Month: January 2024

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Week 4: The Shrouded Woman

Book 3 of the semester and I feel like it’s starting to get good. I found Proust and Breton to be overly complex, needing a lot of rereading and reflection, however, The Shrouded Woman by Maria Bombal was an enthralling narrative, filled with beautiful imagery, oozing emotion. I found myself lost between the lines from the very first paragraph, a unique experience for me which I hope to find myself in again. All 3 books remain connected in their use of reality, its reflection.

The author’s style of narration, mixed with their beautifully ornate imagery, serves to create an extremely subversive world, it’s extremely easy to find yourself fitting into the protagonist’s shoes, feeling the emotion she would have felt. For me, that is the biggest strength of this book. The evocative nature of the narration creates a beautifully complex, yet simple study of tragedy and suffering, while immersing the reader in a world of whimsy and raw emotion. Furthermore, this is coupled with a secondary reflective style of narration, where we see Ana Maria reflecting on her tragedies and soaking in the emotion, and this is an important technique that the author continues to use throughout the book to show us a sense of beauty in death due to its reflection of life. Moreover, it also adds a layer of pain and difficulty for the reader, as it is reflective of Ana Maria being aware of her enduring suffering.

One of the most interesting aspects of this book was the sheer misfortune of her life and the incessant nature of these struggles, and how this is still, but, a rendition of the adversities faced by women, especially at the time. This is another recurring theme throughout the story, and a rather strong one, where Ana Maria, and the other women, are depicted as weaker than and unequal to their male counterparts, be it her father or the other men in her life. Moreover, this callousness from men is further represented through her explanation of how men prioritize themselves and their work, leaving little room left for the women in their lives. Additionally, it cannot be understated the pivotal nature of her lack of control in all her relationship.

In conclusion, The Shrouded Woman is a beautiful tale of love and loss and a extremely poignant reflection of the inequalities faced by women both in love and in life and the impact of this. Overall, I found the plot to be a fun and unique take on these themes and plot points. Also, I found the authors’ narration of the protagonist going through the motions of emotion to be extremely moving.

 

Question: The author’s understanding of the female perspective is clear here, but what of the male perspective? I found it that the author had some extremely profound bits of reflection on the male psyche and its place in this scenario. Would you agree?

 

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Week 3: Nadja

Nadja, by Andre Breton, the second work published by the author, originally published in French, is one of the prominent works of the French surrealist movement. One of the first things that struck me about this book was the style of narration, how it was magniloquent yet foreign. My initial reaction was to chalk this down to being a virtue of the text being a translation, with meanings and intentions being lost in the process. I maintain that this possibly affected the narration, but as I read on, it struck me that this was but the nature/style of the book. Nadja starts off with Breton having a philosophical reflection, wrestling with the question “Who am I”. This leads into an almost factual exposition of Breton’s philosophy, his influences, etc, lacking a clear, explicit explanation for any of it, leaving the reader in a state of limbo, with one foot in the boat, having an idea of what Breton is talking about here, and the rest of your body on the dock, trying to piece together where exactly this dock even is. In further trying to understand Breton’s intention with Nadja, and the seeming incoherence of the writing and structure, namely the contextless, episodic and almost factual narration, the seemingly haphazard page breaks and placement of photographs, all feel intentional in trying to induce and immerse the reader in the ‘surrealist’ ideal. Similar to my thoughts on Combray last week, these authorial choices ultimately culminate in the reading experience emulating a dream, where it’s effectively impossible to control the narration and its flashy episodic nature, while also experiencing vivid, evocative visions. Breton first meets, and the book first introduces the character Nadja in its second part. Nadja is said to be Breton’s personification of surrealism. We see this through the nature of their relationship, the initial infatuation with Nadja, moving to a continued obsession, evolving into a detached fondness and culminating in the relationship being no more, and also through her general depiction in the text and how her enigmatic drawings are used throughout the book with various captions. Especially in terms of their relationship dissolving, it starkly reflects the notion that Breton was himself scared of ‘sacrificing’ himself to an ideology/woman that he could not conceive as logical. Overall, Nadja dances the line of novel or biography. Additionally, Breton’s use of real names of historical auteurs and acquaintances adds a level of relatability and context to the text, allowing you to better place and picture the descriptions. Nadja was a fun and unique read, which I found to be an important and memorable dive into the world of surrealism.

