April is the cruellest month

Posted on April 5, 2026 by Melissa Zhou

A lot of the things in life are done so precisely owing to ephemerality. The pace of time seems only to quicken, and so the need for creating something grand, for something eloquent, draws people towards leaving behind the mark of a meaningful struggle before any ends are met. Symbols of having existed must be left somewhere in the universe — even if marginal, like a scratch on the moon — to represent the seed of consciousness that carried us from sleep to wakening, as the fossil of an epiphany soon to be covered under the dust of a million years. The line from The Waste Land in the title of this post testifies to the sense of despair, and yet of restoration, in the ends that precede new beginnings.

I am listening to Spanish Bombs. It was playing during the lecture on Nada, and I really liked it. I am writing this blog with the intention that it is read in light of the somewhat sad, but semi-hopeful, semi-sentimental mood embodied by the music.

Writing is inescapably intimate. With just a sequence of syllables, set into arrangement by an outline of rudimentary letters, the secrecies of the human condition are made known in their most private form. In other words, there is a certain quality of rawness to literature. Even when done with haste, it in some way or another exposes an individual’s subjective biases, worldviews, and personal feelings. The texts in this course reflect this because they are associated with modernism in literature, an artistic movement characterized by its break from traditional forms of expression, and indulgence upon the inner workings of the mind. Literature is not singular and fixed but changeable and subject to interpretation. It is not separate from the world, but an active reflection of the world to which it belongs. In international relations theory there are positivistic approaches to the world order that emphasize the measurability of the world through the collection of empirical data, as well as hermeneutical, or reflectivist ones, recognizing the full-blown subjectivity pervading the social world and our interpretations of it. Theory is literary, and literature is at its core hermeneutical. It is constructed by subjective biases, bound to offering critical insights into the social atmosphere at a given place and point in history. In this course, the texts that we read embodied the lives, mentalities, and cultures of people associated with the Romance languages. I have come to deeply admire literature from this tradition — I deeply admire the way in which they push against limits and defy conventional forms of writing. After all, a work of literature is never fully complete but constantly evolving, even under the eyes of its readers, exposing the fluid nature of human thought and perception. Previously, I have only read British Modernist literature. Reading works of literature associated with the Romance languages has expanded my knowledge on the ability of literature to expose these underlying perceptual dynamics. At the same time, it has deepened my appreciation of literature itself, and how it is able to respond to different social and historical contexts from the individual level of analysis.

The booklist in this course is my favorite booklist out of all the courses I have ever taken (perhaps on equal grounds with the Arts One booklist). There are many similarities between the books — many melancholic characters, with unknown lives and unknown faces, who are neither purely geniuses nor purely paupers but simply individuals who feel, who are sensible, who are observers, who carry a stream of remarkable thoughts to be dissected under the percipient wand of poetry. If I must choose some favorite texts, they would be Nada and The Time of the Doves. But I liked most of them.

Words are the medium of literature. To read is to swim through a thousand different thoughts, which course into one another and feed into their own philosophical power. However, since words spring from and exist within a social context, their meanings are interpreted differently by different people. A certain degree of interpretative freedom is therefore inescapable. The structure of this course complements this freedom. Given that we were able to select our own required readings, and to write freely, without being bound to rigorous guidelines, it allows people to expand on their own interpretations without the need to conform to pre-established boundaries. Too many people nowadays are forced to conform, to be commonplace, or even worse, to stay silent — the world needs more people who dare to explore, to break social straitjackets in order to pursue their own intellectual journeys.

Life is nonsensical. I think that all of the books reflect this, each in different ways. All of them expose a certain quality of loneliness, of absurdity characterizing the human condition.

But I suppose that is how it is. Like colliding stars, our lives speed across the galactic of the world before intersecting, only to separate again; where in the world our peers go, is not exactly known; but what is known at least is that they are out there, somewhere, beyond one’s reach and yet within the boundaries of this same, strange, indefinable world, treading through the obstacles of daily life and thinking perhaps, reflecting, from time to time, over what they’ve read in this course.

