I honestly do not have anything super profound to say for this final post, but I can say that this class was a really new experience for me in the best way. I come from a very tech and science-heavy background, so most of my day-to-day life is usually just me sitting behind my laptop […]
Going into The Book of Chameleons, I expected something more literal about chameleons, but the title ends up being more of a trick than a promise. That already sets the tone for the whole novel. Nothing is exactly what it seems, and that includes identity, memory, and even reality itself. What stood out to me […]
One of the things that stood out to me while reading Money to Burn is how the novel constantly blurs the line between truth and fiction. The story is based on a real robbery, and the narrator often presents the events in a way that feels almost journalistic. There are references to reports, witnesses, and […]
Marguerite Duras’s The Lover feels very different from a typical love story. What stood out to me the most while reading was how much the novel focuses on memory rather than simply telling a story about a relationship. The narrator is looking back on events that happened more than fifty years earlier, which makes everything […]
In If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino, I honestly didn’t know what I was getting into at first. The novel immediately addresses “you” as the reader, which felt strange but also kind of cool. It made me feel involved in the story in a way that most books don’t. Instead of […]
In The Time of the Doves by Mercè Rodoreda, what struck me most was how ordinary everything feels, even when Natalia’s life is falling apart. The story never becomes dramatic in a loud or exaggerated way. Instead, it stays close to Natalia’s daily thoughts: what she notices, what she worries about, what she endures. That […]
Reading Black Shack Alley felt heavier than I expected. At first, it seems like a familiar story about a smart kid escaping poverty through education, but the more I read, the more uncomfortable that idea became. José’s success never feels fully like a victory. Instead, it feels complicated, almost like a trade-off where something important […]
When I think about Nada, what stays with me most is how difficult it is to explain what the novel is “about” without saying that not much really happens. Andrea arrives in Barcelona full of expectation, spends a year surrounded by hunger, tension, and emotional decay, and then leaves feeling like she has gained nothing. […]
This week’s reading, The Shrouded Woman by María Luisa Bombal, felt very different from the texts we’ve read so far in this course. Compared to Proust especially, I found this much easier to read and follow. Even though the novel deals with heavy themes like death, regret, and unhappy relationships, the writing itself feels fluid […]
To be honest, Nadja is definitely not the typical “romance”. Instead of a love story, it feels more like a surrealist experiment or a diary where Breton uses a woman as a mirror to figure out his own identity. It’s a messy mix of philosophy, Paris street life, and random photographs, which makes the whole […]
