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RMST 202

Ending

I really enjoyed this course! I got to read a lot of books that I had never heard of before and got to make it part of my weekly routine, one book a week, and write a small post about it. It felt good to know that the English reading muscle of mine hadn’t atrophied that much after having not done much dedicated fiction reading in a while. It wasn’t in great shape at the start of the course, I struggled through reading “Combray” and it took me almost the whole week, but I got into the groove as the course went on. Maybe I’ll get back into reading books on a regular schedule like this again, especially fiction written/translated into English.

I thought the blogpost system was perfect for how I wanted to approach he books The low stakes and the word limit helped me out a lot. I didn’t have to write something groundbreaking or something that would be evaluated for marks, which helped my anxiety over writing in this. And with the word count to adhere too, I didn’t feel like I bloated my posts, and wrote narrower and sharper posts focusing on specific elements that I liked from each book. Like rough mini-essays. Just by writing a bit on the book, and then reading other people’s impressions, I felt that I understood it a bit more, picking my brain and other people’s brain for ideas. It gave me some of that important time to reflect on what I just read. It’s now got me thinking about blogging about the stuff I watch and read a bit more outside of books, and giving myself more time to do this kind of writing. I’ll need to figure out how to set up a blogging service outside of UBC’s WordPress blogs.

And some awards for what I liked a lot from this course.

Favourite book:  Mad Toy 

I liked the structure of this book, covering each year of his life, and how it challenged the idea of how kids go through the “coming-of-age” story by having him get denied every step of his life until he goes against all of that in his betrayal. And the scene with the engineer is very cool for that.

Favourite scene: Money to Burn, the kiss, and Soldiers of Salamis, the last train ride (204-208)

I still have my reservations about Money to Burn being true crime and based on true events, but that invented scene is still so romantic and the best way to cap off the thrilling hotel siege and the relationship of the bank robbers. Especially knowing that the siege is all but lost, it is like the last bit of resistance.
I love the visual of Cercas as the sad journalist watching his reflection fade into the night, as he imagines his future writing the book and how he will immortalize Miralles for himself and for future generations, it’s very wistful and Romantic (in the other sense) and idealistic to me. It also reminds me of when I was in Japan and taking the late night shinkansen, watching the scenery zip by through the window, perfect way to end the story after a long journey through history.

Both are these scenes are very cinematic and easy to visualize for me in a striking way. Maybe that’s why I like them so much.

Favourite character: Rita, The Time of the Doves

This was a true bummer of a book that just spirals out of control with how horrible Quimet is and the war and how everything goes to crap for Natalia in that time. But from the back half, Rita felt like the bit of hope for the future in the next generation and all of her scenes were a blast to read as a very unexpected bit of levity. She felt like a very modern character in a romance work to me in her characteristically cute inability to be honest to her feelings and her will-they-won’t-they back and forth that ends with the marriage.

Favourite discussion: Week 9, The Trenchcoat

I liked the activity of trying to describe all the characters’ backgrounds and who could’ve been the informant, because it wasn’t something I really paid much attention to when I was reading. There was so much detail there was for every character’s background, profession, upbringing etc. that we noted down that I didn’t catch when I was reading.

Thanks for a great course!

 

 

Categories
Debré

Book 12: Emptiness in “Love Me Tender”

“nothing to bog me down, a style inspired by emptiness, the only one for me” (29).

This was the easiest novel for me to read in this course – I usually take several hours over multiple sessions but this one I did all in a couple hours. The prose is very matter of fact, short sentences or phrases neatly broken up by commas and easily parseable. A very welcome change of pace after the grandness of the prose and the deep dives into the psychology of the teenagers in this course’s books.

But at the same time, it also inspires a feeling of emptiness. Maybe because the prose lulled me into a trance for how it just laconically goes on, describing her life outside of the hetero marriage structure and now replaced with all the women she sleeps with. The progression of the custody battle is slow, and just flatly building up, if likening it to a Freytag’s pyramid-like story structure. And so the ending leaves the greatest impression in how it just ends.

