and the way Bombal weaves a narrative spanning her entire life, takes us through important vignettes in her life in which every character in some way feels trapped not only by their material circumstances, but by the very passions and intense emotions that give life so much of its luster. Near the end of the novel, Anna-Maria remarks how she wishes heaven to resemble the hacienda that she lives in and in a way this is a fascinating contrast, as the world Anna-Maria describes to us in her memories is one of drastic volatility both from within her and surrounding her. The world surrounding her is one in which she is refused at every corner, the comforts of a life of her own choosing, where she is constantly told that the demands of others, particularly the men in her life, are of more pressing importance, and that her responsibility as a woman is to adapt to these changes. And adapt she does, although not always willingly or silently, as she is forced to lose love, marry against her will, and see her family fall to pieces over the fanatic emotions they all carry. And this emotion, this passionate emotion, underpins a great many of our central casts actions. Throughout the story we see how fanatical emotions lead to sorrow for a great many characters, be it the bitterness Anna-Maria develops for Ricardo and Antonio, the rupture of jealousy surrounding Maria Griselda, or the hatred Anna-Maria finds for Sofia, these intense emotions are always at the forefront of the novel’s most gut-wrenching exchanges. However, these emotions are never made to be separated from context, in fact it is the interconnectedness between social and physical contexts and one’s emotions and perspectives that colour the narrative. Maria Griselda’s hatred of her own beauty, seeing it as a curse, is a clear communication of this idea. By no fault of her own, the men of her life are drawn to passionate love, and subsequent rage and sorrow due to this love, all of this tumultuousness being hurled on Maria Griselda as she must carry its burden. In the same way, because she is a woman, she is treated differently from Antonio, who is also said to be the eye of many different women’s affections, whose agency is respected culturally. This interplay comes at the forefront when Anna-Maria convinces herself that her husbands’ and her best friend Sofia’s infidelity was only a small betrayal, because she has no way of changing these events, and feels isolated without the love of her husband or her best friend, she decides she must accept that perhaps her betrayal was not as drastic. Her only sense of control over her emotions is to accept what has happened to her and try to change her outlook as best she can. A similar example can be when she is dismayed by her arranged marriage to Antonio, but longing for some form of romantic connection learns that she loves him almost out of a necessity for a passion she’s being deprived of due to her conditions, being forced away from her first love and into the arms of another much later. It is in this vicious cycle that death comes to encapsulate a kind of freedom that Anna-Maria did not get to feel in her life, one in which she is something beyond needing only to accept her life, and she realizes in this moment that even those around her are in some ways subject to the same unavoidable condition, that of age and of death. Her death here is like freedom from the cycle, where she can accept and decompress her life without the constant watchful eye of society, or the prying needs of her own mind. Bombal here crafts a rich story, one that felt deeply human through it’s ethereal presentation.

Question for my peers: what did you think of the way life and death are handled in the novel? What are your opinions on the interplay between one’s own self and agency and the physical and social contexts they exist in? How did Bombal’s structure help or hurt the narrative?