Silence, Sadness, Perpetual Solitude

Posted on February 10, 2026 by Melissa Zhou

A lively swing of events rolls into place at the beginning of the novel, full of musical brilliance, unknown voices, and objects scattered across empty spaces. This is a book of wavering stars. And in this midst of it all there is a shadow of contemplation which is the shadow of the main character, Natalia, flitting in the form of text across cigarette-like pages of ash and ink, carrying all of her sensitiveness and feminine daintiness across the scenes, and, with her own private reflections, uncovers the isolated mysteries of human life beneath its whirlpool of ordinary affairs.

Unexpected turns of activity, bursts of liveliness, and twists of language burn across the text with the kindling brilliance of a thousand poetic fires. Her old-world femininity is notable — her scanty dresses, Renaissance-like restraint, quietude, and expectations in terms of marriage serve to prove that she lives indeed in a patriarchal world, that a substantial part of her life will always be confined to servitude and the domestic sphere. Her lack of emotion is precisely the outcome of an emotional toll. The setting is portrayed with the microcosmic detail of a distant memory, laced with the flamboyance of fiction. It is clear that we are travelling back into the nether regions of an author’s memory. The usual trivialities of life overflow the text: the preparations for engagement, the quarrels, the unresolved strife between a sensible woman and a careless man. It is not strange, even from the very beginning, to suspect that their relationship is one formed from a social obligation between two people who do not know precisely what they are doing with their lives aside from their desire for the economic security of marriage, instead of true love. Throughout the first half of the book, her passiveness strikes me as surprising. But employment seems to provide her some sort of autonomy later on. Surrealism is baked into the procession of ordinary life. Tiredness, affection, and amusement unfold one after another in the form of a novelistic diary. There is yearning, pining, metaphysical suffering. Life is dull, but needless to say must go on, for some reason or another, which has to do with those momentary glimpses of happiness that shine like brief rays of light across dull, lacklustre days of earning wages for repetitive meals. The experiences that she shares with her children Antoni and Rita, and in particular Antoni’s merciless acts of jealousy against his infantile sister, are particularlt heartfelt, because the significance of such experiences are rooted in their ephemerality. The elaborate, exhaustive descriptions of her surroundings contributes to this sense of the whole book as an endless painting, expanding shapelessly from all sides, filled with innumerable shades of colour and countless little objects piecing together in her advance. It is rich in empirical detail. In spite of these details, however, we never actually see “her”. Sparks of beauty and remembrance flash over the narrative. And I am at once led to think that perhaps life is meaningful. Becauae perhaps there is, after all, something heart-rending, and I daresay quite beautiful, lying at the bottom of it all, glistening beneath the words.

Doves. That is an interesting aspect of the book. I can hear them cooing through the pages. Simply out of the ordinary, with the unexpected appearance of an injured dove from the balcony, a series of new possibilities sprang into being; the book is rejuvenated with a sense of unexpected wonder; and I don’t know if there is anything else that can so perfectly represent freedom and confinement at once.

The stream-of-consciousness style does justice to the seemingly-autobiographical nature of the book. And I am quite fond of this. Because life, human life, is simply a rant. Long-drawn dreams and conversations, death, melancholic fevers and beautiful children, filled with quizzical despairs and half-achieved dreams, confined to the subjective worldview of an individual faced with a very lonely, nonsensical and hostile world. This was a strange, silent book, and it made me frown at the universality of pain — the pains of labour, the pains of existence, the pains of frustration, the pains of meaninglessness. Above all, it made me frown at the meaninglessness of life. I’m aware that there is a contradiction in my review here, but I’ll keep them here — because to remove contradictions is to be further removed from reality. There is a paradox here, the paradox of living a life that is admittedly dull and directionless, and to suffer so much, physically, only to give life to more meaninglessness, as if suffering only to increase the net quantity of meaninglessness that already exists in the world. With women the process is uncanny simply because it is more carnal. And so if so much occurs in the novel, why does Natalia still suffer from this constant awareness of “nothingness”?

