Going into this class, I’ll be honest, I was a little intimidated. When we started with Combray by Marcel Proust, I genuinely struggled. It was probably the most difficult thing I’ve had to read in a long time. The sentences felt endless, the pacing was slow, and I kept rereading the same parts trying to […]
I just finished Love Me Tender by Constance Debré, and I feel a bit conflicted about it in a way that actually made the experience more interesting. Going into it, I wasn’t expecting something this emotionally heavy. The story follows Constance after she loses custody of her son, and that situation kind of hangs over […]
I feel like My Brilliant Friend is one of those books that I didn’t fully get into right away, yet the more I read, the more it grew on me. At the beginning, I was honestly kind of confused with all the characters and the neighborhood dynamics. It took me a bit to figure out […]
Ricardo Piglia’s Money to Burn was an interesting read for me, mostly because it is not the type of book I would normally pick up. I usually do not gravitate toward crime novels, and this story is very centered around a bank robbery and the criminals involved in it. It took me a little while […]
Norman Manea’s The Trenchcoat is definitely one of those stories that stayed on my mind after finishing it, but I also have to admit that I found it a bit confusing at times. While reading it, I had to go back and reread certain parts more than once to fully understand what was happening. That […]
I actually really liked The Time of the Doves, and it has probably been the easiest book for me to read so far. Not because it is light, because it definitely is not, but because the writing flows so naturally. It feels like someone is sitting across from you telling you their life story in […]
I really liked this book. The Shrouded Woman was such a refreshing shift from the other texts we’ve read so far, and honestly, it felt like a bit of a relief. Not only was it the first book written by a woman that we’ve read in this course, but it was also the one I […]
Okay, so going into Nadja, I really thought things would finally get easier after Proust. Like surely that was the hardest one, right? Wrong. While Nadja was technically easier to get through, I still spent most of the book feeling confused and slightly unwell in a “what am I even reading right now?” kind of […]
I went into reading “Combray” fully prepared to be confused, and yet somehow, I was still caught off guard by just how confusing it was. This was not a light “oh, I’ll just read a few pages before bed” kind of text. This was a sit-up-straight, reread-the-same-sentence-four-times, question-your-intelligence kind of read. Proust’s sentences feel like […]
