Author: Sofia

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Uncategorized

GOODBYE ROMANCE

When tasked to reflect on this course by writing this final blog, my first thought was to do a ranking of all books I read, but then I thought, no, Sofia, you can’t just regurgitate what you’ve been writing all term, but you know what? Jon said he doesn’t care if our blogs are “hot garbage” so I’m doing it anyway.

Starting off strong with Proust. And when I say “starting off strong” I mean like a loud alarm clock rudely awakening you at 7am and then you just go back to sleep.

Nadja. Pass.

The Shrouded Women. Made me cry beautiful tears of I don’t know what.

Nada. This genuinely might’ve been my favourite and I recall only like 15 people came to the lecture that day. Everyone chose to get traumatized by Agostino instead of reading this masterpiece.

Black Shack. This was solid. Enlightening.

The Time of the Doves. This one really solidified my stance as a man-hater in these blogs, and I’m not mad about it.

The Hour of the Star. God, I love this book.

The Lover. I was initially not the biggest fan and still am not. The in-class debate did actually have me switching sides but still, pass.

Money to Burn. Stole some money, burned it, blah blah blah. I did get 10 USD for answering a question in class, that was pretty fire (pun always intended no matter how poor).

The Book of Chameleons. I felt so cool reading this. Cool as a cucumber. But also, I felt like I was reading it on a hot day. I feel like the characters are hot. They read and lie and take pictures of clouds. That’s a hot people book. Smash.

My Brilliant Friend. Brilliant right to the end. This provided a short respite from my scrolling addiction. Might even read the next one, who knows?

The Impatient. See Time of Doves.

Okay. So we ended playing smash or pass on books I read for a university Romance Studies course. I mean, there are worse things.

In all seriousness though, I loved this course. Maybe Romance Studies is for me. Maybe this whole world of translated, transported, multicultural, beautiful, re-read worthy literature could be my world too. I’m still curious about all the other books I didn’t read. How I craved Calvino, but ultimately my patriotic side won, and Lispector it was. What did I miss by not choosing the others? What have I been missing all my life? What worlds remain unseen by not gorging in translated fiction, by not serially blogging?

I feel like I could become a professional blogger now. Is that a thing? Do people get paid to write blogs? Maybe I should look into that.

Sofia

 

Categories
Amadou Amal

The Impatient (I am deeply disturbed)

I am deeply disturbed. The story follows three women forced into polygamous marriages, starting with Ramla, who has just finished high school and found true love, only for her parents to marry her off to a fifty-year-old rich man because money. Then there’s Hindou, Ramla’s sister, who is married to her alcoholic, abusive cousin, who rapes, beats and psychologically tortures her. Lastly, Safira, the first wife of Ramla’s new husband, seeks vengeance on Ramla for taking away her man, offering different perspective on the same system. What a way to end this course.

Ramla and Safira’s stories were both devastating in different ways. When Ramla is married off, her mother tells her, “Marriage isn’t just about love. The most important thing for a woman is to be sheltered from need. Protected, idolized” (22).  Yet we see in Hindou’s story the opposite is true. Her fate is so horrific that I almost had to stop reading, but I felt like I owed it to these women to at least finish the book.

Through Safira’s perspective, we see just how deeply Ramla is affected by the marriage, she becomes depressed, miscarries, and runs away. And yet Safira herself is also complicated: she spends much of her narrative trying to ruin Ramla’s life, but she is distraught when Ramla finally leaves. These women, who are set up as rivals, are ultimately united in their suffering and in their horrible marriage to yet another horrible man.

The back of the book claims the women “defy the oppressive traditions that dominate their lives,” and in some ways, that’s true. Ramla runs away, Hindou tries to escape, Safira fights for her position. But their defiance is still trapped within an extremely patriarchal system. In the end, Hindou is labeled insane, Ramla disappears, and Safira is simply given another co-wife to compete with.

So I keep wondering, did any of them ever truly escape at any point? Will these women ever be free?

Something else that pisses me off is how all this is justified. The polygamous marriage is framed as religious, as something rooted in the Quran, as a man’s right. But time and time again, the men disregard religion whenever it suits them. Ramla is already engaged to Aminou, and her father breaks that engagement purely for financial gain. Disgusting. If I have to read the word “munyal” one more time, I’m going to lose my shit.

Categories
Ferrante

My Brilliant Friend (Yeah, She’s Pretty Great)

Wow. I think we can all agree that My Brilliant Friend had quite the brilliant end. If someone wrote a 100-hundred-page thesis on the significance of Marcello wearing the shoes laboured over by Lila that Stefano bought, I would read it front to back. In a way, I feel like I already did by reading this book, ha.