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Review of Deep Rivers

Posted on February 6, 2026 by Melissa Zhou

The concept of cultural belonging pervades the beginning of the text, where he describes the appearance of the Old Man, enters the native city of Cuzco, and examines the stones of the Inca wall. The narrative style, which lies at the intersection between realism and stream-of-consciousness, deepens the effect of his memories as a symbol of his attachment to intuition and subsequent rejection of straightforward logic, contributing to a dream-like journey into the heart of the Andes. The portrayal of the culture is surreal, tinged with an almost magical quality. It bears the shimmering quality of a memory retrieved from the muted depths of a special, though foregone past. The intermittent usage of untranslated words, combined with a rich description of the atmosphere of the city, creates an ambience of familiarity in which the concept of postcolonialism is used for understanding the idiosyncrasies of various cultures in the context of Ernesto’s personal feelings of alienation. I believe that this contrast contributes to a poignant narrative in which, based on descriptions portraying the folklore, music, and culture of the Andean society, the protagonist is confronted with the feelings of cultural alienation resulting from his detachment from a community to which he feels deeply bound. The juxtaposing imagery between the indigenous communities and the nature of the European Milieu intensifies the main character’s experience of displacement, this source of alienation resulting from his lack of belonging in a fragmented world to which he distantly belongs. Although the narrative is relatively straightforward in comparison to some of the other books from this course, its extended length, which includes long-winding descriptions of the setting, and Ernesto’s perspective on particular social affairs, contributed to it being quite a dense text for exploring issues related to cultural identity, postcolonialism, and alienation. A significant aspect of the narrative, which lies in the author’s recollection of his childhood, uncovers how he was taken back into a Westernized Catholic school in his adolescence after having spent time amidst and connected to native culture, which further contributed to his feelings of alienation. Reading this provided me with a basis for sympathy towards the tribulations of mankind, to recognize human beings in their state of innocent loneliness, trapped within their own feelings of alienation, set apart from the world owing to their private despairs and experiences of isolation. Reading this text caused me to wonder: What is the role of culture in regulating internal conflict and fostering connections in society?

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we are at once conscious of the unspeakable absurdities of life

Posted on January 29, 2026 by Melissa Zhou

With the first chapter of the book we are at once conscious of the unspeakable absurdities of life, of a thumping rhythm of isolation carrying its beat across desolate roads, into unsolved conflicts, and through crowds of unknown faces, leading us towards some sort of brighter establishment of purpose towards which the trajectory of our lives are directed. And right there, we see it: the decrepit apartment, nestled among fragments of bleak furniture and broken bulbs of light, the centerpiece of a central core which is the core of the character’s heart and life — heart, for the fluttering scales of emotion illuminated by haze memories, and life, for the breathing agency of reflections setting together into the narrative guiding our thoughts. There is an inexplicit and underlying search for meaning which subtly pervades the text. Andrea has arrived in Barcelona for the purpose of being a student of literature. Through this convoluted mass of solitude, familial violence, and existential uncertainty, her goal lies before her, gleaming in substance, and yet as immaterial as a product of her own abstract aspirations. But it is a frightening world, as well as a violent one, and she navigates this environment by means of both solitary rumination and the company of others.

Death, love, yearning, memory, heartbreak, irrational fever-dreams and unexpected revelations — it is as if all such literary fiction books touch upon the same themes: the inner chaos of the human condition. Andrea’s reflections upon seeing the sky on page 283, in contrast to her state of physical agony — it reminded me terribly of a passage in Tolstoy’s War and Peace (one of the most beautiful novels in history, in my opinion), when Prince Andrei’s close and unspeakably painful encounter with death on the battlefield causes him to look up at the sky, and to see in it this inexplicable beauty, this feeling of reality in its entirety commingling into nothing other than the mere seed of his own awareness, flashing under the intolerable pain of his injury, and yet glowing with an awareness of there lingering, somewhere out there, a sense of things being divine and perpetually higher than his own mortal self.

