Romance... but not really

 The Shrouded Woman by Maria Luisa Bombal has been my favourite of the books we have read so far. I certainly found it the most compelling, and recognised many of the themes that were going on. I think the theme that most stood out to me was that of realisation. We as people tend to be our most sober around death, and you often hear people talking about their realisations of what really matters in life and how they want to live each passing day only after being confronted with mortality; be it their own or someone dear to them. Bombal manages to take this theme and subvert it by showing that while those who live are faced with hard-hitting realisations, so are the dead.  The regret of wasted time is one that we have all felt (I reckon it's one of the most universal regrets), including Ana Maria. She is struck by this realisation when she is reunited with her first love, only to realise that they both loved each other despite all the years they'd been apart. Her cry of "Oh

Louis Aragon's Paris Peasant was certainly an easier read for me than Proust's Swann's Way was. I imagine it is to do with the translation, though of course the writing style of the original author. In fact, I found myself thinking about translation a lot while reading this book. There were parts that had very interesting metaphors and jokes that I would love to see in the original language. I especially noticed this in the F.M.R. section where even the translator made a note that the original pun worked so much better. I suppose this is one of the weaknesses of translation; you can never conserve all the layers of meaning within a word or a phrase because you always have to choose one. If you can find a way to make it work with more than one meaning then you're lucky. Before starting the book, I knew that Aragon was part of the surrealist, avant-garde movement and you can tell. Paris Peasant has been described as a "novel-that-[is]-not-a-novel" and I agree wi

 Let me preface all this by saying that I did not understand what I was reading, and this was further emphasised to me when I read the sparknotes pages after finishing " Combray ". I really wanted to fall in love with this text. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust has an almost revered place in my home; my stepdad, who is at the beloved centre of our family first read Swann's Way when he was my current age (20), albeit in the Persian translation. Since then, he has read it in English too, and is learning French for the sole purpose of being able to read all seven volumes of this masterful novel in the original language. I'm not kidding, Proust is the reason why he is learning French, and why the act of language-learning is a constant for us all. I didn't understand what was going on at all. I didn't even realise that things were going on. I didn't pick up a plot, I couldn't follow the paragraph-long sentences—may I refer to a 192-word long sente

Hi everyone! I'm Deeba, and I made this blog for RMST 202 where I'll be putting my reflections and thoughts about the books I will be reading for this course.  In the course introduction it was made clear that the Romance World isn't a real thing, and therefore it belongs to nobody and everybody at the same time. There also is no indication that the texts will be centred around romance in the feelings-y way either; hence the URL "Romance but not really." Truthfully, I find the grading structure of this course quite interesting and I've always wanted to make a blog but never really had anything to focus it on, so hopefully I'll be able to take the bull by the horns and carpe diem (insert all other vaguely-romance-derived phrases). By the way, I'm in first year, hoping to major in International Relations and minor in Commerce. I didn't want to take a class in English Literature because that's what I've already studied before, and I chose this