This is my favorite novel so far! I really like how the story is told in a straightforward way, without constantly jumping back and forth between the past and the present. The narration feels simple, but also very comfortable to read, just like the protagonist Natalia herself. She is an ordinary woman, but she feels […]
While reading Black Shack Alley, I kept feeling that what moved me the most was the fact that the world is seen through a child’s eyes. This is not a world that has already been explained or analyzed, but one that is simply felt. Children do not always understand what is happening around them, yet […]
Carmen Laforet, Nada
Stories have to start somewhere, but even stories have stories. To answer the question of “backstories”, and how important they are to novels, well they are quite significant, even if not directly shown. For example, to understand the atrocious history of the Spanish Civil War, we find a backstory to give context to Andrea, our […]
When I first finished Nada, my immediate reaction was kind of anticlimactic. After a full year of Andrea’s life in Barcelona, she leaves feeling like she’s taken nothing away from the experience. She didn’t have a crazy transformation, didn’t really take away a clear lesson, and the story ended with no dramatic resolution. Just… nada. […]
I feel like every book I’ve picked up so far in this class has just left me confused. I thought books from the 1900s were easier to understand than the ones I read in RMST201, but these books might be more confusing??? Anyway, The Shrouded Woman felt like a novel that exists in this strange […]
The novel takes us through Ana María’s memories, which resurface as certain key figures from her life enter the room where her body lies. Each presence unlocks a different part of her memories with that person. Because she speaks from death, there’s a new honesty to the way she looks at herself and others, which […]
Maybe it was death, no… surely it was through death that Ana was rid of any feelings of vengeance and despair that would’ve kept her bound to the living realm. God, if I were Ana and saw my ex-lover, WHO HAD ABANDONED ME WHILE PREGNANT, show up to my funeral, SAD? Bro… please escort him out and just beat the…
From the books we’ve read so far, I can definitely say this stood out to me, and I think it is due to the unique narrative voice Bombal has used alongside the depth. The narrative style and structure, especially its beginning after her death, are very unique. The way her awareness lies in her corpse […]
To give credit where credit is due that was at least more readable than the previous texts. That being said, I need someone to draw up a family tree of all of the names that popped up because goddamn was that a lot. I admittedly confused the names of Antonio and Alberto at one point, […]
