Blossoming Books

Bianca Burlacchini Book reviews and literary analyses Bookstagram: @blossomingbooks 🌸📖

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Book Review: The Testaments, Margaret Atwood

On June 27th, I had the pleasure of seeing one of my favorite living authors in person! A few years ago she came to Lisbon for an event and I tried to go but it didn't work out (terrible organization by a certain venue). So when I heard she was coming to Babell, a literary event in Porto, I ran to guarantee a spot.

For that purpose, the theme for June's book club was none other than Margaret Atwood herself. So, after having read The Handmaid's Tale many years ago, I finally grabbed The Testaments.

Written 3 decades after the first one, this sequel is set 15 years following the original events. "Thirty-five years is a long time to think about possible answers", says Atwood in the Acknowledgements, "and the answers have changed as society itself has changed, and as possibilities have become actualities." How do you write the continuation of a dystopia which reality has come so close to emulate? That was the question in the back of my mind while reading this sequel, which seems to have been somewhat informed by how the sociopolitical landscape evolved after the previous novel.

Unlike The Handmaid's Tale, which is narrated by one single voice, The Testaments bring us multiple perspectives. We're in the same universe, but now we see it not from the point-of-view of a Handmaid, but of Aunts, Wives and Gilead outsiders.

"I imagine you expect nothing but horrors, but the reality is that many children were loved and cherised, in Gilead as elsewhere, and many adults were kind though fallible, in Gilead as elsewhere."

The plurality of perspectives from different roles played by women in this dystopian society is my favorite aspect of this book; it really enriches the complexity of it all. The structure was very unexpected: divided in 27 sections, each one contains chapters whose titles repeat themselves according to the narrative voice: either "The Ardua Hall Holograph", "Transcript of Witness Testimony 369A" or "Transcript of Witness Testimony 369B". Some parts (the testimonies) having capitalized titles and others not, they feel like fragments that were sewn together — which, once you reach the final chapter (or a sort of epilogue), makes complete sense.

"Such excellent embroideres, women are."

The Testaments ends in the same way as The Handmaid's Tale: with a transcript of a symposium on Gileadean Studies, decades after the events previously narrated. Following the previous Twelfth Symposium, now we read a discussion from the Thirteenth Symposium, two years later, with the same chair and keynote speaker: Professor Maryanne Crescent Moon and Professor James Darcy Pieixoto.

“The collective memory is notoriously faulty, and much of the past siks into the ocean of time to be drowned forever; but once in a while the waters part, allowing us to glimpse a flash of hidden treasure, if only for a moment."

Another way in which the ending recalls The Handmaid's Tale is a certain openness to it. We do get more or less an idea of the future of the characters, but not all answers are explicitly provided: we can't be sure, for example, of the identity of the two girls' mother. Throughout the narrative, one starts to wonder if it might be the protagonist of The Handmaid's Tale, which some hints seem to lead to: the story takes place 15 years after, and one of the girls is 15; one of Mayday's code words is "June moon"; the possibility is even brought up by the professor in the Thirteenth Symposium. However, it's never confirmed, and this vagueness fits very well with the narrative's sense of historical ambiguitiy.

In this world, "writing is dangerous" and it becomes a significant weapon to bring down Gilead. One aspect I loved was the metafictional quality of the novel: Aunt Lydia continuously addresses the reader while writing her "testament", wondering about their identity and the future of her manuscript (which reminded me a lot of Jacqueline Harpman's I Who Have Never Known Men):

"(...) my unknown reader. If you are reading, this manuscript at least will have survived. Though perhaps I'm fantasizing: perhaps I will never have a reader. Perhaps I'll only be talking to the wall, in more ways than one."

On the flip side, something I felt lacking in this novel, in comparison to its 1985 predecessor, is a certain lyrical quality to the writing. Considering the testimonies being in different voices, it makes sense that the writing feels different from the Handmaid's point of view (and between each narrator, as well). Either because Aunt Lydia is colder and more cynical (her section titles are not capitalized, like the others'), or the young "witnesses" more callow and straightforward, the writing overall felt more matter-of-fact and prosaic. Although it does make sense narratively, it did lose some points for me considering that the writing style was one of my favorite aspects of The Handmaid's Tale.