There is something particularly remarkable in the extent to which Andrea’s experiences, private feelings, and subjective perceptions are universalized by being portrayed through her state of being as a university student, and the air of vague familiarity that she imposes upon the absurd, foreign atmosphere permeating the narrative of the text. Her individuality is remarkable. There is quarrelling all about, troubling her and intervening with her privacy, and yet this seems only to further emphasize her solitude, not to detract from it. The ghostly, soft delineation of her rudimentary character contrasts with the rough outlines of the setting, the dismal nature of familial quarrels, and the blunt personalities of those around her.

The contrast between Ena’s cheerfulness, freedom of thought, resplendent character and light-hearted composure and Andrea’s tendency for being withdrawn and introspective. Andrea’s bitterness, need for isolation, and tendency for disliking people creates an interesting contrast when viewed in light of Ena’s character, and this contrast provides more significance to her solitariness, her inability to feel at ease with the world around her. However, I believe, on the whole, that Andrea is somewhat of an ordinary person. She is no genius, no troubled artist, no politically significant figure, but rather an ordinary individual, and it is this ordinariness that provides a certain level of universality to the text. I don’t particularly like her nor dislike her. I am surprised, however, of her general lack of resistance towards certain rivalrous affairs, such as Juan’s constant acts of violence towards Gloria — for someone with a tendency for percipience and ‘feeling things deeply’, her passiveness towards the bitter, violent quarrels happening at home is remarkable, because I would have reacted in an entirely different way. Andrea’s character, and her isolationist tendencies, raises certain questions — is it she and she alone who experiences these hallucinatory epiphanies and deep observances of life? Are such feelings ‘ordinary’, does everyone else experience them as well? We are never fully presented with the perspective of others, but only that of her own, and this unknowingness is to me like the blank edges of a map that we fail to fully explore.

There was a sentence towards the end of the book, which went something along the lines of “perhaps the most painful secrets that we keep guarded within us are the ones that others know the most well about” — this is a touching phrase. This struck me, in quite a significant manner, because it is a simple possibility that I have yet not previously conceived of. Ant is a possibility that is both frightening and comforting at once.

There are moments — brief, but distinctive moments in this novel, when a philosophical overture emanates from the text, and makes the reader shudder in their seat, as if confronted with the vague vision of a sensorial awakening, like a memory, softening the significance all other nearby occurrences, and bringing out the alluring depths of the soul. On page 207 I feel here the faint stirring of an unconscious awakening, of an imperceptible philosophy emerging from the depths of the human psyche. And I am at once reminded that life is sad; that loneliness is universal; that beneath all the glories and trivialities of daily life is beating heart of isolation, subject to its own moody despairs. Is loneliness truly universal?

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Incarnate Memories and Foregone Love Stories