The whole novel she has been trying to restore her connection with Paul. It was a harrowing depiction of the unfairness of the legal system, when her lesbian identity is used against her, with Laurent weaponizing the idea of her as a pedophile and abuser (the associating of queer people with deviancy) to deny her from seeing her son. And that part felt so real and painful to read, how the bureaucracy and Laurent reject her, annd how it seems that Paul has been corrupted against her.

But after the long fought court hearing, and her victory, and Paul now  meeting with her again as her son, it just doesn’t matter to her anymore. “And then it stopped working altogether. I stopped going over to Laurent’. I stopped going to the cops.” (164). Everything stops. It’s different from time earlier in the book, when it was like eternity, her waiting for the next court hearing, in her depiction of two years: “Two years might as well be a thousand years. Two years might as well be never” (20). Now, time is empty once more, but the only thing that matters for her is her new relationship with S (165).

And after that “revelation” (which seems too grand of a word), pure emptiness. The effect is more pronounced from reading the PDF, but the book ends with 11 straight blank pages. And I first thought it might’ve been an error, that there was another chapter or epilogue. Or it was like Time of the Doves when it was some file corruption and we knew that there was some hidden message, some text and new information waiting to be highlighted like invisible ink, but nothing.

In this, I feel like it is where the book breaks from the expectations of marriage drama fiction, or specific queer drama fiction against the homophobic state, and into that territory of autofiction. There is no triumphant ending or lesson to be learned or proper denoument and explanation of the rest of their lives, but just nothingn.The book is written just to explain her life, and to try to paradoxically communicate that emptiness and nothingness with something , the words. The book ends there not because it’s a satisfying ending, but because there’s no more story to tell about her and Paul and Laurent. In the end, that’s how I interpreted what lecture was getting at when I read it, the betrayal of literature – that is trying to explain the unexplainable empty feeling with the blunt and bared prose.

 

Categories
Luiselli

Book 11: Train Station Disorientation in “Faces in the Crowd”

“The subway, its multiple stops, its breakdowns, its sudden accelera-
tions, its dark zones, could function as the space-time scheme for
this other novel.” (58)

This book is a difficult, obscure read. Even after going through it a few times to write this post, I still struggled with distinguishing who wrote which section

Unlike some books, where at every chapter break or perspective shift the narrator character is clearly labelled, or indicated with a markedly different style of writing The story intentionally obfuscates who is speaking since everyone uses “I” as their pronoun. You can only guess from the context clues of what’s being mentioned in each part. And the story shifts very quickly, sometimes multiple times in a single page, so you’re . And it’s not just multiple fictional perspectives, but also blending the book being written, such as how the husband says he has been “banished from the novel”, going to Philadelphia like it is a farm upstate (85).

It is a horizontal book told vertically (69), or it’s a vertical novel told horizontally (122). Or it has 3D depth to it, going underground and then back aboveground. It reminds me of when I was in Japan last year, and found myself lost multiple times in the cavernous Shinjuku and Shibuya subway stations Even getting above-ground is a challenge, and many of the exits also lead to exits that are for bus pickups and other busy intersections that you can’t cross over, exits that aren’t for you. You return back to the labyrinth, and then it turns out the exit is only accessed after deliberately passing up another exit (one of the station platforms). It was so disorienting

In the lecture, Maria Pape mentions reading the book like the Manhattan subway, and I mainly agree, but I think even still the book more complex than that. In real life, stations on the map are theoretically connected based on the lines drawn, but you have no actual sense of how it’s actually connecting spatial or temporally, i.e. how long it is from point A to B. But for this book, I could not even ground myself into what the stations were named, or how many stations there are. There is no cross-section or legend to reference like It seems that the husband and the man in the book, and the historical names, and Philadelphia and Mexico City and New York City are all connected in a way. But the true nature of the connection is unclear, and also impossible to keep track of unless you write down notes, create your own map of a subway with no map.

In that, I think the title’s namesake shines. It’s not pared down into the barest of language like Ezra Pound’s original poem, but it has replicated a different labyrinthine feel of endless subway stations with names and actions lost to obscurity. Maybe you could say it’s that poem but multiplied manifold, that there are endless apparitions in the crowd, in endless stations. Just as how Philadelphia is a city, but also the title of the novel, the intricate subway system manifests as this book (58). And by the end, I don’t even know if I found my way out.

