Category Archives: language

March 21, 2022 · 6:34 pm

Bolaño’s treasure; a review of Amulet

Bolaño’s “Amulet” caught my interest with its gripping first line – “This is going to be a horror story”. The narrator, Auxillo is an unlikely choice and voice of a book. She is far from ordinary; impulsive, thoughtful and ambivalent. It is fascinating to follow her writing style, which is a stream of consciousness,  because she seems interested in all her mundane details and instances of quiet rebellion that grips the youth of Mexico and is reflected in her own thoughts. The novel is told in a strange manner, with scattered thoughts and loops within loops of time being created.

Bolaño challenged the linear model of passage of time in a person’s life, and introduces us to think about life, as “ full of enigmas, minimal events that, at the slightest touch or glance, set off chains of consequences, which, viewed through the prism of time, invariably inspire astonishment or fear” (p.23). This perspective is reflected through Auxillo’s experience of being stuck in the bathroom of the UNAM university during the siege by the Riot Police. 

In the novel, Auxillo, an Uruguayan woman living in Mexico,  moves through her bohemian lifestyle, referring to herself as the “mother of all poets” in a non-traditional Mexican way of life. Her vivid descriptions of young poets she encounters and takes under her wing were fascinating to read. The importance of poetry in Auxillo’s life remains explicit in the book, and I particularly liked its relevance when she is stuck in the bathroom of the university, surrounded by the riot police. She remarks “the laws of tyrannical cosmos are opposed to the laws of poetry”, highlighting the importance of art, the comfort provided by poetry and the chance encounter with a riot police member where she remains unfound.  

With Amulet, it is difficult to not view the writing, or the use of words and diction, as anything short of extraordinary. On p. 86, Auxillo describes the setting of Guerrero as a “cemetery..bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing, that it forgot everything else”. This idea can be traced back to Auxillo’s own attempt to try and escape her experience in the bathroom stall  university, as well as the broader landscape of Mexico- where many things are forgotten or lost. 

To end, the erratic tone of the book may make some wonder if Auxillo is crazy and doubt her sanity. But upon closer examination, we may find that her poetically charged account may be a woman’s way of seeing the world and its intricate details by sharing her observations. 

Food for thought: 

How did you interpret the “birthing” scene on page 31, within the broader context of the story? 

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March 14, 2022 · 7:52 pm

Manea’s “The Trenchcoat”

Manea’s “The Trenchcoat” stirred up some discomfort in me, given the ambiguous nature of the text, but it was certainly an enjoyable read. The discomfort came primarily from moving across the pages in an unfamiliar setting, with unfamiliar characters, in writing that imbibed a tone of ambiguity. However, I appreciate that this course has encouraged me to read texts that defy the very notion of what a novel means, or what “good writing” entails. Manea’s writing can be read as a useful artifact in capturing the lives of people living through social and political turmoil. What is interesting is, even as the characters occupy space in Romania at a time in history when it was disintegrating,  Manea has managed to depict them as detached and individuals with agency. 

The most gripping parts of the text for me were the ones that referenced socio-political life under authoritarian regimes, in the context of communism. While most of the book is carefully curated to focus on inter-personal and intimate networks and interactions between people, Manea made some remarks that alluded to the Romanian regime. On page 193, “For a Latin people like ours..it’s the desire to get together that has disappeared.” This specific placement of the Stoian’s family, within their cultural context, makes the remark powerful. It depicts that they experience a loss of excitement and a loss of the feeling of unity that ties their people together, under the authoritarian regime where communities grow suspicious of one another, and live in fear of the power of the government. 

Another great example of the aforementioned point is found on p.196, when the family is in the car, discussing the children’s patriotic oath that they say at school- “ I’ll be tall, healthy, clean and neat, without ever needing a bite to eat.” Manea has an extraordinary ability to frame these historical instances through  an unpolitical example to politically outline the dearth of necessities that gripped most countries that were communists. In this case,  it outlines scarcity created by communism, in contrast to the West (obsessed with consumption and consumerism) as a “sign of the times” (p.196) that Romania is in. 

