7 Manikanetish by Naomi Fontaine

Posted on October 18, 2026 by dnabi

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f6/75/98/f67598b8e92d09f4f1fa612269a02a3c.png

Link is a map of Innu land including Uashat

Some Canadian context for this book that I’m not counting in the word count ????:

In BC we mostly hear and think about Indigenous people as First Nations and Inuit. However, this book is written by a French Indigenous woman who is Innu, which is neither First Nations nor Inuit. The story takes place on Innu land in Quebec (see map of Innu land).

Most Canadians know of the Inuit people, who won the two largest land claims in Canada, in 1999 a new Inuit *province* called Nunavut and earlier in 1975 Inuit negotiated a land-back claim from the Quebec government when a huge hydro-electric dam was built at James Bay in Hudson’s Bay. There are about 60,000 Inuit people.

By contrast, Innu were the original inhabitants in “Ntisinan”, the tundra region of northern Labrador and Québec. There are cultural links to Cree First Nation.

Currently there are 29,000 Innu people, including those in Uashat where this story takes place.

My reaction on first reading

This book is about Yammie who at age 7 left Uashat with her family and is returning now at age 22 to the new high school to teach writing, in this isolated, desolate Innu community. It is the story of her first school year, struggling with her students, her identity, and her purpose in life.

Similar to our last two books, especially RU, the novel is organized by fragments, with white space between. I like this fragment style, it’s the way memory works, so it seems natural to me, and this author mostly follows a chronological order, so it is easy to read.

What she didn’t know, is that she was looking for too much affirmation from her students (16). She doesn’t understand her students, and right from the start one enrages her. (23) Students are regularly impacted by the death of relatives. Yammies own grandmother dies, and she understands the intensity of her grandfather’s love. This contrasts with the boyfriend Nicolas that she left behind, who doesn’t return her calls, until finally they talk and it ends with her shouting F U and imagining him laughing at her reaction (56).

Life is a struggle takes on new meaning for Yammie, as her students struggle with life and death. “Marithee (a student’s sister) killed herself last night” (80), and the students despair, especially the several who are mothers of babies, as “nothing … suggested the distress she was experiencing. A despair that was invisible” (85).

This is my question for the class – is despair mostly visible or invisible?

At this time Yammie meets Stanley, a travelling musician who “doesn’t care what others think, with the arrogance of a man who almost always has his way.” Yet she loved “the way he held my face in both hands when he kissed me”. (102) . A theme common to our previous novels, a man providing a necessary part of a woman’s identity.

The final section Things I can’t change centres around the theatre production she is organizing for the school. The students seem eager to perform, but Yammie is stressed about whether they will be able to pull it off given their life issues. On short notice, her school principal makes her escort a week-long hiking and camping trip which adds more stress.

Suddenly Yammie is gaining weight (126) and feeling nauseous (129) and gets angry at herself for becoming pregnant and feels sorry for herself for having no support system but has learned from her students to just carry on. The play is a huge success. She realizes that teaching is raising other people’s children and watching them grow (151); something she should have learned from day 1 from the school’s name Manikanetish, the name of the founder who had spent her life raising orphans in the village.

We know Yammie will be alright, we have a resolution. This contrasts with our previous novels which lacked resolution, and it made for a pleasant read.

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Carmen Mola

Posted on October 17, 2026 by Jon

Here’s a little scandal from a few years back…

A Spanish woman wins a prestigious literary prize, marketed as “Spain’s Elena Ferrante,” but she turned out to be not a woman but three men.

Spanish media noted that publicity for the books had played off the tensions between the apparent creator’s life and “her” creations.

“It hasn’t escaped anyone’s notice that the idea of a university professor and mother of three, who taught algebra classes in the morning then wrote ultra-violent, macabre novels in scraps of free time in the afternoon, made for a great marketing operation,” Spanish paper El Mundo noted in an interview with the authors.

