Over the course of this Romance Studies course, my understanding of literature has shifted in ways I didn’t initially expect. At the beginning, I approached texts like Combray or Mad Toy as isolated works tied to specific national and cultural niches. Now, I see them as part of a broader, interconnected field that constantly crosses […]
Love Me Tender by Constance Debré left me with a slightly frustrating reaction because it felt like nothing really happened? The narrative drifts rather than builds and it circles the same emotional terrain instead of moving forward in any traditional sense. I suppose the more I reflect on it the more it could be an […]
When I think back on my adolescence I feel a strong sense of nostalgia — a painful sort of longing that will never truly be fulfilled. I suppose it’s true what they say… you don’t truly appreciate what you have until it’s gone. As time passes, I look back fondly on my childhood years, but […]
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 […]