What can I say, I’m pleased. Sometimes it’s really the simple things in life. Some of the books in this course had quite intriguing premises (a deadly heist, a seller of pasts, a woman speaking from death etc.). This book is just about two girls in Italy in the 1950s, living life.  Lucky me, I’m a sucker for female friendship stories. Yes, tell me about why you hate someone’s cousin’s father’s ex, and their entire family lore. Yes, tell me about every single character’s break-up, every petty grudge. Yes, tell me about every single grade you got in school. I’m not even being sarcastic. That details truly kept me going.

It was a lot of Marcello this, Nino that, but that was fine, that’s the reality of adolescence. As Elena/Lenu repeatedly tells us, Lila is the main obsession. So much so that when helping Lila get ready for her wedding, she has “the hostile thought that [she] was washing her, from her hair to the soles of her feet, early in the morning, just so that Stefano could sully her in the course of the night,” and the only remedy for this pain “was to find a corner secluded enough so that Antonio could do to me, at the same time, the exact same thing” (313). If that isn’t peak adolescence, I don’t know what is (minus the getting married part).

The last third really had me feeling for both girls. I imagine the next book section will be titled something like “adulthood,” but the girls are just barely sixteen. For Lila to basically be responsible for the fate of the family and their business, and for Lenu to get three hours of sleep to study just to feel “more strongly than ever the meaninglessness of school”… (276). (Insert sad face emoji)

My only qualms were certain characters, but that’s a sign of good writing, I guess. Donato Sarratore can die, and honestly, I don’t think the Solaras brothers are worth any attempted (but then abandoned?) redemption arcs. And you know what, he’s not his father, but I’ll say it, Nino is a jerk.

Anyways. Longest book I’ve read in a bit.

Categories
Agualusa

The Book of Chameleons (NOBODY’S GONNA KNOW)

I liked this one! I felt like I read it in mere minutes, it went by so quick. I really felt this book, felt it sweating and sweet as I read it, as our gecko narrator scurries along the wall “like a tick on its host’s skin” and describes how the sun “silenced the birds, lashed at the trees and begun to melt the asphalt” (9). There was also this recurring image of stars I found quite beautiful:

“I could easily makeout the river, the stars spinning across its back” (24).

“It was as though falling from the sky were the thick fragments of that sleepy black ocean through which the stars navigate their course” (63).

Right up there with “The Shrouded Woman” in terms of quotability.

The back of the book misled me, though I have no complaints. I was promised a “completely original murder mystery” full of intriguing characters, but while there was great no mystery in the murder, the people were full secrets. We follow Felix Ventura, a genealogist, but also “a man who dealt in memories, a man who sold the past, clandestinely, the way other people deal in cocaine” watched by a gecko named Eulálio who is a reincarnation of a human (16). The two are both artists, dreamers:

“I create plots, I invent characters, but rather than keeping them trapped in a book I give them life, launching them out into reality” Felix tells the gecko in a dream (68). And they do a lot of dreaming.

That’s where things got messy for me but also made for some good food-for-thought. Dreams start blurring into the present, fiction starts bleeding into reality, and whole identities and even histories start being fabricated. José Buchmann, an identity Felix creates for someone, becomes obsessed with finding out about the real José Buchmann and turns out Felix’s false backstory bares an uncanny resemble to the real one. Or does it? Felix seems pretty chill and normal aside from his best friend being a lizard, so who knows?

(You know that audio that’s like “Nobody’s gonna know. They’re gonna know. How would they know?” Yeah. That was me reading about Eulálio watching them make up another backstory for God knows who.)

I think that’s why I found the whole José -Buchmann-searching-for-his-fake-or-real-past-thing to be kind of confusing. But Angela was cool, though. She can identify where any photograph was taken just by the light. Now that’s the kind of oddly specific, niche skill that makes you the kind of cool I aspire to be.

Overall, this was a confusing yet compelling read. Messy but very memorable and I will be thinking about it for a while so I didn’t mind.

Sofia

Categories
Piglia

Money to Burn (Bruh)

Okay, I know this might be a controversial take, but I was bored. Up until the money-burning scene. No offense to Ricardo Piglia, but the genre just isn’t for me. I’ve never been drawn to crime or true crime stories, nor do I particularly enjoy action. They tend to make me feel dizzy and depressed. I suspect that Piglia’s novel would have had the same effect on me if it weren’t for that ending. I just wasn’t very interested in reading a book about a bunch of criminals obsessed with drugs and sex.