Beatriz Gimeno, a feminist, writer, activist – and former head of one of Spain’s national equality bodies, the Women’s Institute – attacked the men for creating a female persona in their publicity for Carmen Mola books, over several years.

“Quite apart from using a female pseudonym, these guys have spent years doing interviews. It’s not just the name – it’s the fake profile that they’ve used to take in readers and journalists. They are scammers,” she said on Twitter.

Their agent’s website features a photo of a woman, looking away from the camera, on the author profile page, above a flattering comparison with Italian literary sensation Ferrante.

Last year, a regional branch of the Women’s Institute recommended one of Mola’s works as part of a selection of books by female authors including Margaret Atwood that could “help us understand the reality and the experiences of women in different periods of history and contribute to raising awareness about rights and freedoms.”

See also for instance Mina Samuels, “Betrayed by Carmen Mola: What We Lose When a Successful Female Author Turns Out to Be Three Men” (December 14, 2021):

If Elena Ferrante turns out to be many men, I will be even more disappointed. A woman’s voice created by a committee of men feels minimizing, as if women aren’t individuals, but rather a lumpy mass of stereotypes. There’s a demeaning aspect to the idea that the individuality of any one woman’s psyche (Inspector Elena Blanco, in this case) can be written by consensus. I know that the practice is commonplace in the television world, where Carmen Mola’s true trio comes from.

[. . .]

I believe that in the particular case of Carmen Mola, my freedom of choice outweighs the author’s freedom to choose their disguise. After all, what do the authors gain by changing gender? They gain credibility for their female police inspector. And, possibly, they gain readers like me, who love thrillers and want to prioritize female authors. Both of those gains are ill-gotten.

It is certainly true that in the past (and perhaps even now) women authors have gained a lot by disguising themselves as men—the right to publish a novel period, or a more appreciative audience who was not judging their writing and content based primarily on their gender and/or protection from the vitriol so often aimed at women with something substantive to say.

I acknowledge that I am wading into deep and fraught waters here by invoking and giving importance to an author’s gender. I offer my view here with deep respect for each writer’s individual voice and expression, recognizing that in other situations the use of a pseudonym may serve a higher purpose than my freedom of choice.

And to give a sense of the discourse before the “revelation,” look at María Fasce, “¿Quién es Carmen Mola?” (June 15, 2018).

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Symphony in White: my hater era

Posted on October 16, 2026 by kcauchon

What a devastating and awful book. Unfortunately, this is the first book we’ve read this term that I can confidently say I disliked. For so many reasons. It’s my turn to be a hater I guess.

I’ll start with the end of the book since it’s fresh in my mind. The reveal that their father was abusing Clarice felt like a cheap and disgusting way to make this book interesting. That feels very aggressive but I’m letting my feelings speak first. The whole length of this book, I knew there would be some sort of reveal at the end because of how vague the writing was about everything. And towards the middle I could guess what had happened. But to have the overarching plot be this reveal of abuse felt like it was exploiting Clarice’s trauma as a plot device. It reminds me of Colleen Hoover books, if anyone has read those, which all follow a similar narrative of “there’s this big secret that no one talks about and at the end it’s revealed to be a devastating trauma” and Hoover’s books have been described as “trauma porn”. In our book, there were other plot things happening, but they were so vaguely described and uninteresting. It felt like it was just superficial descriptions of what was going on in these characters’ lives but the chapter always ended or changed perspectives before we got to know any more. Like Joao Miguel had a relationship with that guy Paolo and the tennis instructor? But we never went into that at all and Maria Ines didn’t really seem to have any thoughts on it, just brought it up multiple times with no reflection. Also Tomas is Eduarda’s father? That was said once at the end of the book but clearly doesn’t matter because we don’t talk about it.

