Romance Studies

Roberto Bolaño's Amulet was much more violent than I expected the story to be. It focuses on the War in Mexico as told through the perspective of Auxilio Lacouture. Lacouture is a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico in the 1960's. I think this has been my favourite book so far as I have found a better way to read the later books compared to some of the initial ones read. Bolaño writes such a tragic and horrifying story with so much tranquility and peacefulness. For such a sad story, it is described very beautifully.  This novel taught me about the war and massacre of Tlatelolco in 1968. I had never even heard of the Tlatelolco massacre until this reading. Similar to Manea's novel, the story draws from real life instances to educate the readers about history. I think it is important to read novel's of this kind. We consume so much news and media content that we have become desensitized to violence in the world.  Lacouture is forced to take shelter in a woman's bathro...

Norman Manea's "The Trenchcoat" was a very interesting read. I did feel a bit lost while reading it, until I realized it was not about the details of the story that mattered. Once I adjusted the way I was reading it, the story became much more enjoyable. It felt very distant and impersonal for quite a bit of the text. It focused quite a bit on interpersonal relationships, with the use of symbolism to describe life at that time in Communist Romania. A lot of the story involves reading between the lines of the text to be able to understand the underlying messages.  While not explicitly mentioned within the book, the novel describes life under Communist Romanian President Nicolae Ceaușescu.  Ceaușescu was famously executed along with his wife on Christmas Day, ending communism in Romania. Manea is able to paint the scenes of the story through symbolism. Much of what he writes throughout the story has double meanings and plays into a larger picture. He was unable to explicitl...

Georges Perec's W, or the Memory of Childhood is a very interesting way of illustrating trauma. It had an unexpected and unnerving storyline. It was a semi-autobiographical work of post-modernist literature. One half of the story is fictional and follows a utopian olympic whilst the other is constructed of real childhood memories. The main character adapts the identity of Winkler to evade military service. The second part follows a mythical Olympics hosted on an island where the winners are idolized and the losers are tortured. At first it was hard to understand how the stories were connected.  I found that this novel had me trying to piece together the story until the third story instalment. The land of W was an escape from the harsh realities of the world during the Holocaust. The island of W was a mirrored reality of what the author was enduring. It was a different type of retelling of the Holocaust. The fact that the island was called W is symbolic of double lives and how the n...