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review of Debré

Posted on April 2, 2026 by Melissa Zhou

I believe that Love me Tender by Debré is a novel underscoring a woman’s desire for authenticity at the expense of the loss and dissatisfaction involved in this desire. It exposes the beauty of pursuing one’s own course of life apart from the conventional ritual of marriage, family, and steady employment typically defining the “good life”. Although the narrative was rather bleak and disconsolating in tone, especially considering the distant nature of the relationship she shares with her son, and her tendency towards emotional restraint when it comes to relationships with other people. Her very departure from a stable livelihood symbolizes a choice that marks her desire to break free from preestablished social conventions stipulating what it means to live a meaningful or satisfactory life. Her struggle for liberation begins with her departure from her husband, and their fight for parental rights, embroiled with feelings regarding her love for her son, epitomizes a core message of the novel – namely, the concept of identity as being concealed within ideas and emotional needs that transcend easily definable social and political boundaries. The literary style of this novel does justice to the nature of its content; by exploring glimmers of her identity and discussions of selfhood through a prose style that is more succinct than long-drawn (in a stark comparison to Proust), it establishes, in a matter-of-factly tone, her experience of these challenges in a frank and direct manner. Simultaneous to its overtures on individuality and authenticity, it is also a novel that is deeply concerned with the relationship between the individual and their society, and the implications borne by the latter upon the former. For instance, her struggle with sexuality and queerness contradicts the conservative social standards of French authority, setting limitations upon the extent to which she can socially engage with these aspects of her selfhood. I believe these vulnerable identity-based experiences of her life are onesthat are undergone by many individuals across the world, especially in a global order where post-positivist approaches to identity and politics triumph over traditional ones that offer rigorous and fixed patterns of selfhood, exploring the ambiguity of knowledge in the context of human beings and the infinite forms of belonging characterizing their place in the world. As a work of autofiction, this novel reveals deeply personal aspects to periods of self-transformation by exposing the underlying challenges that come with breaking free from contemporaneous expectations to pursue a new identity. Although the book was short, it was compelling because it reflects her explicit desire to sustain her pursuit of a new identity amidst challenges imposed upon this strive from her family, the taboo associated with withdrawing from bourgeois society to embrace queerness, and the rather traditional social standards of French society.

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review of luiselli

Posted on March 26, 2026 by Melissa Zhou

This was a “quiet” book. There is a quality of mutedness in the narrator’s portrayal of her life. It is as if there is always something deeper to be said but is never ultimately expressed, perhaps out of languidness, fatigue, or meaninglessness.

There is a particular focus on the negligible and the haphazard. Life passes by in a silent draft of observations, thoughts, and momentary conversations that seem to lead nowhere other than depicting the great emptiness of life and reality. The glimpses of poetry are what seem to infuse it with meaning. But even then there is a certain quality of “ghostliness” that is inescapable, as if bound to her sense of being.

The book in fact has a full-blown manner of portraying the quality ghostliness shaping the human condition. The intermittent transitions between narrators, combined with the ambiguity of the passages as to whether they are fact or fiction, provides a level of surrealism that transcends the ordinary bounds of fiction, a literary quality observable across nearly all the texts in this course. I believe many of the qualities that are being portrayed are quite universal, to some degree — the pains of love, the hardships of livelihood, and the sense of being lost among a sea of unknown, to some degree “repulsive” faces, are experiences that I believe many undergo. It is the simple result of needing to retain individuality in a world where that seems impossible, because life is simply just too mundane.

“I suppose that is what illness is like: you stand down and are replaced by the ghost of yourself” (68). There are numerous points throughout the novel where moments of what seems to be depersonalization takes over the text. Passages such as these display a keen awareness of “non-being”, as opposed to being per se, because they reflect a deep feeling of indifference and ghostly emptiness that resonates with the realization of life being meretricious and lacking in true metaphysical substance. This illness that she speaks of is ill-defined. Her sense of self — despite experiencing the usual motherly responsibilities, the mundanities of ordinary life, and the observations that come with being a poet — is nebulous. She doesn’t have a way out of this feeling.