What I also did not like about this book was the prose. So much of it felt so unnecessary. There was a passage I had to read multiple times and I still don’t know what we’re talking about: “And she withdrew again. To make up or remember a dream, or taste the watermelon, the oranges, and the tangerines that she had not eaten. To intimately be Eduarda, a small and moveable life” (119). I don’t even know what sentiment was trying to be conveyed here, and the way it’s written doesn’t help to understand. It could be a translational difference, and perhaps Portuguese syntax is hard for my native-English-speaking brain to wrap my head around. But I really struggled with the writing of this book. Especially with the way we switched perspectives and timelines. It was hard to find meaning in anyone’s story since we moved on from a given perspective so quickly.

All this to say, this book was definitely not for me, but I am looking forward to see what everyone has to say in their blogs and in class. Surely there is something that I missed in this story that other people saw. My question to the class is: If you enjoyed the story, do you think it would be more or less effective if it had been written in a more conventional way (not constantly changing perspectives and timelines)?

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Brutally Honest, Brutally Beautiful: Sinfonia em branco by Lisboa

Posted on October 16, 2026 by Amada Libertad

It has been a few hours since I finished the book and I do not seem to know how to make justice to the book through this blog.

In comparison to Kim Thúy, I believe Lisboa makes a better work at portraying memory through generational trauma narrative. I love how she makes us jump from different points of views across different time periods (it reminds me a bit of Emiliano Monge in Justo Antes del Final). But more than being fragmented snippets (as we saw with Thuy), Lisboa weaves each memory and even each forgetting in such a beautiful visual conversation.

There is a specific scene where the sisters, Maria Inês and Clarice, are bathing their mother, where their conversation turns into a poem. Gorgeous. This scene reminded me of the moment in the movie A Separation by Asghar Farhadi, where the son is washing his dad:

Even though they are from really different contexts and stories, I believe there is space to put these two scenes in conversation with each other to talk about the ways that gender dynamics affects the ways that daughters/sons confront the last stages of a parent life, when the roles flips completely making the silences, the tensions, become so loud that are too hard to ignore.

In general, these scenes, for me, represent a decision: mercy.

I love how Lisboa, throughout the entire book, pushes the abuser to the sidelines of the narrative. Nothing really points out to the father having anything to do with the hints of trauma that we get throughout the character’s stories. At best we try to blame his absence and the rigidity of a mother not capable of loving for the difficulties their daughters have to face when they try to create their own families when they grow up. Easy to blame the mom, huh? The dad, even in his absence, takes up a secondary role in the trauma inflicted. It is not until Otacília dies, that he starts taking more of a primary role in the book, that our attention is briefly occupied by his nuisance. In general he is just that, un estorbo. Until we go back, again, to that memory: Maria Inê’s memory, a memory once ignored by us, the readers, and by Maria Inê herself.

It is fascinating how accurately the book portrays the way families conceal abusers in real life. As a reader, Lisboa forces you to reproduce the forgetting and the silences needed to be complicit with the violence, with the abuser, of course, this time, unintentionally. But unintentionally, you also become complicit in toxic family dynamics in real life. You have bits and pieces that, with, perhaps, more questions, with, perhaps, more curiosity, with, perhaps, more attention, with, perhaps, more overthinking, you might be able to piece together those snippets of memory before the narrative explicitly reveals the truth about what happened; the truth behind all those little and big decisions that the characters seem to take out of the blue, that helps people around them perceive them as “bad daughters” as “bad adults” as “crazy women,” specifically, of course, in the way Clarice is perceived after her “irrational” decisions.

Question: What’s your stance towards Otacília?

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Adriana Lisboa, Memory, Symphony in White & Thoughts on Course.

Posted on October 16, 2026 by dleoar

“Marguerite Duras will live within the nervous systems of thousands of women in the year 2035”

Roberto Bolaño, Amulet

 

THIS BLOG POST is divided in two parts. Part I, Non-academic thoughts on the course, “Module 1 Reflection”, feelings and connections within course texts. Part II, Reading on Adriana Lisboa’s Symphony is White.