To end, this discussion would certainly be incomplete without referencing the Trenchcoat. In my reading of the text, the Trenchcoat acts as the central symbol in the book. The ordinary trench coat is the ordinary citizen. In a regular context, it is not a threatening object, but given the conditions of the book- it is looked at with suspicion, interest, and a deliberate curiosity, which is similar to how ordinary citizens interact and engage with each other. An ordinary object like the Trenchcoat, and the ordinary citizen, becomes a reason for everyone to be on their toes, as though they are being watched. 

 

Question for Manea: 

Are there any specific lessons on courage that you can give your readers who are interested in writing/ becoming writers? (I ask, since your work can most definitely be considered an act of bravery, having been written against the political landscape of Romania) 

 

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February 13, 2022 · 4:38 pm

A brief character study of Sagan’s “Bonjour Tristesse”

Sagan’s “Bonjour Tristesse” centres around, a 16 year old girl who is on a summer vacation at the French Riviera with her father and and the events that unfolded. The book begins with the idle 16 year old basking in the pleasure of summer- filled with fleeting moments of love, sunshine and laughter with her father. Even in the first few pages, it is difficult for the reader to not view Cecile as spoilt, pampered and oblivious to the sorrows and complexities of life. It’s easy to see how she’s trapped in a bubble of money, privilege, and boredom that can only be afforded to the rich. Looking back (since the story is narrated in hindsight), Cecile remarks, “I dare say I owed most of my pleasures of that period to money” (p.19). Her lack of ambition, and her comfort with deriving happiness from superficial avenues seems troubling, at the very least. The fact that she is self-reflexive about these facets of the self provides some relief (at best) in the readers.

As a reader, I’m left to wonder whether it is Cecile’s boredom that leads her to meddling in her father’s marriage with Anne. Raymond (Cecile’s father), is written  as a charismatic man, untethered by love and the like, who shocks everyone when he decides to marry his dead wife’s former friend Anne. The plot unfolds with Cecile devising an elaborate plan to break up the marriage before her family returns home to Paris. In many ways, the entire book is an articulation of the underlying reasons why Cecile becomes obsessed with breaking this marriage. It remains unknown whether it is her sacred relationship with her father, which exists in a bubble that she does not want to expand to include other people, or her own child-like (and confusing) encounters with love

Additionally, in part, she is motivated to break up the marriage due to Anne herself. Composed, calm and restricted, Anne is a force that is antonymous from her father and her lifestyles and ways of being. Anne is depicted as having a curious control over Cecile, which Cecile regards with equal parts fascination and caution. Anne and Cecile’s conversations in the book are some of the most intense scenes and capture an interesting intimacy. As as a reader, you wonder what lessons Cecile learns and resists from these strange but powerful interactions with Anne, and the ways in which it moulds her identity.

To conclude, the rhythm and flow of the book are tumultuous, with unexpected twists and moments that can allude to Cecile’s state of mind, and the ebbs and flows of her changing identity across the summer.

Astha Kumar

Food for thought: 

Q. In what ways is Anne the villain in the book, and in what ways does she redeem herself from that status?

 

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January 24, 2022 · 6:13 pm

Paris Peasant- an inquiry into the past?

Words like historic, romanic and chic are a part of my common vocabulary when I think about Paris. However, through reading Aragon’s “Paris Peasant” (1994) , I was offered an opportunity to imagine a distinctively different Paris. In his vivid descriptions of the city, it’s places and people and things, the narrator induces an almost painful nostalgia through his  surrealist tone- ..”in this world that surrounded me and which seemed to me to be a prey to quite new obsessions” (113).  The old order of the world was disintegrating, and the world was on the brink of change during the time of Aragon’s writing, and he posits the narrator as witnessing and processing this shift through meticulously archiving the daily, and the mundane.