 

Question: After reading Breton’s cautionary tale with surrealism, where would you place yourself in terms of your relationship with surrealist ideals and moreover surrealist art and literature?

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Week 2: Combray

Combray by Marcel Proust, the first text I have ever encountered of such a descriptive, narrative nature. I found the book especially hard to consume due to, what I found to be, increasingly complicated and elaborate descriptions of the world. This took form in the shape of extremely long sentences, heavy use of adjectives and extreme world building. These characteristics made it especially hard for me to maintain my focus on the book, therefore I had to read over the same part multiple times and various parts to understand and reorient myself in terms of the story. This created a sense of urgency in the text for me, where I felt as if the slightest of breaks would make me completely lose my sense of context in the story. However, this type of narration also helped immerse me in the idea of these descriptions being the ramblings of someone describing their memories. Although this is what makes this reading exceedingly hard, I found the ability of the author to elicit the emotion that one experiences when listening to their friend go on and on about a dream they had, this sense of organized chaos/misconstrued coherency, in my opinion, to be one of the most important and innovative aspects of the book and the type of narration it entails. Ironically, the narration at the beginning of the chapter, where the narrator describes the confused state he wakes up in, perfectly encapsulates what one feels while reading this text for the first time. Overall, I found this text to be extremely interesting in terms of, how the author depicts what can now be considered a rather overdone theme of memories. This text approaches it from a unique perspective of self-awareness, with grandiose descriptions, and extreme care and attention to the contextualization and world building. The highlight of this text for me was the undeniable evidence of Proust’s mastery over the medium. His use of extravagant verbiage and elaborate descriptions, although confusing and complex, ultimately paint a picture and immerse the reader in the story’s world uniquely.

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Week 1: Introduction

Hi, my name is Prathyush. This is my second year at UBC in the faculty of arts. I plan to major in History, with a minor in Law and Society. I’m an Indian international student from Dubai, UAE with an unwavering passion for all things art. My favourite things to do are larp as a cinephile, and listen to every possible kind of music under our sun. Through this course, I am hoping to broaden my horizons and expand my passion for consumption into the field of literature. Prior to this course, and as I write this, I would not call myself a reader. I am hoping to change this and foster, a hopefully, undying love for reading and novels. I am currently a huge fan of comics, manga and more generally all kinds of graphic content, evidently lacking a strong connection to the literary medium. This background allows me to enter this course with a sense of where my taste and sensibilities lie, with the goal of building on this and learning how to navigate the extensive world of literature, primarily narrative. As for my background as a reader, historically I was never one to pick up a book through my own will and motivation, usually requiring external stimuli (my parents or teachers) pushing me to read and expand my vocabulary. This has created a negative relationship of sorts, with reading, for me, where I only read when I am required to. I have long tried to find the internal motivation to pick a good book on a rainy day and read at least a chapter or two, but have been consistently unsuccessful in this endeavour. Through the ‘choose your own adventure’ portion of the course, I am hoping to combine the pressure of coursework with a passion for growth, arts and culture to, at the very least, change my relationship with reading. With regard to the first lecture, there were two points that stood out to me – firstly, the question of what is the romance world and second, the similarity between the perception and versatility of the romance languages and the various languages found across India. When posed the first question, my initial thoughts were – France, Italy, Spain? However, after watching the lecture, I am now privy to the deterritorialized nature of the romance world and how the ‘romance world’ is more a product of freedom of expression and is shared by cultures and languages everywhere. Moreover, this correlates with the interconnectedness of many of the European languages, such as France, Spanish, Italian, etc, and how fluency in any one of these languages can allow you to communicate with someone with fluency in another. This is similar to the interconnectedness of languages across India, where how fluency in Hindi, for example, can allow you to communicate with someone only fluent in Punjabi or Urdu. This concept heavily coincides with the idea of the romance world existing in a plain above our conventions of geographical and linguistic borders/barriers, and more as a testament to our innately human ability to express ourselves and our emotions, rather than products of our race, nationality, gender, etc. I am extremely excited to approach these works from both the lenses of pure expressionism and as products of their environment, and therefore debate the influence of these perspectives.

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