The recurrent themes of life and death, explored through her descriptions of a sense of “ghostliness” pervading the text, represent her emotional detachment from other people or feelings of certitude in her life. It involves descriptions about feelings of uncertainty concealed in the influx of the daily life; traces of dissatisfaction linger in her perspective towards her own experiences and her observations of other people; her life seems to be fleeting and indeterminable, just like the style of the narrative, which switches constantly between different narrators and their perspectives.

Overall, however, I must express that I did not like this book. If I could speak to the author of this book, here is what I would say:

“I get it, life is mundane and intrinsically meaningless / You had the chance to make some sense out of it by writing a novel / But you did not do that / The voices of the children tire me / Your complaints tire me / Your tiredness tires me / And I will g ive this book 2 stars / No feelings attached.”

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Stars in a black river flowing tear-like across the immensely lonely regions of the world

Posted on March 20, 2026 by Melissa Zhou

I see before me pieces of the human condition, bound together under the umbrella of a narrative that does not quite make any sense. Names reel in and out of sight, like stars in a black river flowing tear-like across the immensely lonely regions of the world. It is obvious that this book is written by someone who does not write merely to communicate, but out of an intrinsic appreciation for words. It reveals a great many truths about the human condition, and its endless perplexities, without shying away from the irreconcilable mystery that lies at the bottom of the universe.

There is a dimension of mystery underlying the narrative, pervading the nature of Félix’s job in providing to people a ‘new past’, swarming dreamlike over the text. It blends dream with reality, and reality with being. This text explores the nature of being. Being, in the sense of independently experiencing a world of infinite sensorial aspects, in the sense of wandering through indistinguishable roadways surrounded by dense, fragile clouds of quiet death. Every passage is like a snapshot of light taken from the winding tunnels of human existence. The imprecision of it all gives it a strange quality of perfection. It is a sincere proof of life being as beautiful as it is meaningless. It is about reality, segregated into bits of nonsensible philosophy by a writer’s mind.

I feel that there is a certain speed necessary for properly reading the book — if your eyes skim too quickly over the words, they dovetail into one another and become something other than whatever they are trying to represent. And if your eyes linger for too long upon the words, they lose their coherence and become like stars, scattered glass-like across the empty arenas of civilization after the last whiffs of consciousness have expired: full of sadness and solitude mingled with specks of sorrowful wonder.

“I fear nothing. I yearn for nothing. I suppose you could call that happiness” (175). Happiness is an emotional state of being that exists on the basis of being distinguishable from a duller, more latent state of being — that of melancholy, or boredom, or lackadaisicalness. I must disagree with the bracketed remark. To yearn and to fear nothing is to be in a state of lackadaisicalness. Happiness exists only insofar as there is a contrast to be made — pure boredom is not happiness, but in fact insufferable.

“Truth has a habit of being ambiguous too. If it were exact it wouldn’t be human” (122). The conceptualization of history is itself a fictional manoeuvre in the attempt to reconstruct a truth. The book is largely about a man whose occupation is to sell ‘pasts’ to people in need of one. It is, therefore, largely about the conception of truth as being ambiguous, as something about which people can only understand fragments but never the totality. Reality is multi-faceted and from every angle provides a wholly different aspect to our prying eyes.

“There are people who from early on reveal a great talent for misfortune” (133). This is quite a heart-rending passage. It makes me feel sorrowful. It is heart-rending precisely because it is true. Certain people have a tendency towards melancholy — think the reclusive painters, the unrewarded artisans, the pipe-smoking poets. Others are indeed naturally, or perhaps by fortune, inclined towards good, happy experiences in life. They are nauseatingly cheerful and somehow tumble into the best outcomes that they can hope for. I don’t know why it is the case that there is this discrepancy. My best attempts at an answer to this is something along the lines of the universe being characterized by entropy, and it is owing to the random miracles of chance and fortune that some people are cheerful and simply get what they want, and others are terribly melancholic, never to succeed despite working so hard, and gruelling away long hours at achieving them.

I want to read Fernando Pessoa even more now. The Book of Disquiet is moving up my list of ‘wanted books’.

