February 2024

I’m not crying, you’re crying – the literature equivalent of listening to Yo La Tengo

Rodoreda View all 2 comments

Damn. This one was a lot to take in. I felt drawn into this book from the very beginning, when Natalia talks so bluntly about her dead mother and how she no longer has someone to guide her life decisions. From the start, it feels like Natalia doesn’t have a real sense of autonomy and that she is somewhat helpless, floating through life and just letting it happen to her. It’s not a weakness in her character that leads to things happening this way; rather, it feels like she is too tired to fight for a different life, and that she is forced to begrudgingly accept whatever changes come. She is obviously an incredibly strong person, given all that she endures. It makes me wonder what kind of life she could have had if she’d lived in different historical circumstances, without the war and the limits it placed on her already constrained life. Would she have found peace? Or would that lingering sorrow stay with her no matter the context?

This whole novel is tinged with melancholy, with a kind of sadness that takes hold of you and seeps into your bones and makes you want to curl up and fall asleep for a long time. If you’re a Yo La Tengo listener, you know kind of how it feels. Almost a comforting kind of sadness. Natalia embraces this sadness as if it’s simply a part of her, as if she was born with it baked into her being. She often describes this feeling as being worn out or tired, without making specific reference to the sorrow she carries around. There are several moments where she allows herself to really feel that pain and let it out, like after Antoni offers her a job, and that long overdue scream on page 197, but it never really feels like she experiences a true moment of release.

And the doves… oh those damn doves. The doves, for Natalia, seem to represent the lack of control she has over her own life, the pervasive sense of heaviness that hangs over her like a dark cloud. Like how Quimet calls her Colometa (little dove) and never her own name, never giving her a choice or caring to ask what she wants. The stench of the doves lingers throughout her entire life, it seems, haunting her, reminding her of choices made, time passing, people lost. On page 174, later on in her new life with Antoni, Natalia imagines these doves differently, imagines herself caring for them and keeping them healthy in the dovecote. She makes up a story about having a tower of doves, like the one Quimet promised, and tells it to the women in the park. This part is so sad- it feels like she is holding on to bits of the past, to the familiar, even though it’s not something she wanted necessarily. These fragments are all she has to cling to, without any real happy memories to look back on.

There’s also some crazy, rampant misogyny in this book, but I’ll leave that for the class discussion. Overall, this was a heart-wrenching and bleak read that I’ll be thinking about for a while.

My question- what do you think of Natalia’s relationship with Quimet?

Love, oppression, and growing up

Zobel One Comment

Okay, Black Shack Alley… this is a really good read, and though it can feel slow at times, I appreciate how Zobel brings us from the narrator’s life as just a small boy at the age of five all the way into his adolescence, without ever making the narrative feel rushed or forced. The simple yet eloquent style of prose that Zobel employs makes the story all the more engaging- I felt as if I was growing up alongside the narrator, witnessing the ways that his thoughts and perceptions change with age and maturity. So many aspects of his childhood, although foreign to me in most senses, evoked strong memories from my own, especially in his carefree escapades with friends or the imaginative worlds (like the shrimp world he dreams up by the river on p. 55) he builds. Zobel beautifully captures this simplicity of childhood, before all the harshness of the world comes crashing in to taint things.

Obviously, José is aware of the inferior position that black people hold in society as a child- but growing up in Black Shack Alley, this is just how things have always been, and at this point he hasn’t known anything other than life on the plantation and subservience to the békés. This is quite an emotional novel, with touching moments of love and joy interspersed among the heaviness of oppression that characterizes this place and time period. The seemingly casual (or perhaps just desensitized) manner in which Zobel recounts instances of black people being exploited, whether it’s the békés “doing what they want” with the women in the cane fields, or the pitiful wages and food that José and his community are forced to live off of, is a product of Zobel’s own personal experience, and offers a very necessary window into the past.

One scene I find particularly difficult, yet also revealing of José’s character, is when the teacher at the lycée disregards his work as “plagiarism”, deeming it too good to be have been written by a student (particularly a black student). Rather than lash out in frustration, José vows to work even harder with a quiet determination, secretly pleased that the teacher is so impressed with his words. As he progresses to the more advanced stages of his schooling, José starts to notice the distance between himself and his former peers- not in a prideful manner, but with a deep sadness, as he realizes his dear friends will remain trapped in a cycle that he barely managed to escape himself. A heavy cloud of guilt seems to hang over this latter half of the narrative- José mourns the friends he has left behind, as well as Jojo and Carmen, who might never make it out of Petit-Fond, and above all the life that he will never get to provide for M’man Tine after all she has sacrificed for him.

My question- how did you perceive the ending of this novel- hopeful or melancholic? Or something else entirely?

BREAKING: Spoiled mama’s boy hits puberty and is confused!!

Moravia View all 2 comments

Well. This one had its moments. The first thing that jumps to mind, for everyone I’m sure, is Freud and his psychosexual theories. I’m not going to get into the details, as most people are probably familiar with these ideas (the Oedipus complex, etc.) but this novel clearly reflects some of those ideas, and I was not surprised to read in the translator’s note that Moravia had demonstrated an interest for Freudian psychology in his previous work. It’s clear that he is trying to paint Agostino in a distinctly Freudian light in this novel, with the sexual confusion and at times hatred directed towards his mother.

There are lots of passages worths discussing here, but I’ll point out a couple moments that stuck out to me. First, on p. 46, “he preferred not to love her at all and see her as merely a woman.” To me, this quote reveals the distinction between love and lust, implying that Agostino’s mother can only be loved as a maternal figure, but once she is “just a woman”, she is seen as a sexual object and no longer a worthy recipient of this love. Similarly, on p. 88 he sees the young man kissing “a woman”- not his mother, but someone separate. Agostino struggles with this new separation- this is not the woman that raised him and nurtured him with maternal affection, but a new seductive, sexual being. Or, and perhaps this is at the root of his anxieties, she is both at the same time – an overlap he cannot make sense of in his pre-adolescent mind. His ill-fated trip to the brothel is a desperate last ditch effort to rid himself of this overlap and replace the sensual image of his mother with someone else entirely, so that he can revert her back to the former, purely maternal image he holds in his mind.

Agostino has clearly been somewhat sheltered from the real world, largely due to his social class and strong attachment to his mother. He is coddled and dependent on her love and attention, so anything that distracts her from this leaves him jealous and sulky. I think this sheltering plays a considerable role in his frustration- he had no real notion of what sex entailed before meeting the group of boys at Vespucci beach.  These feelings of repulsion towards his mother, then, stem from a newfound awareness, along with a shift into puberty that his mind maybe hasn’t caught up with it. This sudden realization of a world he had previously been blind to results in a resentment for the woman that raised him simply because she is a woman, and is therefore capable of arousing these forbidden impulses in him. I wonder if Agostino knows what puberty is – maybe he would benefit from a sex ed course.

There are many other aspects of this novel that I would love to delve into- the dynamic of the gang of boys, the pedophilic Saro and his exploitation of Homs, and so on… but alas, we’ve hit the word count.

My question- do you think Agostino’s fixation on his mother reflects something more sinister than just a strange expression of puberty?