The Trenchcoat

-

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 by the food and display of wealth by the host, but quickly become disturbed and disgusted by it. A few days after the party, the host finds the trenchcoat on the coat rack and it is unclaimed by any of the guests. No one is sure who the trenchcoat belongs to, and it creates a great deal of anxiety for all involved.

The lecture did help me to better understand the trenchcoat as it was commonly worn by the secret police. Within authoritarian societies, everyone is always at risk of being arrested or interrogated, and the presence of an informant or even a member of the secret police in your circle could be very dangerous. I thought that the trenchcoat was a very effective symbol to help us to better understand the anxieties of the time and that a simple coat could wreak so much havoc.

Although I didn’t really like the writing, I found this book to be very interesting as a political science major. I traveled around Albania last year, and recalled heard many similar (and very recent - communism only ended there in the late 1990s) stories of secret police and manipulative elites all throughout the country. Having read this novel, I am really interested in learning more about the history of Romania and other countries in the region. To leave you with a discussion question: Who do you think the trenchcoat belonged to?


Comments

  1. Daniel OrizagaMarch 13, 2024 at 12:15 AM

    I can't stop thinking about some films by Luis Buñuel, the Spanish filmmaker, after reading this story. The sinister feeling is felt in the atmosphere. From there the paranoia begins. A secret, or several, that could be discovered. The problem is who knows that secret and the consequences of it being communicated inappropriately.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Concluding Thoughts

-
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...
Read more

The Book of Chameleons

-
    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 ...
Read more

Money To Burn - Ricardo Piglia

-
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...
Read more