“Why do you think Papa’s going to Philadelphia?
But where is Philadelphia?” (54)

Where indeed is Philadelphia? Is it even on the station map?

Question: To you, what does it mean for a book to be “horizontal” or “vertical” or to be viewed from below. If not related to a subway metaphor, what else comes to mind? I thought about Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and how the Tralfalmadorians have their own four-dimension perception of time and narrative. Or maybe something like Flatland, where us two-dimensional readers are face-to-face with a three-dimensional narrative?

Categories
Uncategorized

Book 10: Writing Heroes in “The Soldiers of Salamis”

After finishing this book, I felt the same that I did when finishing If on a winter’s night a traveler, the satisfying end to a meta-story and a long journey. It even ends with its own wink to itself: kust as how that book ends with the reader beginning to read the titular book, this ends with the writer about to write the completed version of The Soldiers of Salamis, with the first line: “It was the summer of 1994, more than six years ago now, when I first heard about Rafael Sanchez Mazas facing the firing squad” (208). Except where If on a winter’s night a traveler is concerned about the position of readers, The Soldiers of Salamis is about storytellers.

And that got me thinking that I could analyze them in a similar method: how do they look at those. If on a winter’s night a traveler is the simple pure affirmation of being a reader, that aspiring to read leads to a fulfilling life with a happy ending. But when I read this book, I came away thinking that the goal of the storyteller is for a more noble cause. In the interview with Miralles, while Cercas is only concerned about Miralles’s narrative role as the potential soldier who spared Sánchez Mazas, a minor character in history elevated to hero, he retorts that there are some who are even more forgotten by history, his fellow soldiers: “the Garcia Segués brothers (Joan and Lela), Miquel Cardos, Cagi Baldrich, Pipo Canal, el Gordo Odena, Santi Brugada and Jordi Gudayol” (198). And no furter stories will be told about them, as only Miralles remembers them, and once he dies, those stories will disappear. But Cercas remarks that as long as he tells this story of the “Soldiers of Salamis” and keeps talking about them, they would all still be alive (207). From the POV of Cercas, the storyteller’s role is just as important for history as the original heroes themselves, whether that storyteller is Miralles to Cercas, or Cercas to us.

But at the same time, the story is still aware that all stories and historical narratives are faulty with the truth, fiction in some way. There’s no confirmation that everything that Cercas discovers in his research is true, with all the people he interviews having different pieces of the story. And on the meta level, the whole story of the Soldiers of Salamis is made up, with all the interviews and the connections across time being impossible as written in the lecture. Miralles denies that he’s the soldier at the end of the interview, which should doom the whole story’s narrative – but it doesn’t, because ultimately while Cercas may not want to admit it it doesn’t matter what he had answered there. I think that is the story’s challenge towards writers and storytellers, that it is still comprised of a mix of fact and fiction but still “whole and real, [a] completed true tale” (208) Because those fictional parts, like Miralles and the hypothetical soldiers standing in for those literally “unsung heroes” on the margins of history, or the imagined connections between these historical figures and the new storyteller Cercas, are just as “true” for memory and narrative passed down as the “historical facts”.

 

Question of the week, which I have been forgetting to do: what do you think of the epigraph:

The gods desire to keep the stuff of life
Hidden from us.
– Hesiod, Works and Days

Last week’s quote from Brecht about robbing banks was pretty straightforward, this less so because it clearly had Greek mythological / philosophical context that differs from this story’s context. What are the “gods”, and what is the “stuff of life” in reference to this story?

I would think of the “gods” as grand narratives structuring history, and maybe “the stuff of life” as the little acts and people that are actually crucial and load-bearing, like the soldier sparing Sánchez Mazas, so we tell stories to reveal those little things.

 

 

Categories
Piglia

Book 9: The Queer True Crime of “Money to Burn”

*post contains F and T-slurs

I enjoyed this book a lot, it was a thrilling read from start to finish and I was always interested in what would happen next in the robbery and pursuit. I also enjoyed it as it being explicitly queer with the Kid and Dorda annd those elements caught my eye; I think of hard-boiled and noir crime genres as very stereotypically hypermasculine but also hyper-heterosexual with the femme fatale being an established figure. So seeing this very gay take was cool, especially the romance of the Kid’s death scene which everyone will deservedly quote because it’s the best scene in the book.

