Hey everyone! This week we’re going to be discussing “The Trenchcoat” by Norman Manea and let me just say personally I really liked the novella/short story. I liked the allegory and mystery of it all sort of like a murder mystery dinner party (my favourite plot line) but with no murder? It was interesting that […]
Posted in Blogs | Tagged with betrayal, class, history, narrative, politics, power, repetition, story, truth
I felt that this novel perfectly encapsulated what it is like to write an essay. Even while writing this blogpost I am struggling to pinpoint exactly what I want to say and how I want to say it. I find myself wanting to plan it out from beginning to end, with an intro, middle, and […]
Posted in Blogs, Lispector | Tagged with childhood, class, Empathy, gender, identity, isolation, narrative, perspective, poverty
Joseph Zobel’s Black Shack Alley was an incredibly moving and eye-opening story that I thoroughly enjoyed. Zobel does a really good job at eliciting emotions throughout the book as I felt myself becoming more and more attached to the story … Continue reading →
Posted in Blogs, Zobel | Tagged with classism, narrative, racism, storytelling
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 […]
Posted in Blogs, Moravia | Tagged with books, desire, family, fidelity, history, Italy, life, narrative, perspective, sexuality, story, Travel, youth
Proust’s “Combray” was definitely challenging for me to follow along, with its lengthy sentences and extremely detailed descriptions of his own memories. I found the plot dreary at first. That said, I appreciated how Proust depicts the scenes where he drowns in his own thoughts, creating a gloomy atmosphere right from the start that signals […]
Posted in Blogs, Proust | Tagged with childhood, memories, narrative, reality, time
Javier Cercas’ “Soldiers of Salamis” was a gripping tale about the nature of ideology, truth, narrative, and the power these things can hold. Calling to mind the novel “W”, “Soldiers of Salamis” also features two distinct narratives in which the second is presented as being written by the protagonist of the first. The story surrounding […]
Posted in Blogs, Cercas | Tagged with Falange, Fascism, Ideology, narrative, Sanchez Mazas, Soldiers of Slamis, Spanish Civil War, truth
Reading Javier Cercas’ Soldiers of Salamis was filled with many different emotions. At first, reading about Cercas’ – the narrator – detachment from his literary career made me sad. However, upon quickly realizing that he had found a new impulse to write again, I felt excited for the narrator. This quote in page 55 resonated […]
Posted in Blogs, Cercas | Tagged with Bricolage, Falangism, fictionality, history, literature, modernism, narrative, recollection, war, writing
For this week, we were given the task of reading Amulet by Robert Bolaño. I found this to be one of the best books we’ve read in this course so far. This book, like many of the other ones, have the consistent theme of memory, and I think repetition. The story is one long monologue, […]
Posted in Blogs, Bolaño | Tagged with Chile, history, history of the future, literature, memory, Mexico, narrative, poet, Poetry, poverty, recollection, sad, sadness, trauma, Weekly Book Blog
The novel, “Amulet” by Roberto Bolano was an enjoyable read. It features Auxilio Lacouture who is an uruguay immigrant living illegally in Mexico City. She is passionate about poetry and literature which leads her to having many different relationships with different famous Mexican writers, as well as working odd jobs at the National Autonomous University […]
“What, what the… what the hell is it with that raincoat?” (p.253) This story made much more sense when the context is explained in the lecture. I read the initial part blind and found myself thoroughly confused but also very tense and intrigued (in a good way); it conveyed an unnatural feeling that something […]
Posted in Blogs, Manea | Tagged with allegory, censorship, communism, metaphor, narrative, norman manea, tension