Based on my very scanty knowledge of reptiles, geckos are somewhat demure creatures, and seem to spend a majority of their lives perched unmovingly on a branch, or dry rock of some sort, stirring in quick spasms only when an external impetus is too much for them to bear. They do not seem to be passionate creatures, and neither are they particularly physically active. But I suppose that physical lethargy should not be a symbol of intellectual lethargy. Maybe geckos are intellectual. After all, who is to judge?

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Review of Piglia

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Melissa Zhou

Money to Burn is rich in scenes involving whirlwinds of chaos, relentless acts of crime, and portrayal of criminality as acts of disregard and recklessness in attaining what specific groups want or desire in society. The scene involving rape and murder are shocking to read about. Nonetheless, I appreciate that the author does not shy away from describing these incidents, because just as love and remembrance—qualities often embodied in literature—are part of the human condition, so is violence and acts of criminality. Something which I found to be significant about the narrative would lie in the portrayal of drugs in the novel, which was not only pervasive but realistic in terms of representing an aspect of criminality that contributes to the disorderliness of its nature, and as a catalyst for the destructive behaviour that they impose upon their surroundings in terms of imposing chaos upon their surrounding environment. At the same time, the drugs that they use is also a central aspect of the novel, because they contribute to understanding their perspective in the world and how they contend with the ultimate reality of their situation, which, in many cases, involves lives of alienation, solitude, and the desire for a greater source of purpose to guide the trajectory of their lives, often fraught with disorder and masked over by the nebulosity provided to them by their drugs.

The motif of disorder provided by the drug interweaves with the narrative of the novel and forms in its pattern a sense of irrefutable danger and desperation, birthed from the entrails of the human condition and mingled with the chaos of criminality. The full-blown digressions into the heist in which the criminals are involved, and their relationship with drug use, creates a cinematic image of violence that is opposed to conventional social norms. The ending, which consists in the gunman deliberately burning their robbed gains, represents how their acts of criminality have no intrinsic value in terms of truly bestowing them with happiness, or helping them gain fulfillment in life. Their crimes are merely momentary occupations in which they become inextricably entangled. Once one becomes part of such a life, one has a difficult way of departing from it; and so it becomes not merely a norm but a ritual, a pattern of obligations spreading its way out from the very centre of life, surrounded by scenes of violence, fights, recklessness.

Is Dorda an intrinsically bad person, or was he made to be this way by his environment and the psychological conditions over which he has no control?

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Transposition

Posted on March 4, 2026 by Melissa Zhou

Right from the beginning there is a sense of going back in time, of flipping through the images of the past so as to arrive at some point in time where a certain revelatory experience unfolds from the ordinary narrative of human life, and some distant memory can be uncovered to reveal its treasured meanings.

It is terrifically diaristic. The writing is minimalistic, but flavorful. We see the face of the young girl, the delicate cat-like features presented against the mild weather of the Asian hemisphere, gazing into a world from a private life filled with familial disputes, poverty, and meaninglessness. She is mysterious — she wants to be a writer. The picture of her life unfolds from a variety of different literary elements: dreary rivers, temperate winds, maturity, mismatched clothing, and a despondent mother. Everything is placid, lacklustre, meretricious. Life takes on its usual course without any surprises or sudden fortunes.

The obscure narrational style provides an intriguing quality of surrealism to the style of the text. And as with many novels focusing upon the individual, the heightened focus upon subjective experiences and realizations overpowers descriptions of the surrounding world — it is ultimately the mind, and its infinite emotional digressions, which shape the narrator’s reality and course of life. And this world changes at once when the man steps out of the black limousine; right from that moment the whole of reality, with all of its dreariness and placidity, hones down to a single point of romantic attraction that implicitly takes over her state of being, and compels her to enter another chapter of her life separate from her family, away from those old arrangements of being into a new one where her affections, femininity, and desires are explored.

The combination of his physical vulnerability, and her unemotional straightforwardness, is remarkable, when viewed in context of the ambiguous affection they share for one another.

