A conversation with Norman Manea
After reading the Trenchcoat, I feel quite confused. I feel like the other books I’ve read for this course have been easier to follow, with plots and settings, as well as distinct characters. In this novel, there are so many characters that I cannot keep track of who is speaking, or their names. The Learned […]
The Trenchcoat was a pretty unsettling read in a quiet kind of way. The story feels simple on the surface, but there’s this constant tension lingering in the background that slowly creeps up on you. What I found really interesting is that everything is told through a child’s perspective. The narrator doesn’t fully understand the […]
Carlos Fuentes, The Old Gringo
Another book, another terrible love interest. Can we talk about how everyone in this narrator’s life is simply awful? To begin with, she’s fifteen and a half when she meets and begins a sexual relationship with a twenty-seven-year-old man. When her mother discovers that she’s been skipping school so he can pick her up in […]
Marguerite Duras, The Lover
Hello everyone, This week I’m breaking character because what is this book. I remember being so sad when I was reading blog guidelines at the start of term and seeing that Tumblr got a specific restriction (which of course is probably for good rea…
Hello everyone, This week I’m breaking character because what is this book. I remember being so sad when I was reading blog guidelines at the start of term and seeing that Tumblr got a specific restriction (which of course is probably for good rea…
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler feels like a prank. It’s interesting in the sense that the book never really lets you settle. You’re placed in the shoes of “the Reader,” literally you, trying to read a novel, only for it to get interrupted over and over again. Just when you start getting invested […]
When I read The Hour of the Star, I wasn’t expecting to feel this uncomfortable. Not because of what happens, but because of how it’s told. Before we even really get to Macabéa, we’re stuck with Rodrigo S. M. spiraling about writing, about beginnings and endings, about whether he even has the right to tell this […]
