This week we were tasked with reading the Soldier of Salamis; I don’t mean to sound harsh, but I just did not enjoy this book. It is a book that disinterested me, was too long, and was kind of confusing at times. I hate to be like this, and will try my best to write […]
Posted in Blogs, Bolaño, Cercas | Tagged with Civil war, memory, narrator, Relationship, repetition, soldier of salamis, Spain, true or false, truth, Weekly Book Blog, writing
I see a steady decline in my enjoyment of these readings but it is much more blamed on final burnout rather than the quality of the books. I hope my blog posts continue to attempt to give them justice as we have discussed; the authors might not be bigger than us but their books are. […]
Posted in Blogs, Cercas | Tagged with autobiographical, critical reflection, fantasy, implications, questions, real, reality, reflection, Spanish war, Surreal, unreal
I thought this novel, like all the other novels assigned for this course, to be interesting. Although this novel is supposed to be fiction, it can also be classified as an autobiographical work because it incorporates several autobiographical elements through the overlap of the life of the real writer and his fictional counterpart. Because it […]
Posted in Blogs, Cercas | Tagged with Heroism, Historical Memory, Role of Literature
Hey Everyone, Writing this week’s blog post has been the absolute worst for me. To start off, I read and completed my blog post for next week by accident. Then, WordPress stopped working. Anyways, I found this reading really interesting. I finished it in about 3 separate sittings (with some short breaks on my phone), […]
Posted in Blogs, Cercas | Tagged with ethics, literature, repetition, romancestudies, romanceworld, romanticliterature, ubc, writing style
Hi Everyone! In this week’s blog post I am going to be reflecting on Soldiers of Salamis, a novel written…
Posted in Blogs, Cercas | Tagged with fiction, truth
Javier Cercas’s Soldiers of Salamis was really unique in how it seemed to blur lines between reality, history, and fiction and pose interesting questions about knowability in the process. Throughout the first part, I felt that the book was more “lifelike” than many of the others I’ve read, probably because it takes place more recently and […]
Posted in Blogs, Cercas | Tagged with history, memory, reality
Cercas’s novel was a very nice blend of truth and fantasy to it just like Bolanos Amulet. The main difference is the narrators and authors. Bolano felt like a big-league writer who was already very established. while Cercas is a person who is struggling to find his groove in the writing industry and has a […]
Posted in Blogs, Cercas | Tagged with events, history, Mazas, memory, novel, Salamis, war
A common theme I have come across in the books we have been reading recently is war. Last week having read Amulet, in which a woman hides from the army invasion in her university bathroom and the week before that with The Trenchcoat and its totalitarian control and paranoia. I think it is awfully relatable […]
Posted in Blogs, Cercas | Tagged with heroes, war