Hi again! One of the elements that stood out to me the most in Nada was its irony, which is seen from the title itself. Nada, which means ‘nothing’, truly captures the space between the expectations Andrea came to Barcelona with and the reality she lived, learning that what she envisioned was nothing like it. […]
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 […]
Posted in Blogs, Bombal | Tagged with life, memories, memory, narration
First of all, I don’t think I’ve ever had to babysit a thought for more than a sentence, cause holy shit I think a sentence in Combray ran for a whole paragraph. I’ve never seen so many run-off sentences in one place without questioning if grammar was a suggestion at that point. HOWEVER, it lowkey […]
Hi all! To be honest, reading Proust, I definitely got lost sometimes due so I’d re-read the sentences quite often. Again, that might be just because I haven’t read something like this in a while. One thing that stood out to me is the way the narrator describes the character’s fascination with the architecture and […]
Posted in Blogs, Proust | Tagged with family, memory, narration
There’s one common thread in existing discussion about “Combray” that I saw: the book’s difficulty in reading. I agree, it’s a challenging read in the forever long sentences and vivid descriptions of everything and constantly shifting focal points. And as the lecture and conversation video mentions, the story is temporally vague. While there is […]
Posted in Blogs, Proust | Tagged with excess, narration, repetition
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
Hello everybody- the book this week was Luiselli’s “Faces in a crowd”, which I don’t even really know how to describe the plot…think ghosts but not really, a wife with a husband and 2 children but not really, and a girl working in a publishing firm as a translator that’s a bit obsessed with this […]
“Faces in the Crowd” was undoubtedly one of the most challenging books I have ever read in this class. This novel requires immense attention and sophistication as the narrator constantly switches back and forth from the perspective of the narrator to Gilberto Owen, a Mexican poet who is featured mostly in the latter half of […]
Posted in Blogs, Luiselli | Tagged with memories, narration, reality, relationships
The reading this week, Money to Burn, is one of the longer readings so far in the course (at around 200 pages which is still relatively short if I’m recalling back to Span312 where we once read a 400+ page book). However, because it its style of writing, reading the book felt a lot swifter […]
Among all the novels that I have read so far, “Money to Burn” is definitely unique in the sense that its narrative style is not constrained to one single genre. Though I know that the novel is based on a true event that happened in Argentina, I find the constant switching of narration interesting; I […]
Posted in Blogs, Piglia | Tagged with life, narration, Realism, truth, violence