 

 Part I

THERE IS THIS WOMAN that haunts me. Her name is waiting somewhere lurking, her artistic works’ forms transposed into a new story, an inter-text or a work epigraph’ed:

If it is useless to cry, I believe one must cry all the same. Because despair is tangible. It lingers on. The memory of despair, it lingers on. Sometimes it kills.

Marguerite Duras

Ecrire

The epigraph in Adriana Lisboa’s debut novel, Symphony in White.  A novel lyrical like Ru, exploring memory like A Girl Returned Days of Abandonment, and The Possessed.

After this epigraph, the Durassian influence on the text seemed pretty much evident to me. I read The Easy Life over the summer, and this novel reads a lot like it. Including the starter “one-liner” short sentences

Symphony in White. It concerns non-linear memory, sparse but lyrical, fragment-like text. Repetition. Albeit Lisboa’s Symphony in White breakthrough in her exposition style with fresh one-line conversation format.

I fell down a rabbit hole. Lisboa is a translator herself, from the French to the Portuguese, has translated various Duras’ novels to the latter: Destroy, She Said (Destruir, diz ela), The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein (O arrebatamento de Lol V. Stein), Hiroshima Mon Amour (Hiroshima meu amor). A key translator, Lisboa is, for the ongoing Coleção Marguerite Duras published by Relicário Edições.   

All novels assigned for 4 weeks are connected with these characteristics. Durassian, in form, influence, prose.

I think this “Module I” of 4 completely different texts compliments one other. Thematic patterns I notice between these texts include, Memory; fragmented memory, core memories, Non-linearity (except DOA), Older narrators reflecting on younger memories, the Self and the Other.

A cosmic influence? I ask myself.

 

 

Part II

 

Lisboa’s novel Symphony in White tells the story of two sisters’ life unfolding (Clarice and Maria Ines), interwoven with the stories of those in their lives amidst the political turmoil of Brazil’s dictatorship between 1960s and 1970s. The novel explores memory, family relations and sexual abuse.

The scene that stood up to me:

“Maria Ines began to undress in front of the mirror. With a quick gesture she took off her nightgown and once more faced that intimate, everyday truth, her body. Her hips were a bit too wide and her stomach was far from being as flat as a board. Her breasts, which had nursed a child, still looked like adolescent breasts, small and fragile. She had a scar from an acute appendicitis five years earlier. Removing her panties, the remains of her C-section, a small, curved scar about four inches long, was still visible” (11)

Intimate. The body centred, portraying a scene of a universal experience: the contemplation of the body. Bodies. Consent. There is something to say about this. The connection between bodies, consent. I will wait until class to properly formulate my thoughts on this.

The book contrasts Rural Brasil: I notice many imagery of bugs, butterflies, hills, rivers (mud). As opposed to Rio wherein denizens have beach access, go to Operas and learn French (paved streets). I really enjoyed the assemble of characters’ story introduced to unfold the two protagonists’ story. This depicts how lives are interconnected.

Nuances of family. This quote:

People in general felt sorry for Afonso Olfmpio and even tolerated his vice of alcohol, because he had the face and the demeanor of a victim. And they said that daughter who lives in Rio de Janeiro should come keep him company. Oh, but that’s how children are, we raise them, give them our love and afterwards, nothing. Ungrateful brats. 

It stays with me. Because it portrays the nuances of family, that not everyone has the insight of everything, not all have access to a holistic narrative.

Eternalism. A block universe. Past, present, future equally existing in a four dimensional universe. This novel feels like it. Not like analepsis and prolepsis (albeit that is the employed literary technique), but like the past interwoven with past interwoven with the present. The Guava-worm scene, mentioned earlier in the novel. A memory that becomes the ending scene of the novel. It leaves me with an image: a past self with an imagination, the future clouded by imagination, of what the future (present) would be like.

I am excited for the class discussion.

