Author: parden

I find myself struggling to know what to write about this week’s reading. This was one of those books that I’ll finish and probably not really think about again (besides our incoming class discussion). I neither loved nor hated it. I don’t really feel any particular way about Amulet, I just read it and now it’s over. I did like the prose, and I enjoyed the slightly more bouncy(?) writing/narration style to what we see in The Savage Detectives. By bouncy, I mean like:

Where maybe your most straightforward non-nonsense author (maybe an author really into historical accuracy) might tell the story like the black line, our narrator’s voice is the pink, where everything is a “yes, but…” or a “maybe, while also…”

I found love to be a strong theme throughout the chapters, a love of poetry, of Mexico, of young poets, of language and words and slang, of her friends, and of storytelling.

I also thought a lot about Poulet’s writing on the phenomenology of reading as I was reading. The narrator talks about how much she loves the poets León Felipe and Pedro Garfías, and while she says she worked with them in Mexico before they died, it’s unclear how much of her “knowing” poets is from meeting them versus reading their poetry. It’s Garfías’ poems she’s reading in the bathroom when UNAM was seized, and she then spirals into her stories about various poets she knew. In reading Garfías’ words in this scene, it’s like a part of him (as author) was with her (as reader) in the bathroom stall; her act of reading inspiring the literature to become “a sort of human being,” and linking “a common consciousness with the reader” (Poulet 59).

One idea I underlined to share this week was her mediation on movement towards the east: “To where night comes from. But then I thought: It’s also where the sun comes from” (Bolaño 54). I have never thought about the night coming from the east, because I guess I’ve always been so fixated on the sun setting in the west.

Then, I’d love to hear people’s thoughts about who the narration is for. When the narrator says “you” (like “I still have to tell you about her”) (41), is she speaking to a generally undefined audience, as in everyone who reads the book, or is she addressing it to something/one more defined (like the young poets she loves and mentors)?

I have now reached the twenty-first chapter in The Shadow of the Wind, where Daniel (main character) has just left his meeting with Nuria (who knew Julián Carax personally) after discussing Julián and his books. I had hoped to finish chapter 24 in this section, but I’ll just have to pick up some slack with the page count in future weeks.

This section wasn’t boring, but it was less immediately grabbing than the previous section (it mostly contains our main character, Daniel, running around the city tracking down clues about who Julián is/was and why it’s all important). Or, maybe the section wasn’t less interesting, but rather the experience of putting a book down and not touching it for a week at a time is taking some of the adrenaline/drive/will to read out of it. I feel like I am normally such a mood reader, so trying to balance a schedule of two alternating books is definitely teaching me a lot about how I read and how my motivation levels rise and fall.

We found out (spoilers ahead) through a letter from Penélope (lots of tension, betrayal, loved Julián, “found out” mysterious information that Julián apparently did not know) that Julián had left Barcelona to “pursue [his] dreams” (143-44). I would love to know more about this man, I feel like we’re getting little scraps of information here and there that are supposed to eventually (presumably) paint a bigger picture, but I might need to start keeping a notebook or something because I feel myself forgetting all the little clues and how they connect.

One passage I bookmarked to share for this week’s blog post was just a couple pages before I stopped reading, on page 175 of my edition: “Julián lived in his books. The body that ended up in the morgue was only a part of him. His soul is in his stories. I once asked him who inspired him to create his characters, and his answer was no one, That all of his characters were himself.” (Outside of the context of Julián being some mysterious author with mysterious intentions whose books are bringing mysterious people with mysterious backgrounds into Daniel’s life), I thought this quote was kind of inspiring, that authors (but also all of us) live on in our stories. When we create art, of whichever form, we bury parts of ourselves in it, and so each time we read a poem or a novel, we’re keeping the author alive (which is taken more literally in the context of The Shadow of the Wind, where someone destroys all of Julián’s books to kill him completely).

I kind of feel like I cheated a little this week, when I downloaded an .epub copy of The Savage Detectives onto my laptop to read virtually while I was out and about. The whole reading-a-big-book vibe was ruined because I had no real way of conceptualizing how much of the book I had read or had left to read (especially when the page number only changes every few times I “turned” the page).

This section was awful to read. Content-wise, I preferred it to the last section, and I appreciated that we have different voices and perspectives and characters. We are no longer dealing with one insufferable main guy, but rather a blend of interesting people (like others have mentioned, even the characters we heard about in the last section are more three-dimensional in this section). I say it was awful to read not because of the content this week, but because of the structure. While some of it is okay, I found it difficult to read when whole pages are one big block of text, with no paragraph breaks and either very short or very long sentences. I must have lost my place five times while reading, and found that the lack of separation between sentences (monotonous) throughout the page was especially hard on my eyes (eye strain) in a virtual format.

One of the parts in the section that stuck out to me based on our class discussions was when the poet narrator was being interviewed by the group of young poets to discuss the state of Latin American poetry (pg. 153 – 155). The idea of length and long poetry and long books was interesting here. The majority of page 154 is one long run-on sentence, spiralling, as our narrator wonders if he was drugged as he tells his interviewers the story of his publisher taking a poem out of his prize-winning book. The group discusses length and page count requirements, and then the young poets’ “theory about long poems,” which they called “poem-novels” (154). I love this idea of a poem-novel, not just a poem within a novel but a poem so long and full that at some point it starts resembling the prose of a novel.

The other bookmark I have on what I wanted to note is with Laura Jáuregui’s section, mostly because I love her hater status. She describes Arturo Belano as a “stupid, conceited peacock” (172) and the men as “at least twenty and they acted like they were barely fifteen” (173). I loved her stance on the visceral realists being useless and not real, and the idea that “you can woo a girl with a poem, but you can’t hold onto her with a poem” (172).