Aragon’s descriptions of the mundane descriptions of landscape, setting and people (friends and strangers alike) are a testament to the fact that the old world is not redundant. He writes  about sacred places at the turn of the century- “At least each space of space is meaningful, like a syllable of some dismantled world” (169).  Through this description alone, Aragon engages in the brave act of preserving history. The ordinary times, even as they are re-shaped into something extraordinary by temporality, cannot deem the past as unimportant in its original form.

As a reader, I felt the narrator move through life embodying the ethic of the avant-garde. Time becomes clung to objects and setting, which appear almost ghost-like. I believe this spectral feeling is created within the readers because Aragon does not not rely on a plot or characters to illustrate the aforementioned themes in his work. Instead, he relies on the literary tactic of stream of consciousness, where the flow of his thoughts become the words on the paper and the backbone of the story. To me, this promotes the idea of the ghost setting, and ghost object and ghost people referenced in his work are an entity worthy of social examination, and not just as dead and forgotten as the tidal wave of time seeks to wipe them out.

Overall, the book creates a feeling of the narrator hanging in between remembering what is gone and cautiously awaiting what it yet to come by offering a still, provocative account pf the present- “I do not seek the right. I seek the concrete.” (202). This is culturally revolutionary because many people associate the turn of the century and technological innovation as a symbol of development. The new world is an embodiment of progress, but the process of such changes might reveal significant details, as evident in Aragon’s work.

Astha Kumar

Food for thought: 

While recognizing the broad usage of surrealism in Aragon’s work, can we maybe point to smaller and specific instances of its usage?

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January 17, 2022 · 2:59 pm

Proust’s “Combray” : A window into the past that is neither transparent nor opaque, but translucent.

Marcel Proust is often cited as a crucial contributor to modernist literature. His chapter on “Combray” is a remarkable study of the fragile nature of memory and remembering. Upon first glance, Proust draws the reader in by the using words that seem to occupy a liminal space between sleep and consciousness, that mimic the confused state of the main character in the book, who is experiencing confusion upon waking up in his room. He arouses a feeling of loneliness in the reader, by populating the setting with great detail, yet positioning the character as feeling empty, in a desolate space. His vivid descriptions of the room, coupled with the descriptions of the objects within it, seem to be longing for the company that the rooms once inhabited.

In a traditional novel, the reader expects a linear time sequencing, a reliable and singular narrator and descriptions of any art form, such as literature, imitating life. Proust’s work, which is an embodiment of modernist work, unsettles and challenges all these expectations in a myriad of ways. The unnamed narrator takes a journey into the past, travelling seamlessly into moments of past that position him as a child, occupying space in the same house he lives in today. He outlines conversations, and moments, and his longing for maternal comfort in great detail, through a narrative tone that is, at best, unreliable. This unreliability is turned inward for the main character, as he struggles to discover whether his memories of the past are locked in time, or moulded into something different as he looks back with the benefit of hindsight. He remarks, “these recollections abandoned so long outside of my memory, nothing survived”. This challenges the idea that every memory, every caveat of the past should fit like a piece of a missing puzzle. Instead, this style of writing encourages the reader to reject the idea of categorizing and recalling the past as a neatly woven structure, and instead look at it as an ever-changing form, with no certain beginning, middle or end.

Memory is described as a window into the past, that looks different from various angles and periods of time. The narrator, when he writes about his childhood, is lacking the obvious nostalgia one expects when describing his home, family members and the private memories of their household. This is yet more evidence of an unexpected style of writing, and provides testament that Proust’s work embodies the modernist agenda. Hence, the window into the past, is not transparent (full available) or opaque (fully blocked), but instead translucent, allowing limited, incomplete and malleable glimpses.

-Astha, K

Food for thought:

A question that I pose from his work is- Were you, as a reader, a) surprised by the narrator’s commentary on class, caste and social status? and b) what did you make of these observations? (page 21).

 

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