Question: What do you make of the scene when Maria Ines confronts Afonso?

 

C’est Tout. 

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The Twilight Zone

Posted on October 15, 2026 by ava

I think the title is very fitting. The Twilight Zone was strange and unsettling in a way, but not necessarily in a bad way. It’s about the man who tortured people. A man with a moustache who tortured people. A man with a moustache who tortured people during the Pinochet era in Chile.

This was a slow read, and it made me pause multiple times. I had to go back and read again at times which was not the case with the previous novels (at least so far). The narrator of the book is a woman. A writer but also a detective in a way. The whole novel is about her wanting to write a book about the man who tortured people. She writes letters to him, follows what happened to him, makes connections of the stories she was told since childhood, her lived experiences, and fills in the gaps of the testimonies given to a reporter by the man who tortured people, and the documentary made on his testimonies of what he had done and what he was ordered to do during those days.

The novel is divided into four zones. Entry Zone, Contact Zone, Ghost Zone, Escape Zone. Stories are structured around these zones. But within all the other stories told, it is all connected back to the man who tortured people, the realities of Chile under Pinochet, and what continues on and the mark left behind by that era. I think the structure all makes sense once you finish the book. There are letters from her to the man and from the man to her. At the very end, we get a condensed timeline of her life. But with one twist, it’s not only about her but her life situated within the history of Chile. Her going to school, an assassination, a death, family members of the disappeared light candles in front of the cathedral, she enrols in university, the police kill three passengers and wound twelve, her son takes his first steps, Revolución Pingüina starts, and the family members of the disappeared (many who were tortured and killed by the man who tortured people) light candles at the cathedral.

I have read other works that you may call historical/political novels. One was very recently written by a male writer and here are some things that grabbed my attention while reading this one, with that in the back of my mind. As I was thinking about this, I realized that which one is a better novel is not necessarily the point. What matters is what each is trying to focus on, and how this one, women’s writing, differs and why it is important.

Well, you hear a lot about mothers, wives, daughters, and overall women’s experiences under the dictatorship. Not only the men who were tortured and brutally killed but those who waited for their sons to come back, for their husbands, and for their fathers. She talks about how when her son was born, she feared that she might never see him again. That fear of losing those we love. And then she goes on to say how many mothers never found where their sons were, hoping that they would one day walk through the front door, but some were faced with their cold bodies, and some were never found or heard of. She also touches on which histories are officially recorded and which are never written down and ones that are only remembered by those who lived through them and then passed them down. Who decides what gets put into a museum of memory? What narratives get pushed forward? Who does it serve?

Another point she makes is that the government tries to put all of this history in the past, as if it doesn’t follow us into the present, trying to close the door on it and move on. Yet the injustice continues. Two women, the families of men killed by the government, start shouting at the opening ceremony of the museum of memory and the author writes: “The women’s cries awaken memory, set it in conversation with the present, raise it from the crypt, and breathe life into it, resuscitating a creature fashioned from scraps, from bits of different people, from fragments of yesterday and today.” (p. 31)

Throughout, she tells the story of women as strong characters. Women who carry the history through their losses.

She doesn’t think the man who tortured people is a monster (fully). She doesn’t blame him for it all because he realized what he did wrong. His life was a mess. But he himself doesn’t think that way. He says “I could blame my bosses, I could say that they were the ones who changed me. But you always have a hand in what happens to you. I know this because I’ve seen people who don’t betray themselves. People who might be up to their necks in shit and they don’t break.” (p. 102)

I also noticed how she would divide what she imagined happened versus times when she would write “I know this, I am not imagining.” Does this give the novel a taste of reality? Or is it still fiction?

I would recommend the book and am glad I chose to read it.