That is, until they started setting money on fire. That scene was genuinely the best in the book (I mean, I would hope, given the title). The line “burning innocent money is an act of cannibalism” (158)????? Insane. The outrage the public has over money being destroyed compared to the robbery and multiple murders???? Insane. It’s good social commentary I suppose. The fact that they managed to hold everything down for hours while completely coked up was honestly impressive. The fact that this was based on real events was also impressive. I suspected it might have been inspired by real events but knowing that it actually was brought it up a notch for me.

The epilogue really saved the book. Learning that Piglia just coincidentally ran into Blanca Galean, “the Girl,” as she’s called in the story, and that she casually gave him the rundown of the lore on a train to Bolivia was wild.

The thing is, the story felt familiar even before I started. Money to Burn carried a kind of Quentin Tarantino vibe with its cinematic crime scenes. It also reminded me a lot of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood: the nonfiction novel format, the focus on planning, and the way the characters’ psyches are presented as fascinating, morally grey figures. Again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just not my cup of tea. Also I genuinely could not keep track of who was who at any point my bad.

So yeah, it was incredibly predictable, but still well-paced enough that I made it to the end. I’m glad I pushed through though because never did I think I’d read a novel where being able to “carry a joint hidden in my balls, and to stash the wraps of dope in my arsehole” would be treated as a point of pride but here we are.Top of FormBottom of Form

Categories
Duras Uncategorized

The Lover (I Get It, I Just Don’t Like It)

Another book, another terrible love interest. Can we talk about how everyone in this narrator’s life is simply awful? To begin with, she’s fifteen and a half when she meets and begins a sexual relationship with a twenty-seven-year-old man. When her mother discovers that she’s been skipping school so he can pick her up in his limousine, the reaction is barely a reaction at all. Instead, she says “even I, her own mother, can’t do anything about it, if I want to keep her I have to let her be free,” (71). There’s no outrage, no attempt to intervene, no sense that anyone is protecting her or cares about her at all.

Her family is atrocious. When they finally meet her lover, their response is pure opportunism. They make him take them out to dinners at expensive restaurants and then proceed to ignore him. It’s an uncomfortable scene, but it also captures the layers of power at work in the novel. In the racial hierarchy of the Vietnam at the time, her white brothers are supposedly above the lover, yet economically they are entirely dependent on him in that moment. He is the millionaire paying for the lavish dinner they themselves could never afford. Meanwhile, the mother simply falls asleep after.

I do understand what the novel is trying to do. It’s clearly concerned with memory, childhood, and the distortions that occur when someone looks back on their past from a distance. The hazy quality of the writing mirrors both the unreliability of memory and the atmosphere of the setting; the heavy heat and languid days in Saigon, where everything seems to blur together. Stylistically, I appreciated the disjointed structure of the novel. Sometimes the narrator spoke in first person, sometimes she was in third and I thought that was cool.

I also understand that the narrator wants to be seen. The gold shoes she wears, the man’s fedora, it’s her form of power, and her detachment suggests that she is the one in control. Maybe that distance is to show how memory transforms something painful into something less important, but almost aesthetic. (Do you think she loved her lover the way he loved her, or was she truly detached?) I also recognize that the story is semi-autobiographical, so maybe this Marguerite processing her strange past.

Despite knowing all of this, I could not look past the fact that she was very much still minor and I hated reading it.

Categories
Lispector

The Hour of the Star (CLARICE HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME)

Macabéa, ridiculed, bullied, deemed irrelevant. She “wasn’t an idiot but she had the pure happiness of idiots” (60).  She “got up early in order to have more time to do nothing” (26). She “didn’t know what she was just as a dog doesn’t know it’s dog” (19). She was “a hair in the soup [that] nobody feels like eating” (51).  I mean, damn. Was this a novel or an insanely philosophical diss track? My girl just wanted to be a movie star, expand her vocabulary and get a boyfriend like the rest of us.

I see why Clarice Lispector let her fictional narrator,  Rodrigo S.M., take the blame. They really drag her through the mud. Rodrigo S.M. claims it’s his duty to write this story, that he absolutely has to, and he spells out what a burden it is to tell her story plainly. The writing however is rather grandiose, and he constantly interrupts Macabéa’s story with fancy words (that I don’t even want to quote because then this blog would be all quotes, and how dare Clarice Lispector be so quotable?) He contradicts himself, circles around the story, and withholds the full picture or any kind of comforting resolution. But he never promises to do so either.

