I know you’re all wondering — if I could reinvent my life from the start, would I? Well, I think I quite like my life the way that it is. But would I also like to try my luck at living the nepo baby dream? Yeah, I think I would. The Book of Chameleons by […]
I have to say, I’m pleasantly surprised by Ricardo Piglia’s Money to Burn. This is by far my favourite of all of our novels so far, and I think it’s the first one that I was actually invested in getting through. On the surface, it’s a noir-ish crime tale about a botched Buenos Aires robbery […]
Duras’ The Lover follows a fifteen-year-old French girl in colonial Indochina and the wealthy, much older Chinese man who becomes her lover. Some may try to frame this as sensual, tragic, even romantic… but I can assure you that it lands somewhere closer to the unnerving territory occupied by Lolita. I think what I found […]
Reading Hour of the Star kind of made me wish that I, too, was hit by a Mercedes. The narrator’s incessant yapping in the beginning made it really hard for me to get into this book, which is honestly kind of an achievement given how short this story is. And then, when we finally get […]
I’ll be honest, I don’t think I took the disclaimer about Mercè Rodoreda’s The Time of the Doves being dark as seriously as I should have. Knowing it was set in the Spanish Civil War, I wasn’t surprised to see that there were bombs and hunger and death. But the fact that most of it […]
After reading Joseph Zobel’s Black Shack Alley, I admit that I feel quite… devastated? Not in a dramatic, bawling-my-eyes-out kind of way, but in a slow, kind of lingering sadness that has stuck with me even now. Don’t get me wrong, the novel is easy to read on the surface. The prose is clear, and […]
I quite miss the days of reading a book and not worrying that the main character is going to perform some questionable acts in the name of being unhealthily attached or attracted to his mother. But alas, here we go again. I don’t think Agostino is meant to be a comfortable read, and I fear […]
Luisa Maria Bombal’s The Shrouded Woman feels like the kind of book that sneaks up on you. In the same fashion as Proust, nothing explodes and no dramatic plot twist comes and sweeps you off of your feet. Instead, a woman lies dead, wrapped in white, and only finally does she get to tell the […]
My decision to read Mad Toy this week was entirely based on the (perhaps naive) assumption that it might take me back to reading The Outsiders in my eighth-grade English class, when I first crushed on Ponyboy Curtis and learned that teenage rebellion often comes from a lonely, poetic place. I was hoping for that […]
I would be lying if I said that picking up Swann’s Way wasn’t a daunting act, one requiring an immense commitment of attention and patience, coupled with silent confusion. Proust’s writing, known for its expansive sentences, intricate reflections, and a kind of obsessive nostalgia, was hardly near the top of my TBR list. And yet, […]