My question is about translators, not writers. This is something I came across recently as I was choosing a translation for a classic, and I ended up buying the male translation from YEARS ago and the person who checked me out said ” Interesting, you didn’t choose the newer translation by the woman. I think whoever says it’s bad and not accurate is a misogynist.” As I read this novel, I thought about how I have read a book written by a man but translated by the same woman who translated this novel, which is why I thought of this question. So, what do we think about women’s translations vs men’s? does it matter? does it make a difference?

Thanks for reading!

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Symphony in White by Lisboa: Fragmented Trauma

Posted on October 15, 2026 by Sydney Hyndman

This book was interesting as it was set amidst the Brazilian dictatorship era (1964-1985), so it kinda possesses that historical touch like the last book we read, Ru, did. On a second note, another theme that I recognized as parallel to Ru was how the book was written. It jumps between time, experiences, and memory. All of these aspects are very fragmented, yet collectively seem to paint a landscape of the lives of those involved. The observations are incredibly detailed and precise, so although they are quite broken apart, they offer readers the opportunity to deeply immerse themselves in the storyline. I guess this is what the title Symphony in White is perhaps alluding to? The idea of little pieces coming together to create something big, and meaningful?

Contrastingly, I feel as though this book illustrates trauma and abuse differently than the previous readings we have looked at. In this story, the trauma of the two sisters, Clarice and Maria Ines, is explored within the backdrop of rural Brazil. We learn that both sisters have been caught up in parental sexual abuse, with Clarice as the victim and Maria Ines as a witness. While their experiences are different, they are very much connected. Such experiences are also processed in different ways. I think that this goes to show that trauma can extend beyond the person who is directly experiencing the abuse. Instead, it can affect and shape the lives of those who exist around it too. 

Taken together, I find the comparison to Ru quite interesting. On the one hand, both novels show how engaging in a fragmented form of storytelling can communicate experiences that are perhaps hard to capture through a clear cut, linear narrative. However, Symphony in White is different in the sense that it illustrates how trauma can shape different people in different ways. I'm looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts on this tomorrow - as always! It's very cool that we get to hyper analyze these new texts every week, and pick them apart. I always think about how the authors of the books we read would feel if they sat in our classroom, as we pick apart their literary style, ideas, and motivations.

My question for the class today: What was your favourite, or least favourite, aspect of this book? What stood out to you?

The image I chose today is quite simple. It depicts two girls running in a field, which represents the two sisters. Importantly, the image is also blurry. I see this as illustrating the fact that the book blurs and sways between experiences and timeframes.





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Unfulfilled Dreams

Posted on October 15, 2026 by qtoca

First of all, I loved the prose. While it was fragmented and jumped from timeline to timeline, it still felt like it was organize to tell a story in chronological order in terms of themes. Character information were slowly revealed the more you read, and individual traumas unfolded which explained why the sisters became how they were like in the present day.

It saddened me to see how the purity of childhood can be destroyed and ruined by poor adult mentors. The scene when the mother found the two sisters sleeping together on one bed was sooo sooo showing of how close the sisters were and how much they relied on each other through their time growing up. They were separated too soon and seemed like so much started to change the moment Clarice left. Because both grew separately, they also were exposed to such differing experiences which made their bond weaker.

One thing I definitely wanted to talk about was Lina and how the many families and witnesses decided to ignore her murder and rape due to possibly race, class, and her physical maturity. She was just a young girl!!! With possible mental deficiencies at that. Her body never stood out as something she needed to worry about and that broke me. Young women (heck girls even!!) shouldn’t have to fear the body in which they had no say in developing! I HATED when they blamed her for apparently “seducing” the murder or saying that it was her fault because she dressed “seductively” she was just a child. It scared me because of how often this happens and how quick we can lose someone and also have them be forgotten in a blink of an eye.

I think another aspect of the book that’s important to point out is the constant censorship in these girls’ lives and the political nuances that pop in and out of the book. Whether it be not being allowed to speak of the explicit reasons of Lina’s death (rape and murder) or certain books from their mother’s home that they couldn’t read… It seemed that in censoring what these girls had access to and understood, it caused them to suffer reality even more than they would’ve if someone explained it to them. The scene of Maria Ines catching people have sex for instance.

