I enjoyed reading Agostino, but it’s also a very uncomfortable experience for the reader. My impression that I got while reading: the novel is stopping before anything truly happens in a deliberately unsatisfying way while hinting towards repulsive content. Despite the novella having so many scenes alluding to sexual encounters, I don’t think the word […]
Posted in Blogs, Moravia | Tagged with childhood, desire, love, relationships, sexuality
While reading Agostino, I kept having this strong feeling that the novel is full of GAZES. It never explicitly talks about “looking” or “being seen,” yet almost every uncomfortable moment in the story seems to come back to it. Even the setting already hints at this. The story took place on a beach, which may […]
Posted in Blogs, Moravia | Tagged with Agostino, family, Gaze, relationships, Uncategorized
With the first chapter of the book we are at once conscious of the unspeakable absurdities of life, of a thumping rhythm of isolation carrying its beat across desolate roads, into unsolved conflicts, and through crowds of unknown faces, leading us towa…
Posted in Blogs, Laforet | Tagged with family, fiction, Home, life, literature, nada, poverty, reality, reflection, relationships
First off, I applaud Bombal for fabricating such a unique novel. I have never come across a novel from the perspective of the deceased, but am very intrigued by how it offers opportunity for deep reflection. In the novel I read last week (Nadja), the a…
Posted in Blogs, Bombal | Tagged with beauty, reflection, relationships, The Shrouded Woman, Womanhood
First off, I applaud Bombal for fabricating such a unique novel. I have never come across a novel from the perspective of the deceased, but am very intrigued by how it offers opportunity for deep reflection. In the novel I read last week (Nadja), the a…
Posted in Blogs, Bombal | Tagged with beauty, reflection, relationships, The Shrouded Woman, Womanhood
TW This has been my favourite book to read so far! I loved the poetic way it was written and I found it much easier to follow the story line than with the Breton or Proust. I noticed that I read this book much slower but I wanted to savour every word and feeling that was evoked on the page….
Posted in Blogs, Bombal | Tagged with death, life, love, memory, relationships
Wow… Writing this immediately after finishing the book, all I can feel is overwhelmed and a bit amused. This has been my favourite read so far, which is not too surprising! I knew I would enjoy this novel more than Proust and Breton just because its written from a woman’s perspective… but still, wow! Ana … Continue reading bombal
Posted in Blogs | Tagged with beauty, death, love, memory, relationships
What struck me the most in this book is how often Bombal shifts the narrative perspective. At first, I thought it was just a stylistic experiment, but the more I read, the more it felt like something much deeper. The constant switching between first person and third person narration doesn’t feel random at all. Instead, […]
Posted in Blogs | Tagged with death, marriage, relationships
What a book! Within just the first few pages, I felt strangely emotional about Ana María and her life.. which caught me completely off guard. It almost felt.. relatable? It’s given me lots to think about, that’s for sure. There is something so incredibly intimate about the way she reflects on her life from the […]
Posted in Blogs, Bombal | Tagged with beauty, death, gender, love, relationships
Right from the beginning that is a sense of significance in the seemingly trivial, like the falling of rain, and a glimmer of existential beauty to be found in repetition, exhaustion, and freedom from logic. If inexplicitness was a literary principle, …
Posted in Blogs, Bombal | Tagged with death, Home, life, love, memory, nostalgia, reality, relationships
