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
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 […]
Carmen Laforet, Nada
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
Georges Perec’s novel, “W, or the Memory of Childhood” is an interesting mix of reality and imagination. I found the writing style to be quite similar to Proust’s and Aragon’s as Perec often jumped between different memories and thoughts. Something I found intriguing was how Perec describes the relationship between writing and the people from … Continue reading Week 8: Perec’s “W, or the Memory of Childhood”