All in all, I enjoyed this read. It took time to get into but I scarily related to some aspects of the book. It’s a story filled with regret, dreams that used to be strong in childhood and turned out to be unfulfilling in adulthood, trauma, and growing up.

 

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Symphony in White or symphony in shared trauma?

Posted on October 15, 2026 by xuekun jiang

This novel flowed before my eyes. The words a string of birds brushing over the top of my gaze. I am (was, as of now when I sit in front of the draft of my book again) halfway through and I am waiting for the climax, if there is one. 

Turns out, for this Me who finished reading it, there might not be an actual climax at all. The novel ended in a strange way, in a piece of memory, a past tense. I do not feel reconciled with the ending or the whole plot in general. And it is fair for me to conclude now that I did not like this book like the others. It was confusing to begin with, tricky to follow alone. It had this one single piece of puzzle waiting to be uncovered by its readers through some extremely surreal rhetoric (which was almost also the reason that kept me reading intently). And upon revealing the whole picture of this puzzle, I learn nothing glamorous or philosophical, but a heartbreaking, repulsive crime and some trauma. Yes, there is some revenge in the end. But other than that, what else? You are basically telling me the story of two sisters marked by a share trauma of parental sexual abuse, one being the witness and the other victim. Then they all grow up and get married with some unhealthy mentality and all their marriages did not work out well. Then the old lover of the witness goes to live with the victim and they become friends and in the end they sleep together. HEY, excuse me? What is your point? 

I am just quite disappointed, I should have crossed it off from my reading list. According to your posts, Ru from last week seemed a better one to sit with.

Okay, yes. There is some aesthecity in the rhetoric itself. The novel is packed with rich simile, metaphor, personification. Beautiful writing. The landscape of rural Brazil is captured with an exceptional level of detail and sensibility. I can feel that the characters breathe in their homeland, and that land speaks to their history, their traumatic lives. Yes, there is a strong and intimate bond between the person and the land. After all, they all come back to it, like Scarlett going back to Tara it was both forseeable and inevitable. It HAS to END where it all BEGAN. That being said, this is also quite cliche. I am not saying that cliche is not good. But in my opinion, it has to be accompanied with some other novelty, which I do not quite sense in this novel. 

The other thing I at first liked but then disliked was the timeline of the novel and the way it is told. It changes to the perspectives of different characters from time to time almost without any warning. At first it seems interesting, but as I went through chapters, it started to wear me out. Changing perspective is a good trick, however, utilizing it to this extent could pose the danger of losing readers between the lines. Because it is difficult to get immersed in the mindsets of each. Not to mention taht the changes in perspectives are also accompanied by jumps in the timeline. The novel reads to me like an expired dream when someone dozed off on a bus running on a highway. When the bus reaches its last stop you wake up with a dizzy head and horrible hair, you go home and think okay it is over the past is the past good thing i am still alive. That is what I got from the novel. The trauma was not revealed until the last few chapters, the recovery of the victim is carelessly depicted in a fleeting way. 

I do not like characters that I fail to understand. And in this novel, I feel like I am not pampered with evidences or riddles that would allow me to understand why some characters are the way they are. I am just as puzzled as the sisters. Why did the mother put up with the father's violence? Did she know that he is a pedophile? How did Clarice get out of her suicide attempt? Why is Joal Miguel gay and when did he find out??? And why is the book name Symphony in White? What is with this obsession with the color white? I have so many questions and so little interest in understanding them, that is what this novel left me with.