My impression, looking at previous blog posts and reception of the movie is the heavy emphasis on the homosexual relationship between the Kid and Dorda when talking about the queer elements. But not much seems to talk about Dorda’s possible gender identity as a trans character. (It’s possible the movie removed those parts of Dorda’s story). When Dorda and Kid are jailed in Batan, they’re with the unit with “faggots. Whores, trannies, queens” (57), so the book knows these identities exist. Dorda mentions that he always hears women’s voices in his head (54), and transness and plurality are statistically comorbid. Dorda also jokes about “getting pregnant” and getting “the op” (gender reassignment surgery) after having gay sex for the first time (57)… but it doesn’t have to only be a joke.

And it doesn’t seem like it’s all just in Dorda’s head, but also acknowledged by the Kid When Malito venomously asks if the Kid and Dorda are like “man and wife”, the Kid answers, “Of course, cretin[.]” (59) An easy response to a jab, but could also be hinting towards Dorda’s identity and Kid as the only one who truly loves and understands Dorda. Though it is interesting to me that the narration persistently refers to Dorda with male pronouns, which does weaken my argument substantially…

In any case, the story does play into the trope of mentally unstable sociopathic/psychopathic queer killers as a bombastic element to add to historical retelling, a reason for why these outsiders would commit crimes to this length and be found half-naked together. The trans elements I interpreted may just play into Dorda’s troubled identity crisis, it being an easy signifier for mental illness of “wrong identity in the body”. We see this problematic trope resurface in recent times with trans school shooters being the latest media boogeyman to drum up transphobic hatred. But at the same time I think it’s cool to see this queer relationship fighting against the world in a literal blaze of glory, stealing the money and then burning it in a nihilistic rejection of the world and its systems. In the end, despite all their crimes, I think following their escapades we find the main two a lot more sympathetic than Silva or the murderous crowd. To me, the core of noir is that feeling so complicated and mixed after reading.

Also, this is not related to the main topic of the post, but I found the book more interesting before the epilogue explaining that it was true crime fiction. (I didn’t read the lecture or book jacket before reading). I thought the rhetorical flourishes that had the event being retold by various people, like the journalist Emilio, or the police chief Silva, or Dr. Bunge, looking back on the events was very cool. While being a hard-boiled noir inspired work whose genre is, in my experience, heavily shaped by its characters’ point of view and their emotional states, it had a very detached and analytical, almost omniscient tone to the play-by-play of what was happening. Which is then explained by it being true crime fiction of past events. I guess I liked the illusion more that Piglia made it all up, and also not getting the odd feeling that it could be exploitative in how it was riffing off contemporary historical murders. Especially when it was brought up in the lecture that Piglia was sued over it Bianca and Dorda’s daughter. Truly problematic fiction in all elements.

 

Categories
Manea

Book 8: Names in “The Trenchcoat”

This short story left me very confused and disoriented, with not much to grasp onto and characters also losing it, like Ioana gesturing towards hidden conspiracies and death that had existed  So it was relieving to know that the confusion and paranoia and gradual descent into madness is a feature, not a bug, of the story, when listening to the conversation video and the lecture.

One thing that stood out to me (that I was most easily able to comprehend) was how names were used. In the story, everyone has a name, like the Stoains and the Beldeanus, and Felicia. Everyone except the Guileless One who I’ll come back to in a bit. The names in the story are character data. We identify and distinguish characters based on their names, Your name is all your personal information, and since the totalitarian government holds all their names and their data, it can control them by holding power over their names. Even if the system has lagged and has become what Ali describes as “apathetic”, and just sorting and filing everything away, “files, files and more files, hardly ever used” (239-240), that threat still looms. Everyone still has to fear the “means, the motivations, the machine” (240). It makes me think of the panopticon, the system where everyone thinks they’re being watched at all times, developing paranoia and forced to self-police.