Posted on January 23, 2026 by Melissa Zhou

Right from the beginning that is a sense of significance in the seemingly trivial, like the falling of rain, and a glimmer of existential beauty to be found in repetition, exhaustion, and freedom from logic. If inexplicitness was a literary principle, this text would have passed with flying colours. It is a cruel master of portraying the impossible, a maestro of describing things not as they purely are but rather as what they seem to be, which involves infinite digressions on how it makes a certain character feel, which, almost inevitably, revives inner memories and sensations associated with it. New characters continually emerge, and Ana Maria’s life experiences are comprehended through isolated fragments of events that do not come together as a cohesive whole, but as the miscellany of memories forming her past life. It is a simplified Proustian rant, a full-blown poetic narrative without being entangled in immeasurably long sentences. The nature of identity in this book is one that is less conscious of itself than the sensation of its own experiences. On page 161 the narrative indulges in describing the unspoken desire for closeness and that kind of emotional sensitivity which occurs with two people who are beginning to become lovers but have not yet done so owing to the impersonal tendencies of most humanly relations. Eventually the text does succumb to such passions, and the murmurous desire for love is seen to move like a snake through the dense veins of human consciousness, creating an irrational dimension of remembrance, a fixed feeling of regret produced from the intricacies of love, permeating almost all her memories. Feeling and remembrance — that is what this modernist text (and of course, almost all others) is concerned with. For there are these moments in life, these delicately sentimental, arduously sweet, and yet painful sensations of remembrance that plague our minds — and it is this hidden significance, this pulsation of emotions that clog the throbbings of consciousness which symbolize, in their ritual of remembrance, the carnality of human emotions, and the spasmodic rituals of heartbreak. Her marriage with Antonio is one that is unhappy. Ricardo’s departure from her was insufferable. But how does she suffer? Moments of insanity, soul-searching, fury, and sickness tumble through the narrative of her actions, guided by an impulsive desire to return to her lover, to gain him back. There is no distinctive way in which she contends with these memories that she experienced when she was alive — only that they are vaguely outlined by instances of wild regret and despair. And so from all sides of the text there is this breaking of boundaries, this freedom from logic, this inexpressible revolution of thoughts and feelings made expressible through a miscellany of desire and dust-laden memories. There is a strong awareness of life being temporal and finite, and therefore subjecting individuals to the possibility of regret, failed relationships, and unspoken experiences. She has many regrets in life, but she has now no choice other than to succumb to the inactivity of death. Ana-Maria’s death was peaceful; these memories do not clog her mind, but rather pass through her thoughts like a long winding river, revealing its contents without truly bothering her. But is there life after death?

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NEBULOSITY

Posted on January 18, 2026 by Melissa Zhou

Confusing. Figuring things out not by their form but by the convoluted trails of meaning formed by dense sentences, juxtaposing verses, and half-conscious dreams. This book is a forest of question marks. “I am no puzzle-maker, no wizard of chess, no physician of letters. I am only a p-poor, poor reader!” But the author lies silent. He has died. The pages are silent, but so full. And from its fullness, I am at once informed of the fact that life is hard, very hard, and that instead of shedding shy tears like a shameful dove on a solitary perch, I should simply continue with the task at hand.

Confusing entrails of people, flashes of faces painted with significance but fading out into the background as more words pour into the text. There are so many young women everywhere, scattered over the cities, pervading foregone dreams. I am waiting, impatiently, as a whining child awaits for a lollipop promised to him by an annoyed parent, for a distinct moment of understanding, of sweetness — for a perceivable height; a traceable theory; a conic structure of some sort; a clean tissue; something to lean on, like a rock; a climax of happiness, or of Dostoyevskian insanity. But there is only a desert with slow, sandy rise and falls that lead, for the sweating mountaineer dressed in a nylon ripspot jacket (me), to nowhere exactly.

Confusing like life, and life is confusing, simply because there is confusion in every starry puddle, every windowed painting, every overgrown garden.

Confusing. The blurb of this book describes the text as “surrealist”. I disagree. I argue (and now this is my attempt to sound like some fabulous, magnificent, distinguished lawyer in one of those glittering palatial rooms) that it is not surrealist, but “tyrannically, tremendously surrealist”. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury — on page .., and according to circumstantial evidence based on Melissa’s prior testimony, this is one magnificent example of ‘tyranny’, because these fleeting descriptions of momentary visions choke the brain-vessels of interpretation, causing the reader to fall unconscious to the floor. On page 50, the writing is ‘tremendous’, not only because it shakes the limbs of logic, BUT because it satisfies these two following absolute, inarguable components of tremendous writing: That it must be insane, and that it must be 1.11 readometers away from blowing up the human condition into atoms of dust. According to my scientific fellow Dr. Swift, these conditions have indeed occurred. Melissa’s right to poetic clarity (rule 1.11, book 11, listed in the Universal Declaration of Reader’s Rights) has therefore been breached in the aforementioned cases (the above paragraphs). You must trust me on this matter. You must put your trust in the hands of democracy. The author has even personally admitted to being guilty (recorded on page 23: “I shall discuss these things without pre-established order”). Case closed. The gavel bangs.

