I was very excited to read “Death with Interruptions” since I thought the idea of imagining a world without death was so fascinating. This book is obviously fictionalized, but many aspects of it feel very realistic. Death is such a complex idea that is imagined very differently across various individuals, cultures, and religions. For myself […]
Posted in Blogs, Saramago | Tagged with death, gender, life, purpose
This text was my favourite by far, and after scrolling through a few blog posts, it’s interesting to see that most people share the same opinion. The shrouded woman was a fascinating text that challenged men’s views on women in that day in age. It was super cool to read a book from a women’s perspective compared to the other two books we have read so far. A theme I found similar was how a woman shouldn’t act out and always listen because their husband can take everything away from them.
One of my favourite parts was when Maria spoke about how her beauty is lonely. Everyone was envious of her beauty, and all the men wanted her. Seeing it from her perspective was very eye-opening. But, unfortunately, she is only seen for that, and as a child, she was not given any love because she had enough beauty and was isolated. Isolated physically and emotionally from her family. She told us how she did not look like any of her family members and was not connected to anyone. Total and utter loneliness. This made me sad for her and has changed my perspective on living up to beauty standards and consistently trying not to judge anyone based on their cover.
This book takes us along Ana-Maria’s life, her love encounters, her brutal, unloving husband, her children and her sickness. I love how the book started off by describing her illness and being stuck as an alive corpse, and then ended once again, representing her death and her last march through her childhood and life. Ana-Maria had a chaotic life and had friends betray her trust and even her own husband. She holds many regrets about her life and her relationship with God. Hearing her side of the story and the feelings of everyone surrounded by her as she was dying brought me comfort. It may sound weird, but as someone who has dealt with a lot of grief in my life, it is nice to hear a story of one’s relief in passing even after holding onto so many regrets. I think Ana-Maria can teach us a lesson. We are alive, we aren’t like her living in a corpse, and we still have our lives to live. Even though we have regrets and more to come, we can’t let them control or take over our lives. We should enjoy what we have in the present and not focus on the past because we cannot change it and have no control over it.
The one question I have is…
Do you think if the narrator’s perspective wasn’t from a dead woman that the book’s themes and lessons it gave us from reading it would change/lose their significance?