 

And meanwhile, Manea deliberately leaves the government nameless. While he is writing about the Romanian authoritatian government,  they are just “the Institution” (239). The “trenchcoat” is emblematic of this – it must belong to a human, but that person is both everywhere and nowhere. It is likely an informant who “uses the apartment without permission of the tenants” (192), but no one knows. You can’t assign a name or data to it, it’s a ghost in the system that haunts the cast. To be nameless is to be exempt from that scrutiny, to not exist within the system, either by being the system itself or being outside it.

By the end of the story,  two people have disappeared. Or rather, their names and identity have.
“A focused, steady voice, and a happy laugh, incognito” (259). She begins as Dina, or Lady Di, but that all disappears after her mental break, and she is now just “the sick woman”. And so, too, is the one unnamed member of the two couples. He was Felicia’s husband, or the Guileless One, the Learned One, the Researcher, the Child, the Kid, the Simpleton; all these titles bestowed on him by others, including the author and his narrative that positions him as The Narrator. He already had one foot out the door, by not being being named in the story. But at the end, he has now fully discarded all those titles. They are now just “the two”, “the old friends from childhood” (258), and they do idyllic things like go for walks and chat. I think that’s why the two wear raincoats in the last scene (257), as a nod to what the “trenchcoat” is, the empty clothing. It is called “the time of absence” (259), and I see it as that feeling of liberation.

Though that does lead me to my question: just what exactly is the liberation that Dina and the man feel at the end, a “absolute, cosmic, intangible assurance” (258-259)? Of course nothing has changed politically in the world; is it just a mental shift, and rejection / escape from the world? Or is it some other metaphorical plane beyond the authoritarian system? Maybe it simply cannot be named.

 

Categories
Calvino

Book 7: Reading “If on a winter’s night a traveler”… Again

“I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read,” a third reader says, “but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern? Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before. At certain moments it seems to me that between one reading and the next there is a progression: in the sense, for example, of penetrating further into the spirit of the text, or of increasing my critical detachment. At other moments, on the contrary, I seem to retain the memory of the readings of a single book one next to another, enthusiastic or cold or hostile, scattered in time without a perspective, without a thread that ties them together. The conclusion I have reached is that reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext.” (255)

 

I first read this book in high school as part of a unit on metafiction, 4 years ago. When I think about rereading and rewatching my favourites, or ones that I haven’t seen in a while and want to go through with fresh eyes, I think about the above quote from this book. I thought it’d be appropriate to reread this for this class. And writing this has me reflecting on how I’ve changed as a reader since then.

More than anything, this book reminds me of being a reader. Before the moulding of the protagonist of chapter 1 into the male Reader and the whirlwind worldwide romance, the first chapter is still so directly meta and directed to the reader. “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler” (3). And painstaking detail about the conditions to read in: the body position, like “curled up or lying flat” (3), the location, “an easy chair, on the sofa, in the rocker, the deck chair, on the hassock” (3) the proper lighting so you get “absorbed in the book” (4). Maybe not what I do exactly, but I think it understands all the routines necessary to even start reading. Same for page 5, which is a direct blow to anyone with huge backlogs and plan-to-read lists for various reasons: “Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Have Read Them, Too” or “Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer” are particularly funny.

Reminded of my status as a reader, it brings to mind the question of what it means to read. And I think about the culture around reading these days and the proliferation of sites like Goodreads or Letterboxd. Reading or watching has been gamified, where you log as many things as you can so your completed books or movies number goes up. “I’ve got to read 50 books this year!” “Watch a film a day!” And so on. Admirable goals, but maybe just checking off boxes and defeating the purpose of going through all those different works. Though I admit I’m judgmental here and can’t truly know for what reason they read.

But for me, at least,  “reading a book” can be much more than that, as shown by this book. Reading doesn’t necessarily have to be from start to finish, or even the entire thing, just like how we only read Combray out of Swann’s Way and moved right on. Calvino shows that a thrilling read can be made where half the book is made of 10 unfinished books, and the other half is the grand adventure about metafiction and reading. When I first read this book, I focused on the metafictional aspect, as that was most relevant to my English class; this time around, I paid more attention to those first chapters of books. And the fragments are excellent on their own: like the shrouded noir of “If on a winter’s night a traveler (chapter) or the diary of “Leaning from the steep slope”, or the South American fiction of “Around an empty grave” that reminded me of some of the readings in this very class. Like in the above quote, I always see new aspects of both the book and myself every time I reread.