Confusing. Because in life, actually — in-in real life, no accusations can ever be made. Nothing is quantifiable. In fact, there is no glittering room at all, no universal declarations, and no limbs of logic. There is no Melissa either. There is only chaos, contradictions, and confusion. And sometimes, in a comet-like spasm of light, there is a particular object, person, or tale of honour that zaps through one’s haze of consciousness, and sets alight a purpose kindling, a source of significance springing in midair, and informs the perceiver that there is something, something indeed (wipe away your tears) — through all of that confusing mystery which we call the “essence of being”, which grasps the conscious heart and moves, moves the individual into life. I think that was Nadja’s role in this story. The elucidation of his intentions, furthermore, from pages 19-24, and around page 148, moved me, because they struck me as an ideology resonating with my own stance on literature. And so I shout: “Away with all rigid plots and stock characters! The writer is supposed to be king to their work, not subordinate to public expectations. The human condition has no pre-established order. Why should the writer ever be bound to such artificial premises?”

– – – Nadja is introduced on page 66. And suddenly the sunlight sheds its tears over the dark city, and illuminates these damp cobbled paths; the flowers raise their heads; the morning curtains are pulled open. This moment, this very moment, has the languorous, bleariness, violin-sounding intonation of a visual longing coming into reality, as a naked body emerges through dense mist and is polished by a river-stream of diamond-white light. Here, the whole world simply “happens”. Logic can not bring us here. There is a sense of the mystery being exposed; an intention growing; a desire being uncovered. A thing happens. Two things happen. The street roars with laughter. Flowers nod their head. People fall in love. But no matter what happens, or how many things happen, and how often they happen, the truth is that there is a nebulosity that is inescapable, a nebulosity that does not occur in particular moments, but is pervasive to reality as a whole, as an eternal and indeterminable entity of perception — and it is this substance of nebulosity that I think is central to Nadja.

Are you confused?

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proustian rant on proust

Posted on January 11, 2026 by Melissa Zhou

As I have expected (from having seen glimpses of the book here and there in my distant past), this is one of the most beautiful texts that I have encountered, and, with every line, I feel that keen jolt of pleasure from reading which informs me of the prestige in his use of words and structure of language in the representation of the human experience.

The opening paragraphs are an epitome of the blending of consciousness and unconsciousness, the vagueness of human thought and perception, and the arbitrary nature of reality itself as being supremely subjective. Such aforementioned qualities are not objective but in fact deeply subjective, simply because they are liable to fluctuate under the influence of those tiniest wafts of memory that pervade the moment of time, influenced by the subtlest flickerings of emotion that kindle in the fires of the awakening mind. No amount of objectivity — be it through logic, mathematics, reason, or science— can never help us understand the human condition in its fullest, most representative form. The closest means of understanding the human condition is through art, because art is about self-expression, and literature, as an art form, has the power of specificity (I would argue much more than painting or instrumental music does) in capturing the subjective details of existence down to the granular level of material textures, voices, and principles.

The material world stands here, there, and right there, here before our eyes, and right beyond our reach, in the form of brass doorknobs, forgotten bedrooms, undusted floors and flickering candlelights. But we, as human beings, are not part of that world — our memories and experiences are associated with such material objects, but fundamentally our minds operate in a distinct world of its own, drawing from and brushing over the image of these material objects but never truly in touch with them, instead playing around with a dense haze of miraculous, voluptuous, and ridiculously personal tide of emotions that have no basis other than in our characteristic perceptions, inner eyes, and emotions of the heart.

