Month: January 2026

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Laforet

Nada (Surviving, not Thriving)

Carmen Laforet wrote this at 23. What. How. Time’s a-ticking for me I suppose.

The main character, Andrea, had my heart from the start, her desire for independence, her dreams of Barcelona which are swiftly crushed by her dysfunctional family. At first, it’s her Aunt Angustias that seems the most overbearing, telling her that “in all of Spain no city resembles hell more than Barcelona” (17) but within a few pages we are shown the true horrors of the household, when her uncle Juan starts spewing obscenities at his wife.

Then she meets Ena, her new best friend at university, who brings light to her dark days. At times I thought the descriptions of Ena’s elegance and wit to be a bit over-the top, but then I recall my own bubbly best friend and accept it as fact. That is of course, until Ena, essentially bored of being a rich girl, decides to stir things up Andrea’s eccentric uncle Roman, who had a thing for her mom back in the day(!?) so it’s really just a mess.

Andrea’s life is just a mess honestly, and I think it’s important to note that she is literally STARVING the entire novel, as is her entire family. Still, I found her to be a very interesting character, someone incredibly wise, even while acknowledging her own naivety and supposed selfishness. Her humility and insecurities made her a more realistic eighteen-year-old and overall, a rather endearing character.

What I loved most about the novel though was it’s almost gothic atmosphere. I felt like I was reading a spooky ghost story with the start of every chapter beginning with some tragic description of the weather:

“Those nights ran like black river beneath the bridges of the days, nights when stagnant odours gave off the breath of ghosts” (207).

“That stormy sky entered my lungs and blinded me with sorrow” (256).

Okay Andrea. Such descriptive and melancholic prose could be brushed off as teenage angst, but this not just a simple coming of age novel. And in fact, calling it “spooky” was a mistake on my part. Some of her family members are genuinely cruel and there is so much domestic violence in the book, which really only Andrea escapes from at the end. I suppose the family is meant to reflect the chaotic state of the city after the Spanish civil war, which is mentioned here and there. My question is; what else could Andrea’s family represent? All in all a beautiful book but man, it hurt my heart to read. Gloria, I hope you get out of there. And Andrea, boy am I glad you did.

 

Sofia Rocha Zandbergen

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The Shrouded Woman (WHAT A BEAUTIFUL LIFE)

Wow. And I thought I held grudge. The Shrouded Woman is this breath-taking story about a woman on her death bed. She revisits different parts of her life, sifting through memories as various family members and friends say their farewells. I don’t know what to say. It was just so beautiful.

Let’s start when she was a teenager and madly in love with Ricardo, and reflects that “we were in reality two children appalled by the consequences nature had imposed upon certain acts which we had considered nothing more than a marvelous and forbidden game” (174). Hello? Maria Luisa Bombal how dare you do this to me?  And then later with her husband, Antonio. Guys it’s just too good. I hate him. He loves her, she does not, she goes away, realizes she loves him, she returns, he no longer loves her the same and which “convert[s] her timid rancor into a fixed determination of revenge” (227). They get into this whole fight, and his takeaway is “How you love me!” (228). Ana Maria is a just lover-girl deep down. And then Bombal hits us with:

“She had managed to adjust her own intense love to the mediocre love of others. Trembling with tenderness and sincerity, she often managed to smile frivolously so as not to frighten away the small amount of love that came her way. Because not loving someone too much was perhaps the best proof of love that one could give to certain people, on certain occasions,” (227)

I mean c’mon now.  “…the small amount of love that came her way…”. WHO HURT YOU. At this point this blog post is just going to be a collection of quotes.

And then of course she grows petty, bitter from all this misplaced love. She doesn’t want to meet her son’s wife the beautiful Maria Griselda, (so beautiful her other daughter-in-law ends her life wtf) and her life is all sour until Sofia, Sofia, Sofia who gives her “a sentiment which one never knows solitude, as one does in love” (238) until SHE CHEATS WITH ANA MARIA’S HUSBAND (supposedly). It’s too good. Guys I’m a sucker for drama. I felt like I was watching a novella but just the last episode where all the characters you love to hate unite for the wedding/funeral finale and you’re just crying. IT’S TOO GOOD. And in the end, she dies of course. At peace, and memories are just memories and she moves on to wherever one goes at the end.

My questions: 1. Maria Luisa Bombal, how do you read my mind? Share your secrets. 2. How is this beautiful book out of print in English? Time to learn Spanish. 3. (The real one): How does gender affect how each of the character’s sorrows and regrets are portrayed? That’s about it.

WHAT A BEAUTIFUL LIFE.

 

Sofia Rocha Zandbergen

 

P.S. Look at me using all caps when I bullied Breton for it last week. How times have changed.

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Nadja (Nothing Makes Sense)

Nadja, Nadja, Nadja. Nothing in Nadja seems make much sense but I think that’s on purpose. André Breton’s sole focus is the character, the idea of Nadja (except at the start when he was talking about who knows what). He also does not care for the reader; “I shall discuss these things without pre-established order, and according to the mood of the moment……” (23). Well, thanks for nothing, André.

The structure is disjointed, basically non-existent, which I guess is reflective of Nadja herself. Her many moods keep the narrator and the reader on their toes and at the end of the diary-entry section, when Nadja is institutionalized, it’s almost as though maybe she was never there. Maybe she was just a figment of Breton’s scattered imagination. Overall, I wouldn’t say I liked the novel, but I also didn’t hate it Some bits were redeemable, like the dinner scene where the waiter keeps dropping plates, that was funny, and I also enjoyed the photographs and drawings; they added to Nadja’s whimsical, almost childish nature.