Nowadays, I don’t identify with the overtly gendered Good Ending, although I get the gendered and masculine framework that Calvino works with as described in the lecture. It’s parallel with how the seventh reader describes stories from “ancient times” (259), the hero marrying the heroine, and thus have a sort of perceived universality when connecting those ancient times to the present. I might’ve been closer to him 4 years ago, but not now. However, I now understand a bit more about why the story and the Reader gets a good ending, even after the unsatisfying quest of all those books, besides the default explanation of “stories with happy endings end like this”. Reading is the good ending, and it’s a joy to pick up another book, finished or not, or the same book again.

 

Categories
Rodoreda

Book 6: The Birds in The Time of the Doves

I enjoyed reading this book, I liked how deep it dove into Natalia’s psyche through the stream of consciousness writing. One image I kept circling back to, like in the novel, was from the title, the doves and the birds that keep reappearing.  It always feels to me like Natalia is bound by something out of her control, or forced upon her. Like the false name “Colometa”, labeling her as Plimet’s “little Adove”. And then through the stream of consciousness, the doves begin to consume all of the narration. Everything revolves around the doves, as a potential source of income by selling them (88), the apartment overrun with doves, their endless cooing sounds (100-101). The scene where Natalia finds the dove wtih half-moons dead in “his home”, the dovecote (138), is particularly resonant to me, as it is both the fate of a domesticated bird as the owner it relies on collapses, and also Natalia herself. She’s stuck in one place, and develops what I interpreted as a phobia of going outside and crossing the street with the “blue lights”. Rodoreda did a great job of illustrating her gradual downward spiral, and paralleling that with the doves she kept. Even after they are all gone, they lead to her negative reputation as the crazy “dove lady” (175) and how she continues to be haunted by the smell of doves and imprisoned by their existence, in an ironic twist.

And in the ending, she gets to “let go” at the same time the doves and birds eating away at her from the inside fly away in the form of a scream (197). It’s important that the last scene with the birds are not named as doves but just “birds”, no longer the ones from her trauma. That morning after her release, she sips water, and then overlaps herself with the bird also drinking from a puddle with its beak. It’s “shattering the sky” in the puddle, it’s breaking through to it, and it’s “Happy…” And the water she drinks, connecting her to that sky, is what “put[s] color back in my cheeks and the light in my eyes” (201). I think that the sky in the puddle is interesting to think about  it’s a symbol of freedom but reflected in a small thing like a puddle of water, but it is every puddle that has the sky in it (201). And I think that for her, the happiness is not exactly leaving the place she’s in, going on a new journey like in some of the other novels in this course e.g. Mad Toy or Deep Rivers, but rather rediscovering some of that “happy” in those small things. It’s the “happy” of the everyday that was stolen from her by Plimet, and the doves overrunning her house, and then the war. And it ends on an optimistic note that way.

 

Question: How does the English title and its change from the original Catalan meaning Diamond Square affect your interpretation and analysis, if at all?

I think that if the translation I read was titled that way, I might have approached this from a different angle, but who knows for sure…

Categories
Arguedas

Book 5: Trying to Understand Ernesto in “Deep Rivers”

Reading “Deep Rivers” was a challenge for me, possibly the most difficult read so far. I still liked it a lot. But Ernesto was impenetrable to me; he didn’t fit into my preconceived notions of what a protagonist should be like or like. Especially compared to previous books in this course I read like the excerpt of Swann’s Way, Mad Toy or Agostino; the teenage male protagonists there were easy to understand, and noticeably more “teenager” to me. Possibly it is because their motivations were more easily linked to the expected desires of “coming of age”, like trying to escape poverty, achieve sexual satisfacation, and enter society/manhood.

But Ernesto to me seems to not be concerned with that at all. Like with the mentally disabled woman; while the other boys in the school viciously bully and even sexually assault her, he doesn’t participate at all. He shows her grace by calling her “Dona Marcelina” when she dies from typhus, with Dona being an honorific title of address (245). Despite the boarding school setting, I don’t remember any major scenes of him studying or it being a learning environment, but just as a place with the other boys of the story. Similarly, he participates, seemingly sympathizes with the women’s revolt.

