Okay, I know this might be a controversial take, but I was bored. Up until the money-burning scene. No offense to Ricardo Piglia, but the genre just isn’t for me. I’ve never been drawn to crime or true crime stories, nor do I particularly enjoy action. They tend to make me feel dizzy and depressed. […]
Another book, another terrible love interest. Can we talk about how everyone in this narrator’s life is simply awful? To begin with, she’s fifteen and a half when she meets and begins a sexual relationship with a twenty-seven-year-old man. When her mother discovers that she’s been skipping school so he can pick her up in […]
Macabéa, ridiculed, bullied, deemed irrelevant. She “wasn’t an idiot but she had the pure happiness of idiots” (60). She “got up early in order to have more time to do nothing” (26). She “didn’t know what she was just as a dog doesn’t know it’s dog” (19). She was “a hair in the soup [that] […]
I started this book slowly, a few pages a day. Then I read the entire second half in one sitting. At first Natalia’s problems are domestic, thanks to her tyrant of a husband, Quimet. But as the war takes over, Natalia and her children are brought to the brink of starvation and all she can […]
Honestly, even though José gets his education and succeeds in life, the whole story made me very sad. I felt sad for M’man Tine, who literally worked herself to death in the sugar cane fields. I felt sad for José’s mother, whom he rarely saw because she was always working somewhere else. I also felt […]
Carmen Laforet wrote this at 23. What. How. Time’s a-ticking for me I suppose. The main character, Andrea, had my heart from the start, her desire for independence, her dreams of Barcelona which are swiftly crushed by her dysfunctional family. At first, it’s her Aunt Angustias that seems the most overbearing, telling her that “in […]
Wow. And I thought I held grudge. The Shrouded Woman is this breath-taking story about a woman on her death bed. She revisits different parts of her life, sifting through memories as various family members and friends say their farewells. I don’t know what to say. It was just so beautiful. Let’s start when she […]
Nadja, Nadja, Nadja. Nothing in Nadja seems make much sense but I think that’s on purpose. André Breton’s sole focus is the character, the idea of Nadja (except at the start when he was talking about who knows what). He also does not care for the reader; “I shall discuss these things without pre-established order, […]
At last, I have finished Marcel Proust’s Combray. Forty-nine pages felt like a lifetime, and I attribute this to there being sentences that went on for longer than this blog post. Apparently, using periods wasn’t common practice in early 20th century France and semicolons were all the rage. I did enjoy it though I think, […]
Hi hi! My name is Sofia and I’m a second-year student here at UBC. I signed up for this course after taking RMST 361: Studies in Portuguese and Brazilian Literature last year and I really enjoyed it, and by the looks of our syllabus, I expect to like this course too. Isn’t so neat how […]
