Right from the beginning that is a sense of significance in the seemingly trivial, like the falling of rain, and a glimmer of existential beauty to be found in repetition, exhaustion, and freedom from logic. If inexplicitness was a literary principle, …
Posted in Blogs, Bombal | Tagged with death, Home, life, love, memory, nostalgia, reality, relationships
The book we read this week is The Shrouded Woman, written by Maria Luisa Bombal. I used to think death is the end, that everything stops when a person dies. But from this book, I feel how an individual is constructed through a network of emotional bonds that may or may not vanish after they […]
Posted in Blogs | Tagged with death, life, love, The Shrouded Woman
Confusing. Figuring things out not by their form but by the convoluted trails of meaning formed by dense sentences, juxtaposing verses, and half-conscious dreams. This book is a forest of question marks. “I am no puzzle-maker, no wizard of chess, no ph…
Posted in Blogs, Breton | Tagged with absurdity, Home, identity, life, literature, love, nadja, reality, Surrealism
Hi everyone 🙂 My name is Fatima Mudassar, and I’m a 3rd-year Cognitive Systems major with a minor in Economics here at UBC. I’m also an international student from Lahore, Pakistan, and I can speak 3 languages fluently; Urdu, Punjabi, and English. I made the decision to take RMST 202 because I’m really curious about […]
Posted in Blogs | Tagged with books, culture, language, life, Romance Studies, writing
Hey everyone! First of all, I literally cant believe we’re almost done and this is our last book. In a way it feels like it has been so long and challenging but the fact we have read SO MANY BOOKS in such a short time is crazy to me. Personally, I had to really dedicate […]
Posted in Blogs, Luiselli | Tagged with gender, history, identity, life, memory, narration, reality
“Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition, and they’ve got talent, as well as just beauty. I’m so sick of people saying that love is all a woman is fit for.” (Alcott, Little Women) A wearying message arrives to Elena: Her friend has vanished. Yet, […]
Posted in Blogs, Ferrante | Tagged with communism, duality, education, Feminism, girlhood, life, poverty, society, Womanhood
Faces In the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli is a unique novel that has stories intertwined in three time zones and seems to jump around in its thinking. From the beginning of the story, the story was from the perspective of a writer, who is the mother of two kids. “I have a baby and a […]
Posted in Blogs | Tagged with ghost，death，Owen, life, Mom, Valeria Luiselli, writer
Hey everyone! Im super excited to discuss this week’s reading, “The Book of Chameleons” by Jose Eduardo Agualusa! Immediately my mind goes to the movie Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind. With Ariana Grande’s album coming out and everything, I have been thinking about that movie a lot and how interesting the concept is. A […]
Posted in Agualusa, Blogs | Tagged with animals, desire, identity, life, memory, narrative, reality, relationships
Hi everyone! This week I read “The Book of Chameleons” by José Eduardo Agualusa. I am going to be very honest and say that I did not enjoy this book, mainly because I found it difficult to follow and mildly uninteresting. However, this book discusses important themes of identity, truth and historical impact. It also […]
Posted in Blogs | Tagged with Colonialism, family, history, life, memory, The Book of Chameleons, war
I really enjoyed this week’s novel, and it is probably my favourite by far in this course. The novel allowed me to take on a different perspective in considering the meaning and purpose of death. Saramago takes a very intriguing approach in exploring the topic of death. He specifically does so through an interesting thought […]
Posted in Blogs | Tagged with death, immortality, life