I guess I’m hung up on how eloquent and descriptive Ernesto is. Markask’a describes Ernesto as a poet; the scene where he writes the letter for him is in my opinion one of the most beautiful scenes in the novel. Not just the romantic descriptions invoking nature, “in the sun, in the breeze, in the rainbow that glistens beneath bridges, in my dreams”, or the message conveyed through the “emerald hummingbird” and so on, but how he weeps from joy or overwhelming beauty after finishing (74-75).  And the memorable descriptions of the zumbayllu scene is very different from what I expected. The inquistive beginning, “What did this word, whose last syllables reminded me of beautiful and mysterious objects, mean?” (67) or his description of the top as “a new kind of being, an apparition in a hostile world, a tie that bound me to the courtyard I hated, to that vale of sorrow, to the school” (69) is far beyond what I would expect how a teenager would react to the spinning top, as magical as it is, in the beautiful descriptions. Or maybe it’s just how straightforwardly honest and poetic he is that he seems more “mature” to me. While Proust’s protagonist is also lyrical, I processed more as through an older, reflective lens, compared to the lyrical and melodious odes to nature, insects, and small things like the top that just naturally comes from Ernesto. It already feels like Ernesto has reached a deeper understanding of things and their beauty, and also combined with his natural curiosity for everything in the world.

Question: What is the role of the morphing of people and concepts in Ernesto’s descriptions; how much of it can be metaphorical, or fantastically real? (e.g. the plague as a face, or as a horde, or Lleras becoming a monstrous mass)

Categories
Moravia

Book 4: Gaps in Understanding in “Agostino”

I enjoyed reading Agostino, but it’s also a very uncomfortable experience for the reader. My impression that I got while reading: the novel is stopping before anything truly happens in a deliberately unsatisfying way while hinting towards repulsive content.

Despite the novella having so many scenes alluding to sexual encounters, I don’t think the word “sex” is used at all. For example, when Sandro educates Agostino on what sex is, it’s described as with “gestures that were effective but not considered vulgar”, and then “less sober descriptions” (31). A similar scene happens after his boat ride with Saro: Sandro gives him “the explanation [Agostino] had intimated without fully understanding (59). As adult readers, we should know what’s happening on the boat rides between the mother and the sailor. We also should know how Saro is coded as a predatory “father” figure and what is implied that he has done in the past. All the other boys know, too, or at least have their own formed image of what happened. Only Agostino is left out in understanding and mocked for it. And by not using the word sex, we are placed in the same position as Agostino: We have a feeling we know, but we onnly understand the implied meaning understood through the boys’ whispers and gestures.

And Agostino is always kept at a distance, one step behind sex actually happening. Agostino never actually gets to see or even fully understand what sex is besides what he has been told through those approximations. The closest he gets to a sexual scene is when he walks in on his mother kissing the sailor (88), and even that is unbearable for him; he doesn’t stay to peek, he interrupts it. And in one of the last scenes of the novel, when Agostino peeks into the brothel, it’s through the window. While he sees the woman in full view, of the man he can only see his feet (100). He doesn’t even see any “action”, just body parts and a hint to what is about to occur, as the woman disappears behind the curtain (100).

Overall, reading Agostino to me is that terrifying experience of a glimpse into an unknown world for a juvenile protagonist. He’s kept to the outside, without anything being under his control. He learns about the adult world of sex, but unwillingly, and only ever filtered through other mediums – the hearsay of others, or a peeking window. As readers, we are also caught in this gap. You could liken it to uncomfortable edging for Agostino and the reader, wondering when we will ever get confirmation of his mother having sex, or him fully grasping his feelings. But in the end, Agostino and the story never get to properly climax. He stays as a child and “many unhappy days would pass before he became [a man]” (102).

Question: What is the significance that Agostino’s unrealized relationships are all taboo in some way (Mother-son incestual relationship with his mother, homosexual pedophilic relationship with Saro), as opposed to “regular” teenage love?

 

 

Addendum: I first enjoyed picking themed music for the first few weeks, but I began to feel that it’s not really furthering my understanding or interpretation of the book. Though I’ll still enjoy listening to it.

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