My long book is Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.

Firstly, I would like to shoutout Amanda, who has done such a good summary of this first section of the book that I’m going to refer you all to that blog post instead of repeating the same thing here.

Otherwise, the TLDR of it all is: Daniel (age 10, in 1940s Barcelona) is sad because his mom died so his father wakes him up before dawn to meet some guy at a bookstore that he’ll one day inherit. He chooses a book (/the book chooses him) and becomes obsessed with it and its author.

I enjoyed the first section of this novel. It’s rather fast-paced and the tone is to-the-point, but the prose is nice to read and there’s a good mix of dialogue and introspection so far.

One of the first questions that came up for me while reading is the connection between the concept of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books (the name of the bookstore) and the relationship between Daniel, his deceased mother, and his father. It was mentioned early on that Daniel woke up one night crying, saying he couldn’t remember his mother’s face. When his father comforts him by saying he’ll remember twice as hard for the both of them, Daniel thinks to himself that his father won’t be around forever. I think we’re meant to connect here cemeteries (final resting places) of forgotten books, forgotten stories, forgotten people.

People make stories, and so I think Daniel forgetting these parts of his mother will come back around to mean something. If each shopkeeper of the Cemetery is called to a specific book to safekeep and remember for the duration of their life, there’s bound to be some metaphor growing here about people and life and death, especially with the book’s war themes. I’ll wait until I’m further into the book, until I have a more comprehensive perspective, before trying to outline this better.

Another idea I thought was worth noting from this first part (I misplaced the page number, but will comment below when I find it) was how it is characteristic of childhood to not understand something but still feel it deeply.  As the novel introduces war in a coming-of-age sort of trajectory, I wanted to highlight this sentiment, of feeling the repercussions of things you don’t yet understand and slowly losing your childhood innocence through the acquisition of knowledge.

I don’t know if anyone remembers the Inkheart series, a set of three children’s/middle-grade books fro the early 2000s, but this novel is giving off a similar vibe (energy) so far (albeit with more advanced/mature themes).

I have definitely read worse books than The Savage Detectives. In one sense, I’m glad that the book is mandatory because otherwise I probably would have either DNF’d it, or at least put it back on the shelf for “later” (a later that would never come because it would be included in my annual Facebook Marketplace sell off).

I don’t tend to love a journal entry writing style, but I thought it flowed well and the prose was well-written. I’m interested in Bolaño’s choice to make the main character so unlikeable in this section. While it does make it difficult to care about what happens to him, an unlikeable main character also allows more space and potential for growth. What happens to how you read the book when you, as reader, are less emotionally invested in the characters? The plot was slow but the overall tone didn’t feel like it was.

In terms of the act (/experience) of reading, I like the cover and the texture of the cover of the Picador edition. Physically, it’s a great read and is nice to hold: I love a book that’s floppy. It’s a long book, so I understand that having thin pages reduces its width and weight, but it is a little annoying that you can see the shadow of the text from the opposite page as you read.

Another little quirk I noticed is that the last line of the novel (I swear I’m not one of those controversial readers who reads the last line of the book first, I was just trying to check the page count) is on the literal last page of the book, which I feel like I don’t see often, either because of author bios or publishing ads or blank pages. I feel like it’s cool for the math to have worked out so exactly when they were printing the signatures to make the book.

I see from some of our classmates’ blog posts that I am not alone in being slow to warm up to the novel. But, The Savage Detectives is well-rated on the internet (4.5/5 stars on Goodreads, 5/5 on Indigo.ca, 4.03/5 on Storygraph), so I have faith that even if the pace doesn’t quite pick up, that the story will start to be received better the further in we get.

I expect it will be kind of like when you recommend a new television series to someone else, and you promise them that it gets good, they just have to “make it through” the first few episodes. I am waiting for this novel to change my mind, get good, and earn its 4/5 star rating.

Hello everyone, my name is Paige and welcome to my blog.

I am a graduate student in the Hispanic Studies department and my main interests are avant-garde art and literature, especially the dialogue between/through/across media. Looking at the course syllabus, I am most excited about exploring the physicality and materiality of a book. Is the construction of a book an art form or is it more scientific (based on stats and impact study)? In what way does the form of the media affect how we experience its content? How much agency does/should the author have in the creation of the book as object vs book as story, and how does that impact how they write it?

I had a long journey towards choosing a long book to read this semester because I am quite indecisive, especially when there are so many options. I started off by looking at my bookshelf, to see which books I could choose (and not have to spend additional money buying a physical copy of a new book). I cross-referenced my shelves with the course’s suggested list. I almost chose One Hundred Years of Solitude, because it’s a book I really should have read by now (and certainly have pretended to have read). I also almost looked at The Catholic School by Edoardo Albinati, but I decided it was too long (which, coincidentally, is why it’s still on my shelf, unread). I only entertained Don Quijote and Les miserables momentarily, because I very quickly decided that they were both too long and dry (too wordy, if you will).

After filtering out all these books that I did not choose for this semester, I am pleased to announce that my long book for this semester is:

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.

I will be reading an English translation by Lucia Graves, because I could not find a used copy of the original Spanish. To obtain a physical copy, I would have had to Special Order it in to a bookstore for thirty dollars. I decided that the English translation is good enough for our class purposes, and it will also make the reading more enjoyable since reading in my native language takes less effort than reading in a second language. I like that the book is part of a series, so I can continue on if I end up loving it, and I like that the synopsis gives off cozy vibes.