This course, Hopscotch: Topics in Hispanic Literature, has been a really great learning experience in terms of both pedagogical style and Latin American Literature. Some of my favourite reads were Azuela’s The Underdogs, Bolaño’s Distant Star, and Garza’s The Taiga Syndrome. Although these works are all quite different I think what draws me to them is the clear …
This week’s reading, The Taiga Syndrome, by Cristina Rivera Garza is really weird. But I liked it? Particularly the explicit sex scenes took me by surprise, and yet they were written with such distance and in sometimes disturbingly medical terms without seeming objective at all. It was half uncomfortable and half enrapturing to read, which makes …
This week’s reading, Papi, by Rita Indiana felt like the lightest read of the course so far. this is likely due to the very successfully achieved child-like tone of the narrator. One of the aspects I thought contributed to this and is essential to the novel is that the narrator is a girl rather than a …
I feel like I say this every two weeks but this week’s reading, Distant Star, by Roberto Bolaño was probably my favourite so far. It read extremely well, was fast paced, discussed themes I am very interested in and had characters that were relatable, likely due to their status as university students. I think this is …
This week’s reading, though difficult in content, was a deeply engaging read. The an auto ethnographic style is very interesting. As Rigoberta points out her culture is illiterate and knowledge is passed down through an oral tradition. On the one hand, the auto ethnographic mode is true to this tradition in that the story and …
Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star was a fantastic read. The novella interestingly links the reader, the writer and Macabéa (the protagonist) into a complex relationship. The writer seems to have something to prove to the reader and yet is completely out of control of their own writing according to them. Macabéa, although she is their creation, is …
This week’s reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude was harder to get through than the first half. Although I still appreciate the novel as meaningful and enjoyed the plot it is written so densely that about half way through it becomes rather exhausting to keep up and I became slightly numb to the climaxes and moments …
This weeks reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez was one of the most accessible and enjoyable readings so far. Although there was something of a lack of overall plot, this can be said for several of the previous readings and there is always enough happening that the novel reads smoothly and remains …
This weeks reading, Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo is a fragmented story that begins with a young man seeking out his estranged father in a town called Comala to fulfil his mother’s dying request. As the novel progresses the young man dies and the tale focusses on the father, Pedro Páramo, and how he caused the …
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges was my least favourite read so far. I recognise the complexity that was added by merging and confusing genres the practice also drastically took away from the reader’s experience. About half of the pieces frustratingly felt like philosophical wafflings framed by a vague plot-like narrative. I found that this meant …
