Hey everyone! I’m super excited to talk about this week’s reading “Deep Rivers” by Jose Maria Arguedas. The novel dives into the Peruvian Andean culture and surrounds the story of Ernesto, who is a young boy torn between two worlds. Ernesto’s upbringing is a blend of his indigenous Quechua traditions and Western education as he […]
José María Arguedas’ novel “Deep Rivers” explores Peruvian identity through indigenous culture, colonial heritage, and nature. Through the eyes of the protagonist, Ernesto, the author tells a story about the search for belonging. We follow a story that is both turbulent and calm, like the rivers that flow through the pages of the book. Between Two Worlds […]
Hey everyone, I hope you are all doing well this week! I have just finished reading “Agostino” by Alberto Moravia, and it was different. Compared to some of the other lengthier novels we’ve read it was for sure easier to follow and had a pretty simple storyline. Regardless, there was an in-depth story with a […]
Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant
“The war isn’t over, my friend. It’s only sleeping.” (p.131) At first, it was refreshing to be reading a book set in the modern-day. Seeing mentions of social media and smartphones was a slight surprise after reading older pieces of literature. However, very quickly, I began to forget what time period it was set in. […]
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 […]
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 […]
I struggled for quite a while to get into Solders of Salamis. I’m not sure that I enjoyed it completely, but it did give me a lot to think about in relation to history and loyalty and writing. The Spanish Civil War is one that I haven’t studied very deeply. The little that I do […]
For this week’s blog post, I read Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas. I have been enjoying the theme of civil war that we have been seeing in a few of these readings. They have been teaching me a lot about history and different world conflicts. When I heard that this book was declared “a work of fiction” “where real-life historical figures and public figures appear” from the lecture, I thought of The Old Gringo because Fuentes used the real Ambrose Bierce’s point of view although the story was fiction as well. I like how we are now able to relate what we are reading to our previous course texts and notice what patterns are being repeated. I found it surprising to see Bolano’s name in the third part since reading Amulet last week, but also interesting that we are starting to see past authors’ connections in different works.
It was interesting how Cercas, used these embedded narratives to reveal Mazas’s story. Each part functioned to reveal more but was dependent on each person’s experience and memory. The book follows the story of a fictional version of Cercas becoming interested in the story of Rafael Sánchez Mazas. He uncovers the story of how Mazas fled his death from the republican firing squad in part one. Then part two tells the biography of Rafael Sánchez Mazas’s life before the events of his capture and escape. Finally, in the third part, it goes back to the fictional Cercas after he finishes his book, but feels like there is a narrative that is missing so he tries to find the one who let Mazas go. He then meets Miralles who is never confirmed to be the one who freed Mazas, although Cercas is sure he is.
There are definitely some parts in this novel where the reader has to put together some of their own connections. We have come across unreliable narrators before in previous readings, but the fact that the narrator himself didn’t have the full story made it even more questionable. While the other readings had an unreliable narrator because of trauma or the character’s personality, in Soldiers of Salamis, Cercas had to rely on the retellings of other people’s versions to put together what he believed to be fact.
My question for the class is: How do different perspectives and the way we remember things alter the retelling of stories that are passed down?
For this week’s blog post, I read Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas. I have been enjoying the theme of civil war that we have been seeing in a few of these readings. They have been teaching me a lot about history and different world conflicts. When I heard that this book was declared “a work of fiction” “where real-life historical figures and public figures appear” from the lecture, I thought of The Old Gringo because Fuentes used the real Ambrose Bierce’s point of view although the story was fiction as well. I like how we are now able to relate what we are reading to our previous course texts and notice what patterns are being repeated. I found it surprising to see Bolano’s name in the third part since reading Amulet last week, but also interesting that we are starting to see past authors’ connections in different works.
It was interesting how Cercas, used these embedded narratives to reveal Mazas’s story. Each part functioned to reveal more but was dependent on each person’s experience and memory. The book follows the story of a fictional version of Cercas becoming interested in the story of Rafael Sánchez Mazas. He uncovers the story of how Mazas fled his death from the republican firing squad in part one. Then part two tells the biography of Rafael Sánchez Mazas’s life before the events of his capture and escape. Finally, in the third part, it goes back to the fictional Cercas after he finishes his book, but feels like there is a narrative that is missing so he tries to find the one who let Mazas go. He then meets Miralles who is never confirmed to be the one who freed Mazas, although Cercas is sure he is.
There are definitely some parts in this novel where the reader has to put together some of their own connections. We have come across unreliable narrators before in previous readings, but the fact that the narrator himself didn’t have the full story made it even more questionable. While the other readings had an unreliable narrator because of trauma or the character’s personality, in Soldiers of Salamis, Cercas had to rely on the retellings of other people’s versions to put together what he believed to be fact.
My question for the class is: How do different perspectives and the way we remember things alter the retelling of stories that are passed down?
