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Concluding Thoughts

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RMST was a great course that really pushed me to read new things and explore new ideas throughout the semester. If I’m being completely honest, I was a little skeptical going into the course. I haven’t taken many literature classes during my degree and really disliked the English classes that I had to take during high school. That being said, the low stakes approach to learning and the opportunity to read books for the sake of reading books was very refreshing. I think that a lot of students (myself very much included) get very jaded about reading with the sheer volume of course readings we get assigned every week so it was nice to get to read things that weren’t academic papers. It was almost a little fun to get to read things that were completely outside of my field and I would most likely have never read otherwise. In a bit of a contradiction to what I said above, I really enjoyed reading books that connected in some way with my degree. I study Political Science, and so much of poli
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Faces in the Crowd

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“Faces in the Crowd” was not the quick and fun read I was hoping for during finals. It was a messy, convoluted and oft infuriating exercise in patience that felt a little like reading the film Inception. The book centres around the story of a woman living in Mexico City who is writing a (fictional?) autobiography about her younger self in New York City. The novel frequently flips back and forth between the present day and the woman’s story in New York. This younger version of the woman lives a largely care-free lifestyle, working as a reader and translator. She lives unapologetically, going all over the city while meeting new people and pursuing her own creative pursuits. She has all sorts of friends and new and interesting people are constantly coming in and out of her apartment.  This stands in stark contrast to the life in which the author is living today, where she rarely leaves her house and living in an imperfect marriage. It sort of seems as though she longs for what could have
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The Book of Chameleons

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    The book of chameleons was one of the most bizarre books that we have read this term. It was a quickish read but was extremely confusing and I still don’t think I really understand the full extent of the novel. The story centres around an albino man living in Angola named Felix Ventura. Felix is a master of creating new identities, and along with being a bookseller, he forges alternate false histories for anyone with means to access his services. In the time of the novel Angola has recently had an escalation of the civil war and people want to be on the right side of history with status. Felix invents whole genealogies and and pasts, providing his clients with documents and photographs to obtain some level of status in the post-war nation. The story is narrated by Eulalio, a gecko who lives in Felix’s house. Throughout the text, the author treats Felix like a real person, personifying interactions with him and thinking and dreaming about life together. Through reading the lecture,
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Money To Burn - Ricardo Piglia

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This book was a really great read, and gave some really good insight into what the 1960s were like in Argentina and Uruguay. One of the main draws of the novel is the bizarre writing style by the author which claims to use true facts and references to tell the story. That being said, with any event such as this, there are bound to be differing perspectives and takes on the story, along with possible embellishment by the author to tell a more compelling story. Personally, I was constantly trying to guess how much I could trust the author, and whether I should really trust anything at all that was being said. While there seemed to be a high level of fact checking and referencing within the text, much of the novel was so largely outlandish that it seemed impossible to really gather whether the author was really getting an unbiased perspective. This narrative style really harkened back to reading The Da Vinci Code, admittedly a horrible book, which alleged to tell some level of truth amids
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The Trenchcoat

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This book was really cool but also very bizarre and certainly very thought provoking. It was very hard to read and really made me constantly confused, though I still enjoyed it in the end. The author isn’t the best, and the writing style was often hard to read and sometimes just plain bad. That being said, I think the erratic and poor writing added to the sense of anxiety and confusion present throughout the novel. I was constantly rereading sentences to make sure that I had gotten the full idea. The book primarily centres on the lives of a three couples living in communist Romania. Two of the couples travel to a dinner party with a very manipulative host (the third couple) who seems dead set on gaining more power and using it to gain all that he possibly can. According to the perspective of the novel, these small luxuries are very hard to come by in Romania and the host is seemingly revered for having them. Once the couples get to the dinner party, they are initially greatly impressed
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The Hour of the Star

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                      This novel was really hard to read even in its brevity, and certainly left me with more questions than answers. The book was brutal, lacking any real resolution as Macabéa’s life spirals out of control. The fragmented style of the novel adds to this sense of desperation experienced by Macabéa within the novel. The presence of a narrator also adds to the novel, the narrator even openly admitting that the lack of knowledge they have about the story is troubling. The narrator doesn’t even identity Macabéa’s name until more than halfway through the novel. This novel revels in the mundane, there isn’t a particularly complex narrative and the novel lacks a clear beginning middle and end.                     In a brief over-simplified summary, Macabéa is a poor young woman living in Rio. She eventually starts dating a rich guy in the city, who’s kind of an asshole and leaves her for her coworkers, Gloria. Macabéa then goes to a fortune teller who says that she will be ha
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The Time of The Doves

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This book was a great read but also was very challenging due to the subject matter. “The time of the doves” is considered as a classic of Catalan literature and provides an incredible insight into daily life during the Spanish Civil War. Through the mesmerizing voice of Natalia, often called Colometa, we witness a young woman's heart-wrenching journey of hardship, loss, and resilience. The novel opens at the vibrant Diamond Square, where the simple act of dancing with the domineering Quimet marks a turning point in Natalia's life. From the suffocating domesticity of her marriage and the birth of children to the devastating shortages and betrayals brought on by war, we witness how large-scale historical events forever warp her life.There's a theme of quietly defying expectations. Natalia doesn't have grand ambitions, she just wants a life not ruled by fear and hunger. The fact that she keeps fighting back against those giant forces is what makes the book so powerful. The
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