Looking back on this course as a whole, I feel like one of the biggest things that stuck with me is how much these texts resist being pinned down. At the beginning, I thought we were just going to read a bunch of novels and analyze them in a pretty straightforward way, but instead it […]
I feel like The Impatient hit me in a way I didn’t expect, it’s not just sad or it’s exhausting. And I think that’s kind of the point. The idea of munyal which is this constant pressure to be patient, starts to feel less like a virtue and more like a trap. The lecture really emphasized how patience […]
An aspect I found really interesting in The Book of Chameleons is the idea that people can buy a new past. Félix Ventura creates fake histories for his clients by giving them new identities with documents, photos, and detailed family stories. At first, this seems almost humorous, but the more I think about it, the […]
Ricardo Piglia’s Money to Burn starts off like a classic crime story at first. A group of criminals plan a robbery, escapes across the border, and eventually end up trapped in a violent standoff with the police. It has all the elements you’d expect from a thriller such as guns, paranoia, betrayals, and tense planning […]
When I read The Lover I felt like the opening immediately created a reflective and slightly unsettling tone. at the start the narrator starts by describing her older self and her “ravaged” face before returning to the memory of being fifteen and a half. Beginning the story like this makes the reader aware that everything […]
When I read The Hour of the Star, I wasn’t expecting to feel this uncomfortable. Not because of what happens, but because of how it’s told. Before we even really get to Macabéa, we’re stuck with Rodrigo S. M. spiraling about writing, about beginnings and endings, about whether he even has the right to tell this […]
What stayed with me most while reading The Time of the Doves is how normal everything feels, even when it absolutely shouldn’t. In the setting of the book we can see there’s political chaos, war, hunger and lives are being torn apart, but Natalia moves through it all, noticing almost miniscule things like the tightness […]
When i read Black Shack Alley it honestly felt less like reading a novel and more like listening to someone quietly telling the reader about their childhood. What stayed with me most wasn’t a single dramatic event, but the steady, exhausting rhythm of everyday life, the work, the hunger, the discipline, the waiting. The novels […]
After reading Agostino, what stayed with me most was how uncomfortable and strange it made me feel, not because anything especially shocking happens, but because Moravia captures that awkward and unsettled feeling of being in between stages of life so well. Also, I do not think the novel gives us a clear “lesson” about growing […]
Something that hit me while reading The Shrouded Woman is its narrative perspective. Bombal chooses to tell Ana María’s story almost entirely from the moment after her death, as she lies in her coffin waiting to be buried. At first, this feels like a purely experimental or modernist choice an “impossible” point of view meant […]