On that note though, I found that Breton’s obsession with her made me somewhat uncomfortable, especially when he says things like “This is the second consecutive day I have met her: it is apparent that she is at my mercy”. It’s very ominous to say someone is “at my mercy”. He then doesn’t offer any suggestions on how we should interpret that. Then at one point, Nadja says his kiss is “a kiss with a threat it in” (85). Hello? Considering how Breton’s portrayal of Nadja makes her feel more like a toddler sometimes, wandering this way or that, and his self-insert narrator is married, his affection for her is just weird.  His wife apparently knows about Nadja; “I go out at three with my wife and a friend; in the taxi we continue discussing Nadja, as we have been doing during lunch” but we never see how she feels about this situation at all. He basically just ignores her. He basically just ignores everything. I get it, the novel is supposed to be about poetic freedom, and Nadja is that freedom, but it feels like a lot of nothing dressed up as philosophy.

He also annoyed me at the end with his whole I don’t believe in psychiatry blah blah and the whole “beauty will be CONVULSIVE…” (160). Like okay, I love an all-caps moment, but after all that? Sounds an awful lot like an excuse to just not visit Nadja, the woman you were obsessed with two pages earlier. Doesn’t make much sense, but I suppose that’s what surrealism is all about. Nothing makes sense.

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Combray (or, Memories of a Mommy’s Boy)

At last, I have finished Marcel Proust’s Combray. Forty-nine pages felt like a lifetime, and I attribute this to there being sentences that went on for longer than this blog post. Apparently, using periods wasn’t common practice in early 20th century France and semicolons were all the rage. I did enjoy it though I think, once I got though it all.

The hilarity of Swann being basically a kind of villain in the narrator’s eyes because he was a guest, and guests prevented the narrator’s mother from kissing him goodbye just might have made the whole thing worth it. Poor boy. His love for his mother was certainly endearing but it did break my heart a bit when his sadness was seen as nervous condition. The only good that came from that was that it allowed the narrator to “cry without sin” which isn’t much considering his sobs the night his mama slept beside him “never really stopped” it’s just that he could only hear them when “life became quieter around [him]”. Honestly, I think it was the descriptions of his sorrows that made me stick around because the conversations the adults were having were, sorry-not-sorry, often quite dull. The fact that this also a semi auto-biographical recounting of Proust’s own childhood also piqued my interest.

It was funny to me though that Swann is actually part of high society and dines with princesses etc and the narrator’s great-aunt and whole family think he is middle-class and send him running around doing chores basically. The whole family was rather amusing honestly. I also thought the structure of the story, while confusing at first was clever as it played out how a memory would. The more we learn, the more is remembered and revealed. I also learned a lot of words from this one: benumbed (deprived of physical or emotional feeling), ignominious (deserving of public disgrace), demimonde (people at the fringes of high society) and cocotte, (an oven or a fashionable prostitute).

And of course, the infamous madeleine scene. I had similar experience once, when I ran out of body lotion and put on some random leftover one I had, and bam, suddenly it was summer before senior year. I’m disappointed that my experience didn’t involve “render[ing] the vicissitudes of life unimportant to me” or made me “cease to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal,” though, but I’m happy that was the case for Proust I guess. In any case I now at least know what vicissitudes (changes in unpleasant circumstances) are. Poor boy honestly, so much suffering just for a goodnight kiss.

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Hello world!

Hi hi! My name is Sofia and I’m a second-year student here at UBC. I signed up for this course after taking RMST 361: Studies in Portuguese and Brazilian Literature last year and I really enjoyed it, and by the looks of our syllabus, I expect to like this course too. Isn’t so neat how we get to pick our own grades and which books we get to read for ourselves? I don’t know about you guys, but I have never got to do that for another course before.

A few facts about me; I have lived most of my life in Vancouver, but my family is Brazilian and Dutch and I spent the first few years of my life moving between Brazil, the United States and Canada. Because I grew up travelling so much, I’ve always enjoyed reading books from other countries and would love to visit other places in Latin America one day. I also love dancing, listening to music and going to movie theatre by myself or with my friends and family.

Now to address the first Lecture Inventing the Romance World. The first question asked is “where is the Romance World?” to which I say the romance world is where Romance culture and languages are in use, which arguably could be everywhere. To narrow it down, maybe we could say the Romance world is where romance language is the dominant language, so in some places like Latin America, and in parts of Europe and Africa etc. But I think maybe the first answer is more true. It’s impossible to narrow down where a world is when the world described isn’t necessarily physical. Language and culture don’t have objectively physically defined features so we can’t exactly pinpoint where the Romance world exists.

I think that’s what draws me to Romance Studies. Like it was said in the lecture, Romance languages share miscegenation and are “tied to no territory”. The Romance world is a mixed one and I think I see something of my own upbringing in it (minus the overt overthrowing of authority and betrayal haha). I mean more in terms of being displaced in a way.

Anyways, I look forward to learning more about all of this through the study of literature and achieving our goals of finding patterns in the different texts, seeing what they have in common, and hopefully also just enjoying reading them and maybe even finding a new favourite novel.

 

Sincerely,

Sofia

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