This book reminded me of Paris Peasant by Louis Aragon in the way that it felt like an existential crisis and it definitely left me wondering what was going on at some points. 

While I am not sure what the author’s intentions were behind this book, there appeared to be some references that had me considering this book as adding to a critique of social inequalities in Brazil. Specifically, “a city of gold and stone, Rio de Janeiro, whose inhabitants under the sun were six hundred thousand beggars” pg 109, seemed significant. The narrator, G.H. makes it evident that she is not included in this group of Brazilians, instead, she gets to leisurely ponder what it would be like to take part in low-paying jobs, such as her maid’s job. “If money and class hadn’t put me in the class I belong to, I’d normally have worked as the maid who arranges things in a large home of rich people, where there is so much to arrange” (pg 25). This line stood out to me because it reflects the privilege of those in higher social classes to only ever have to wonder what it might be like to live in the poverty that those who work for them endure. The narrator is definitely very detached from her maid, both in the sense that she simply views her job as just ‘arranging’ things, as well as not knowing anything about her maid or her living standards, assuming her room would be filthy. Many of the questions she asks herself amidst her mental breakdown reflect in itself her privilege, these questions ultimately leading her to gain a consciousness of the social construction of our world. These lines all reflect to me a sense of awakening to the absurdity of capitalism and the severe inequality and dissatisfaction that it creates:

“Life that I had tamed to make it familiar” pg 10

“Life cannot be retold. Life is not liveable” pg 12

“Because a world fully alive has the power of a Hell” pg 14

“There’s a bad taste to the disorder of living”

The narrator’s position within a higher social standing is important because she has the privilege to be able to awaken herself to the confines of living in a constraining economic system, while her maid, or the “six hundred thousand” beggars are unable to do so as they are bound by these social confines of society. The cockroach, therefore, becomes so triggering to the narrator because it is emblematic of the poverty that is pushed to the side or hidden behind all her privilege, the shield of privilege has been broken. The cockroach’s triggering death perhaps reflects a sense of her own guilt for being blind to such poverty.

There were numerous references to ‘Hell’, such as “Hell is not the torture of pain! It is the torture of a joy” pg 103. To me, these references seem suggestive of the reality of capitalism as a living hell, as it ‘tortures [of a] joy’. The author appears to gain consciousness of the unlivable and constraining realities under capitalism, describing it as hellish. What did you make of the references to both Hell, but also to God? I would love to hear how other people interpreted this confusing book!