The man’s name is not known throughout the novel, and this creates a certain degree of anonymity, of distance between the girl and her relationship with him. Their relationship is certainly sexual; the affection that they share, however, sometimes amounts to mutual affection, and at other times appears to be the shadow of an unnamed, secretive, sickening human desire for physical affection, made to be favorable under the thrilling influence of pleasure. But that is not to say that her encounter with this man has instantly alleviated her burdens. In fact, the relationship is portrayed as only one aspect of her life, one distinct memory of a foregone relationship mingled with her memory of countless other places, people, and impressions that overflow the boundaries of her life. As explicitly described starting from page 44, she describes a certain air of sadness that is pervasive in her life, and which has been present within her for as long as she has come to know herself. I don’t think at all that this is a “happy” book. While this particular quality of sadness is derived from familial estrangement and poverty, it has a deeper implication in terms of the meaninglessness of life, isolation, and the futility of human endeavours.

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The Desire for Transcendence

Posted on February 27, 2026 by Melissa Zhou

THE WRITER: The desire for transcendence is itself a transcendent aspect of human nature, because it entails an already-present awareness of the transcendent, and a recognition of the possibility of becoming transcendent. The writer, Rodrigo, desires for transcendence through writing, through the act of soul-searching and making discoveries about the human condition. Truth is inwardness, truth is subjectivity and subjectivity is truth. Kierkegaard says that also, in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. But the cause of his desire to write all of this is something I would argue is something beyond himself. According to Plato’s cosmological argument, the cause of the universe must be something distinct from itself, because the assumption that the universe has caused itself entails the idea of the universe existing and not existing at the same time, as the cause of something must itself exist, making it a logical contradiction. The reason as to why the writer writes, I believe, is not that he simply desires to write, but instead this awareness of the transcendent and the possibility for transcendence. Does he eventually achieve transcendence? I expected him to. But the ending, I argue, was somewhat meagre. It reflects how there is a constant sense of desiring to achieve things that end up never being sufficiently achieved. There should have been something glorious, like a sudden realization, a flash of significance across the snowy hills of unknowingness before the oblivion of death. But Macabéa simply dies, and nothing else happens.

THE: Being. Being qua being. Being as an indefinite dissolution of microcosmic atoms disassembled from the image of the human condition.

THE GIRL: Ghostliness, souls, fear, uncertainty. This “northeastern girl”, this Macabéa, stands in a room with stained yellow walls, with very frail limbs and pale doe-eyes. I can see her in a light gray cotton frock, with trembling pallid lips. Her heart is like a starfish, webbed and succulent, pumping steadily into an ocean of veins; the sea-grape of her lungs breathes some weak drafts of life; her arms are like the branches of a thin tree, stiff and narrow against a cold draft of wind. Her hair hangs down her face in wispy strands. Her face is the kind of face formed by the combination of thousands of human features sent rippling across a single silvery pond, piecing together into a dreary image of what remains from civilization in a meaningless world: a look of isolation, unknowingness, and loss. I can see that she is neither beautiful nor ugly, neither particularly remarkable nor commonplace. She is not very intelligent, but too sensitive to be considered stupid. She lives internally, as if constantly confronted with the shimmering mirror facing the world which is the mirage of her own soul, very vacant of its own nature but full in the sense of receiving and reacting to the world outside. She alone is an empty vessel. But the writer adores her deeply, in the same way that one comes to adore an offspring made from one’s flesh and bones, and I find this surprising, because there is something very hollow about her, as if she is filled with nothing other than little flashes of feeling, empty thoughts, and existential discrepancies. Perhaps that is precisely because it is how the author feels. Since she has difficulty in expressing herself using words, the writer is the one who expounds on her inner feelings, epiphanies, and realizations. Almost as if he is constructing a rag-doll out of bits of old yarn and fragments of driftwood, there is a quality of incompleteness about this girl that he has created, as if she is not fully a human being in the sense of experiencing things fully and speaking in conventional ways, but only a ghost, an embodiment of certain qualities that the reader may find to be relatable, owing to the close association of such qualities with the experience of human life, and all of its unbearable solitude. She seems to float over the text, as if existing only through glimpses of half-sung reveries, never fully birthed from the entrails of language in which her existence is outlined. In fact, it is as if she does not exist, but is merely pieced together by a haze of describable actions and experiences, taken up from the rogueish corners of human existence.

Did Macabéa ever exist?

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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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