Conclusions! (Week 13)

I can't believe this semester is (almost) over! I had such a great time reading and chatting about these books with everyone. I've never had the opportunity to read so many books from so many different countries in such a short amount of time, so it was really a pleasure. 

Some people have already been ranking their favourite and least favourite books so I thought I would do that here and compare them a bit. My favourite book of the term (by far) was The Hour of the Star, although that is one of my favourite books of all time, so it's a bit of an unfair comparison from the beginning. However, I also enjoyed The Time of the Doves, and (while I wasn't crazy about it initially) Faces in the Crowd also grew on me once I was able to understand it a bit better after the class. I really appreciated the lectures and the class discussions as there were many books that I didn't fully understand while reading them, but I always felt as if I left the classes with a better understanding of the material. 

Now while I don't think it was a major theme through all the books, one theme that kept sticking out to me during the readings was gender and the different roles and assumptions associated with it. The most obvious example of this was in my favourite reading, The Hour of the Star, where Macabea was not only confined to the conditions of her status in society, but also her gender. Additionally the same could be said for Natalia in the Time of the Doves. I also think this was a point beyond just women's gender roles, but also men's as well. For example, in many of the books, toxic masculinity was also pretty present. The violence and womanizing in Money to Burn, the group dynamics and peer pressures in Agostino, and the class circumstances and career expectations in Mad Toy. It was interesting to me that this presence of gender hierarchy was displayed throughout all of these books, regardless of the time of publication and country. Reading how this theme was present depending on whether the book was written by a female or male author was also interesting to compare. The last book of the course, Faces in the Crowd, tied this up nicely to me as it had the perspectives of both a man and a woman narrator and while they shared some similarities, they also had their differences, particularly in terms of parenthood and marriage expectations.

Overall, I had a really great time in this course. Over the summer, I also plan to go back and read some of the books that I didn't get to read this semester. My Brilliant Friend has been on my list for a while and a few people have been telling me to read the Book of Chameleons so I look forward to picking that one up as well. 

Hope everyone has a great rest of the semester! Good luck with your final projects and exams!

Question for the class: How has your opinion of romance studies changed throughout the course?

My Face is Just Confused - Faces in the Crowd (Week 12)

 This book was a bit of a shock to me. First I want to say I'm actually a fan of Luiselli. I've already read "Tell Me How it Ends" and "The Lost Children Archive" and loved them. However, this book was a big miss for me. I didn't get what was going on, I didn't understand the relevance of Gilberto Owen, and I found the mysterious vagueness of the writing took away from the message of the struggles associated with being a woman. Sometimes, the point just needs to be said or the message gets lost. I was also confused about her relationship with Dakota. Were they just friends? Lovers? Was this also about the narrator (well one of them anyway) questioning her sexuality? Or was Dakota just an escape from her unhappy married life? Again, the vagueness resulted in me feeling as if I'm writing the story myself when sometimes I just want to be told (especially at this point in the semester I'm not going to lie).

By far, the biggest hurdle I had while reading this book was the character (don't know what to call him honestly?) of Gilberto Owen. The turning point for me, when I started to think about his relevance, was when the narrator mentioned masturbating to his picture. While they both share similarities such as unhappy marriages, I had a difficult time finding these similarities. Again, this comes down to the message that I tried to find in this novel. If this is a novel about the struggles of being a woman in adulthood or balancing personal life with motherhood, then I don't see how Owen's point of view reinforces this theme. As Jon mentioned, this book is about obsession, and while yes, there is definitely an obsession from the female narrator (who I assume is Luiselli herself?), I don't see how this intertwines with the other main themes that were occurring throughout the book. Quite honestly, I just found the Owen sections annoying as they got in the way of the interesting tidbits on the female narrator's life and struggles. 

Another thing that got me a bit confused was how time was displayed throughout. I physically groaned in frustration when the line "A vertical novel told horizontally" was used. While the female narrator's part read in a somewhat linear fashion, the back and forth between Owen's sections at the increasing rate where there were a couple of parts that I didn't know whose perspective I was reading made the pace of this novel stall for me a bit. Which is odd, because there was a lot of descriptive movement. 

Overall, this novel wasn't for me. I would still encourage everyone to read her other two books though because I thought they were fantastic. 

Question for the class: What message do you think Luiselli was trying to get across through the character of Gilberto Owen?