I know we are reading women's writing and that most of them are sad. :) Yes I am a grown-up and I quite understand that, but this sad story got me nowhere. If there is supposed to be a deeper level of criticism toward Brazilian history, then I apologize for not being able to understand it due to my shallow knowledge. However, aren't books supposed to be written in a way that your readers can understand what you are getting at even without the professional knowledge of the subject? I think of All the Light We Cannot See, another novel of interchanging perspectives between two protagonists with jumps in time, it was written in a nice way that even if you are not a history nerd you can feel the cruelty of war. Say if Lisboa did not want to emphasize the political unstability too much, okay, that is fair, but then she does not do a good job -in my opinion- in writing everything else.

This novel reminds me -quite strongly- of another novel written by a Spanish author. Las maravillas/The Wonders by Elena Medel. Both try to tell the stories of women across generations through jumps in time and perspectives. However, the way Symphony in White is written is much more perplexed and confusing. If you are into this style of writing, read The Wonders and it will be worth your while.

Question: Why white? Is it because the girls are never innocent/white again?

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A symphony indeed

Posted on October 15, 2026 by Matteya

Wow, what an incredible read! At first, I was unsure of the book but I think it’s mostly because I’ve been really sleep deprived and had trouble concentrating while reading. But, once I got to the end and everything started to tie together, I felt very moved and saw the vision of the whole story.

As I was reading, I was thinking, there’s no way the author is not a musician. On Lisboa’s biography at the back of the book, it states that she holds degrees in literature AND music and that she plays the flute and is a jazz singer. Once I found that out, I started to make connections between the story line and some music history. For example, the Brahms trio for Horn, Violin, and Piano mentioned in the second chapter is an extremely famous piece, especially because of it’s unusual orchestration. It’s also an excellent work of music and you should definitely give it a listen. I think this piece being brought up is particularly interesting because of the love triangle between Brahms, Robert Schumann, and Clara Schumann. The three of them somewhat remind me of the stories of Clarice, Maria Ines, and Tomas. Towards the end of his life, Robert was in a psychiatric hospital and for much of this time, Brahms was there for Clara and her children. Through their letters to each other, it’s clear that Brahms fell deeply in love with Clara. Although it’s not completely the same, and some roles are interchangeable with others, Brahms can be seen as Tomas, Clara as Maria Ines, and Robert as Clarice.

Another interesting motif that struck me was the book ‘Death in Venice.’ It is mentioned throughout the story and Clarice states on page 147, “I’m trying to read it… But I can’t seem to concentrate much these days.” I personally have never read the book, however, Benjamin Britten did write an opera based on the book. It follows a man (Aschenbach) who becomes infatuated and obsessed with a young boy (Tadzio). They never speak or interact (I think) but Aschenbach follows Tadzio around and eventually Tadzio starts to notice. It ends with Aschenbach falling ill and dying on the beach. It’s clear that this is a representation of Clarice and her father. Although here, Afonso Olimpio goes much further and rapes Clarice regularly until she is sent away. Of course, Aschenbach falling ill, is the equivalent of Maria Ines pushing her father off the rocks.

These two things struck me the most and I saw direct correlations between these pieces and the storyline. However, there are many motifs that appear throughout the book. Of course, the colour white, Cafe Florian and the significant people mentioned (Casanova, Wagner, and Proust), and the Montiverdi madrigal. I think this would be a particularly interesting novel to read in some musicology class. I feel like I could go on about these things for a while but I’ll stop here.

My question for this week is how were the motifs significant to the story? For example, the colour white signifies good luck and celebrates happiness (pg. 62). How would that tie into the story?

Finally, I had a hard time choosing a music pairing for this book. There are just so many good options  like the Brahms trio, Death in Venice, or the Montiverdi madrigal but, none of the composers of these pieces are women. Although I do recommend you go listen to these pieces, especially the Brahms (it’s one of my favourites). I decided to choose Clara Schumann’s Piano Trio in G minor. If you listen to this piece and the Brahms Horn Trio (or any of Brahms’ music, but especially his violin sonatas) you can hear the influence of Clara on Brahms. I hope you enjoyed my nerding out!

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