RMST 202

This week, the assigned book was Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas. To be completely honest, I started this book very confused. I wasn't quite sure whether or not this book was a work of fiction or a biographical re-telling of true events. After watching the lecture video and doing some googling, I finally understood that it was a sort of mix of both, a historical fiction about real people that existed and real events that happened. When I went into this book, I went in without much knowledge on the history of Spain and its civil war. This text kind of forced me to do some learning about Southern Europe in the 1900s to understand the context that lies behind this story.  As we near the end of this semester, I can see how there are a few major literary themes that have been consistently present in the texts that we read in the beginning, all the way to now. One of these major themes is memory and its significance in storytelling. From Proust, Paris Peasant, The Shrouded Woman, W ...

This week, the book was Amulet by Roberto Bolano. In terms of story structure, sentence structure, vocabulary and content, it wasn't too difficult to understand or follow. That said though, it was still my least favourite book of this semester. It wasn't necessarily boring, but I also wasn't incredibly captivated by the storyline or super invested in any of the characters, even the main protagonist. The book wasn't long but I did end up taking way too long to get through the whole text.  Even though I didn't really enjoy the story, I did recognize the fact that our narrator Auxilio seems to have led quite an interesting life. Or maybe it wasn't even her life that was so interesting but the stories of other people's lives that she added up and made into a collection which she then presented as the summary of her own that was interesting. I feel as though the main thing she did with herself was act as a secondary character in everybody else's life. I don...

This week’s read was The Trenchcoat, by Norman Manea. To me, this short story was probably the trickiest piece to read so far. It was written using all of these subtle insinuations and half-hidden meanings that lurked behind the character dialogues and mundane, surface-level activities of these characters. It was like every line had another meaning to it and it was up to the readers to see through it. It wasn’t a long story, but it required me to concentrate on every passage for me to understand what was really happening. It was quite abstract and I felt as if I had to decode the sentences.  Certain passages were just non-stop, broken ramblings by the characters and it felt easy to get lost in what was being said. I even restarted from the beginning at one point because I felt like I didn’t absorb it the first time through.  In the lecture video, the significance of the appearance of the trenchcoat was one of the points of discussion. As I was reading it, the trenchcoat gave m...

This week, the book that I chose to read was W, or the Memory of Childhood by author Georges Perec. I found this story to be quite emotional. The main themes of this story are kind of obvious (seeing as they are in the title), but I will list them regardless: childhood, memory, life and the struggles of those who were affected by the horrors of the Second World War.  I currently can’t think of anything super brilliant to say, so I’ll just discuss a quote that I really liked. Right at the beginning of the story, there was one sentence in particular that caught my eye.   “Even if I have the help only of yellowing snapshots, a handful of eyewitness accounts and a few paltry documents to prop up my implausible memories, I have no alternative but to conjure up what for too many years I called the irrevocable: the things that were, the things that stopped, the things that were closed off things that surely were and today are no longer, but things that also were so that I may st...