I suppose he is kind of a personification of writers in general. He says he belongs to no social class, that he’s detached, and yet he treats the poor much like all of society does. He claims he wants to look away, but in reality, he cannot. He calls Macabéa “a truth I didn’t want to know about,” yet also insists that he loves her and he alone suffers for her (31). Somehow, he manages to pity her and put her down at the same time. And then there is her RAT of a boyfriend Olímpico. This course has really just made realize that I #hatemen. I mean, why is it that all the books in this course that were written by women feature really shitty boyfriends? Can’t be a coincidence is all I’m saying…

Back to Macabéa. While she has a “flimsy soul” she does have these (explosions) that I thought were cool. Then the ending killed me. Well, it actually killed Macabéa. CLARICE HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME. She gets hit by a car. The end.

But despite being a “nobody”, she is what she always wanted to be; “for at the hour of death a person becomes a shinning movie star” (20).  HOW DARE YOU INSINUATE THAT LIFE ONLY HAS MEANING WHEN YOU DIE. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO LIVE NOW.

My question is wtf because genuinely wtf

Sofia Rocha Zandbergen

(Real question: What/who else could the narrator represent?)

Categories
Rodoreda

The Time of the Doves (And…)

I started this book slowly, a few pages a day. Then I read the entire second half in one sitting. At first Natalia’s problems are domestic, thanks to her tyrant of a husband, Quimet. But as the war takes over, Natalia and her children are brought to the brink of starvation and all she can do is try to keep them alive.

What I think broke my heart the most was Natalia’s almost detached narration. The story is told in first person, with many long, run-on sentences starting with “and”. Even so, Natalia doesn’t talk much, and we don’t really see her thoughts in depth. She rarely says how she feels beyond “I was tired” or “I felt sad” but that is the point. She has to block these things out in order to cope with the horrors around her. This woman is deeply traumatized, even before the war fully began.

I think the first passage of the novel spells out the rest of story:

“…I didn’t feel like dancing or even going out because I’d spent the whole day selling pastries and my fingertips hurt from tying so many gold ribbons…but she made me come even though I didn’t want to because that’s how I was. It was hard for me to say no if someone asked me to do something.”

This idea echoes throughout the novel. She marries Quimet even though deep down she prefers Pere. She does all this tortuous work around the house. She lets him name her children. She lets some eighty-doves take over their apartment because Quimet and the children want her too and so on and so forth. Then at the end when Antoni the grocer offers to marry her, she agrees, for her sake and the children’s sake. Natalia is a character who simply can’t say no.

But this is not just a personality trait, she is literally not a position to say no. As a woman in Spain during the civil war, she is not offered the opportunity of choice.

And I wonder, do you think she really found happiness at the end, or was it just another quiet compromise? I like to think she’s found a kind of happiness at the end.  Still, this novel broke my heart into a million little pieces. There are so many little moments that got to me like all the times she described the colour blue like the blue of Mateu’s eyes and the blue lights and when she dissociates staring off into the sea and when she’s digging out breadcrumbs from cracks in the kitchen table and…

Categories
Zobel

Black Shack Alley (Successful, but Still Sad)

Honestly, even though José gets his education and succeeds in life, the whole story made me very sad. I felt sad for M’man Tine, who literally worked herself to death in the sugar cane fields. I felt sad for José’s mother, whom he rarely saw because she was always working somewhere else. I also felt sad for the children of Black Shack Alley, whose reckless and seemingly “free” childhoods abruptly ended when their parents sent them to work in the petit bandes.

From the very start, José is portrayed as an incredibly thoughtful and obedient child. Despite running around and playing games with his friends, he does what he is told and feels immense guilt whenever he disobeys his neighbours, his grandmother, or his schoolmasters. Even at the age of five, when he tears his clothes, he carefully fixes them and ties knots to hide the damage. Of course, much of this behavior comes from fear of being beaten, but it still. Throughout his entire childhood, José listens to what people tell him to do, rarely questioning authority. In the end, it works out for him though, right? He gets into Lycée Schoelcher, essentially the equivalent of high school, and by passing his exams he could theoretically become anything: a doctor, an engineer, a lawyer etc.

One scene that especially stood out to me is when José is at school and all the children are lining up to buy cake. Afterward his friend and him went to the taps, “ Bussi to wash his fingers, dropping into the sink the rest of his cake; and I, to take my last fill of water” (162) This moment highlights how out of place José is and how much poverty defines his experience, even in spaces meant to offer opportunity.

We know the story is semi-autobiographical. Joseph Zobel himself had a similar childhood, one in which his family sacrificed everything for his education. In his case, it paid off: he became a renowned writer. In fact, we are reading this very novel, something his illiterate family would never have been able to do themselves. Knowing this offers some hope and reassurance to the reader.

If we did not know this outcome, how bleak the novel would be! There is so much love in the story, yes, but is tough love, brutal love shaped by survival.  My question to you is, how would our reading of the novel change if we did not know José’s real-life outcome?

Categories
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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