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?

Agostino (Week 5) - aka wtf did I just read

Well...this one was interesting. I usually write blog posts a lot earlier because I feel pretty inspired after reading a book...but this week was different. I've delayed writing this because quite frankly I've been left a bit speechless and don't know what to say. It's not that I didn't enjoy the novel...I'm just left a bit weirded out, and confused, but also intrigued at the same time. Last week in class we spoke a lot about whether or not a novel is feminist and what makes a feminist novel be viewed as such. At the time, I argued that almost anything can be feminist depending on how you look at it. However, this week made me realize I spoke too soon. 

I don't really know where to begin, but I guess I'll start with the hyper-sexualization of his mother in a way that would make even Freud clutch his pearls. I thought it was an interesting narrative to have the mother be only viewed through the lens of young boys. There was the existence of her young adult lover in the novel, which could have been a potential narrative/character, however, having the only female character in the book be portrayed through the eyes of young boys was an interesting choice for me. I think this could speak to how feminism isn't inherently attached to sexual realization and puberty. I think this can ring true in many cases today with young men learning about sex through violent porn or hyper-sexualized social media. The somewhat passive role that Agostino takes when the gang of boys discusses his mom can also symbolize how much a person can be passively influenced during sexual puberty. This speaks to the importance of having positive role models for men (and women) during these times of sexual exploration. 

While I think writing about the tendency that young boys have to hyper-sexualize women during sexual maturity is very important, what's left me really struggling is why Moravia chose to exhibit this point with the guy's mother...I mean...why? I think this is made even weirder by the fact that his mother seems to almost baby him throughout the book. I'm not going to lie, usually, I have more deep thoughts attached to these posts, but my speechless nature has left this post brief. 

Question for the class: Do you think this novel is a feminist novel? If so, why, if not, why not? Why do you think Moravia chose to use Agostino's mother as the object of sexual desire when he could have easily placed another female character in that role instead?

Combray (Week 2)

 I must say, from the beginning, I didn't particularly enjoy reading this novel. Proust's run-on sentences with extreme descriptions left me in a bit of a dreary state with my attention drifting in and out of the words. However, considering how the first part was primarily centred around a dreamlike state, I think from an artistic standpoint this can be quite effective. It just wasn't easy to digest and jump in for me from the beginning. Tying in with the theme of modernism as mentioned in the lecture, I found the relationship between my "real" and the representation within the book to be blurred because of the difficulty grasping the run-on, descriptive sentences. As per the lecture, when I think about what I look for in a novel, I look for a novel that grabs my attention from the beginning while also having some artistic merit. While this book didn't grab my attention, I can admire the artistic, dreamlike, effect produced by the writing style. I'm not going to lie, the first part was a bit of a struggle to get through. However, the second part was more enjoyable. 

One thing that stuck out to me in this novel was the use of time. Perhaps this was what made it so confusing, but the references back to the past in the dreamlike state during the first part created the impression of a lack of fixed temporal space, which was what ultimately made it difficult to follow. Not only were we at a fixed point in time with Marcel remembering/dreaming about his childhood, but within those memories was an additional time jump in describing the pasts of those in his dreams/memories, his Aunt for example. Because of this, it made it hard for me to filter what was necessary information that would eventually be integral to the plot and what was just added for artistic effect. 

Moving onto the second part of the novel, I found it interesting how time changed to be described and represented through the architecture. For example, the descriptions of tapestries and glass built to entertain specific kings grounded the novel in a more present sense of time, while also referencing a past, but in a more "real" way. Shifting the descriptions from memories to architecture grounds the novel in a way that represents reality in a much easier format, instead of the dreamlike state of the first section. 

Questions/thoughts for the class: How do you think the use of time in this novel is used as a tool towards a greater message? Do you like when authors spend a lot of time in the past? How do you think Proust uses the memories of the first section to influence the reality of the second section? Do you think the placement of time is an integral part of Combray?