Month: April 2026

Categories
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.

 

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