As opposed to a technique in literature that I call ‘revealing the significance of things that are seemingly insignificant’, Proust does not seem to do this. On the whole, of course, there is a particular degree of significance that generally emerges from his very act of having expressed these multitudinous ideas. But microcosmically, specific events and memories that he describes do not alone hold significance, unless they are viewed in comparison to one another by the reader. This is especially prominent when he describes the reason causing his grandmother to come back inside from her walk outside. Along with a medley of other details, he indicates that his great-aunt would tease her by indicating that her husband was drinking, and his grandmother would go home, since she does not want this happening. Without any inclination to explain the significance of this memory, the speaker gradually and almost imperceptibly transitions to elaborating his own feelings on the matter, and how he naively desires to be alone in such instances, leading the text towards his room, his personal ills, and his desire for a goodnight kiss from his mother. These passages are not significant on their own but appear to provide significance if pitted up side by side with one another; in this context, the contrast between the dispute erupting from his family, and the speaker’s discomfort towards this, is what provides significance to his solitude and desire for a ‘kiss of peace’ (13), because it seems to symbolize his desire for love and closeness in the midst of familial disputes.

I was quite struck by the naivety of the speaker’s tone throughout the text. The recurrent reflections over memories of his mother, and more specifically his desire to receive a goodnight’s kiss from her, along with his memories about his grandmother and his father, strikes me as those types of memory retrieved from the muted depths of one’s childhood, preserved in the form of an arrangement of vague feelings and arduous visions that penetrate the deepest regions of the subconscious mind, and linger on for ages as a lasting personal impression, which, if never expressed through art, will remain in one’s heart to be taken to the grave.

Is literature a good art form for representing subjective experiences?

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introduction

Posted on January 6, 2026 by Melissa Zhou

I am compelled to think that to write an introduction about oneself may fall into two broad categories: A long-drawn, soul-searching analysis on the self and one’s innermost feelings, or a small paragraph simply introducing conventional facts, such as one’s name, school, and year of study. Since the former would be too novel, and the latter perhaps too plain, this is my attempt to write something which could be defined as a midpoint between the two.

My name is Melissa Zhou. I study international relations and political science at UBC. I was raised here in the world of glassy buildings, sound bridges, solid trees, healthy children, and concrete park-benches here in Vancouver, BC. This may sound absurd, but since I have never really been to many other parts of the world (partly due to never having a chance to travel, and partly due to my tendency for clinging to familiar routines), I feel that a substantial portion of my knowledge about the world is derived from books, films, and academia, rather than first-hand experience. The world itself seems to have a significantly fictional quality, not simply the material that I read, and this makes it so that there is a dualistic quality about it all — about the infinite perceptual experiences, political rants, and philosophical explications that dwell in books, and the way that they reflect not concrete objective reality itself, but the subjective intricacies of the mind and the human experience. And perhaps this dualistic quality is what makes literature such an enthralling art form for me. Literature has always been of primary interest to me from a young age, and my bookish tendencies have shaped my perception of the world through introspection, amateurish philosophy, and poetic self-expression.

Given that literature has tickled my fancy for quite a long time, I can safely argue that the acts of reading and writing has always been my outlet for understanding, expressing, and contending with the puzzling intricacies of human life. If I must be honest, however, the time that I allocate to these two activities have dwindled since arriving in university, owing to other responsibilities that have settled into my life. But my interest in literature has never left me. Within the realm of literature, furthermore, I have always been intrigued by this tendency to break established norms; to confront the fact that the human condition is not fixed, but in fact fluid and subjective; and to not simply ‘experience’ the world, but to express these experiences in an explorative manner, especially in the use of experimental language structures.

Thus, in the video lecture introducing Romance studies and languages, what intrigued me deeply was this idea of the Romance languages “pushing at limits and constructing something new”. I feel that a glimpse of my own stance on literature rings through this statement, simply because I have always had a bias for reading modernist and experimental literature, which are categories that often disregard conformity to traditional plot structures. However, I must admit that I have never read literature belonging to Romance world — aside from a tattered copy of Proust that I own, whose pages are yellowed and almost unreadable — and this is something that I am excited to be doing.

Although I am aware that there is a rigorous amount of work to do in order to achieve my desired grade, I am sure that this class will reinforce my interest in literature, and contribute to my familiarity with a much broader amount of texts!

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