Olivia's Blog

  This book made me feel quite uncomfortable and weird when I was reading it. There were a few lines within this book that I had to read over to make sure I was reading it right because they were quiteand were lowkey really gross. For instance when Agostino was looking through the door and watching his mom change and was sexualizing her body at such a young age made me super sad and made me remember how I don’t like Sigmund Freud. This novel has definitely been the easiest read so far in terms of how I understood the text, but the most unrelatable as well. Reading Agostino go through different stages of thinking in such a short period of time kept the book interesting and I really did not know the direction the book was gonna go.  “Saro was startled, and without letting go he opened his eyes, turned, and looked at Agostino. In the boy's face there must have been such wild-eyed repulsion, such barely concealed terror, that Saro seemed to realize immediately that plan had failed...

  I quite enjoyed this reading, it was a point of view that I’ve never read a book from before. This short novel touched on an issue of gender and agency. How a woman is always the focus of others in terms of her beauty and appearance, even when she is dead. I found this quite impactful because I never really thought about it like that. Near the beginning, Ana Maria makes a comment about how her hair was perfectly set around her head and how it fell down to her chest. I made the assumption that she never wore her hair like that but whoever positioned her, had a certain idea about how a woman should look and not how she usually did.  This book is very much so also focused around perspective. Not only the unique perspective of it being narrated from a dead woman but also how the woman’s perspective changes once she is dead and how she develops a clearer point of view of her life from when she was alive.  Throughout her life, she experiences a lot of anxious and depressive f...

 I quite liked reading this book but there was a slight debate in my mind at first as to whether Nadja was a real woman because of how the author portrays her more as a concept rather than literal person. From what I gathered from the book is that she meets the protagonist in the book, she is kind of like a spontaneous and free-spirit that doesn't exactly abide by regular social norms. This book was in my mind like a semi-love story that I could say resembles what a man looks for when he is young and then maturing and finding that he doesn't fit within what he once looked for in love.  When he first met Nadja, he was intrigued with her living life outside of the social norms. But it seems he never fully fell in love with her. He followed her around  until she was of no use in his eyes or she actually needed help and then he left her. This kind of reminded me of some modern day "situationships" where a guy will hang out with a girl and string her along because it is ex...

 At first, reading the beginning of Proust had me confused but after listening to the lecture video, I realized that reading it is like  you are following the ins and outs of someone's memory and different sensory triggers trigger different memories which is quite nostalgic and relatable as someone who forgets a lot of things that have happened, and then the smell of something or a song is able to quickly bring that memory back into the front of my brain.  It is also cool to see the importance Proust puts on childhood emotions and really puts a emphasis on the difference between adult emotions and childhood emotions. Especially in the one part when the narrator as a child is by his bedroom window, and his only concern in affection from his mother which are not things that adults seem to care about or put importance on (shown when his mother makes him wait forever). But these miniscule actions that as adults, we don't think about, are big factors that affect children espec...

Hi everyone! My name is Olivia Wong and I am a third year sociology major at UBC. My goal is to hopefully get into Law school (anywhere) after I graduate. I grew up in North Vancouver (so pretty close) my whole life and I would love to live in at least two more countries later on in my life. I decided to take this course to fulfill my literature requirement but I am excited to be able to expand my knowledge and take on a different lens in reading as well as learn new concepts deriving from the Romance languages. The word literature has always been a little frightening in my eyes and that is because I was not exposed to it a lot and I never was fully able to grasp it completely but I am hoping that throughout this semester these pieces that we will be reading will really expand my horizon and open up my mind to ideas that I never really thought of before and make the term literature seem more small and familiar. I think the structure of this course will enable me to enjoy reading the pi...