Overall, it's a very interesting addition to the Gileadean universe, although it doesn't come close to the richness of its predecessor (nor did I ever expect it to). I like that it's not directly following the first narrative, and that its link to The Handmaid's Tale is very subtle, so it reads as a work of its own while still delivering more pieces to the puzzle. If you read it with the expectation of a traditional, mainstream sequel, you won't be pleased; but if you approach with literary curiosity and postmodern acumen, you might be satisfied.

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Book Review: "I Who Have Never Known Men", Jacqueline Harpman

Last month's book club theme was "freedom", because in Portugal that's pretty much a synonym for April. Fittingly, I had been meaning to read Moi qui n'ai pas connu les hommes (I Who Have Never Known Men) since last year, when my boyfriend almost begged me to read it right after he did.

This novel has a complex relationship with freedom. First, it longs for it, (spoilers ahead) then it reaches an empty, "hollow" version of it (“cette liberté vide”), and makes you question its real meaning. The story is told in the first person, by a girl who lives among 39 other women inside a prison, held by rotating guards. None of them know why they were arrested, following a chaotic global event. The narrator is the youngest and the only one who was a small child when they were arrested, so we see this mysterious dystopia through the eyes of someone who's coming of age.

Her thirst for knowledge is the drive of the novel, which itself starts with a very meta reflection on books, prefaces and translations. "But why translate when it must have been so easy to learn different languages and read anything you wanted directly?" ("without passing through an intermediary", as the original French specifies). As someone who always reads books in the original language if it's a language that I know (and if I don't, I try to get translations within the same language family), and was therefore reading the French text, I felt directly spoken to. Somehow this very isolated character, who grew up in a nonsensical world, really resonated with me intellectually.

More than a science-fiction dystopia, this book is almost a philosophical treatise. It's a book made of questions, both for the reader and for the characters. The impossibility of meaning in such an absurd world raises questions about our own reality: about the nature of time ("The alternation of day and night is merely a physical phenomenon, time is a question of being human"); the role of memory (“Is there a satisfaction in the effort of remembering that provides its own nourishment, and is what one recollects less important than the act of remembering?”); what it means to be a human being (“But human beings need to speak, otherwise they lose their humanity. (…) Talking is existing.”); or even epistemological inquiries:

The point of knowing is to know! Sometimes, you can use what you know, but that’s not what counts most. I want to know everything there is to know. Not because it’s any use, but purely for the pleasure of knowing.

It's a book permeated by existentialism, almost like the female version of L'étranger. I'd even venture to say that it's the culmination of Camus' intent. If there ever was a character who's a stranger to life, this is the one — "the world I have come from is utterly foreign to me", she says, defining herself as "the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing":

(...) all I’d have gained would be a new question, that worthless treasure which was beginning to weary me. This world was like a jigsaw puzzle, I only had a few pieces which didn’t fit together.

The part that affected me the most in this overall extremely grim story was the one in which the women find another cage, filled with other women who died imprisoned in an "eternal procession of despair". The gruesome description of their cadavers left me in tears, and evoked in my mind the image of Pompeii's calcified bodies: "those contorted bodies that lived there, piled haphazardly, perpetual inhabitants of horror and silence." "They’d collapsed all over the place, in all sorts of attitudes, without dignity, tragic witnesses to the incomprehensible" — it made me think of a cast that I saw of a young Pompeian girl, laying with her face down in her arm. Like the narrator of this book, the normal course of her life was interrupted by something tragic bigger than her.

While many existentialist novels have asked the question of "what is a man", Harpman seems to ask "what is a woman?". Although the mysterious event that catalysed this dystopic world seems to have been general and not gender-specific (they eventually find cages with imprisoned men, too), the title invites the question of what it means to be a woman in a world without men. One of the women says "Men mean you are alive, child. What are we, without a future, without children? The last links in a broken chain." At first glance, it might feel like an antifeminist deduction: is a woman's life not worthy in itself? And yet, the conclusion of the novel proves the opposite. Living in a world with no contact with men (and, eventually, no contact with anyone at all), the narrator learns to be human both through community and through solitude. When freed from patriarchal constraints and social expectations — things the narrator never had contact with —, all that matters is being human. Without the prejudices and conditionings of the other women, the narrator is a clean slate — filled with curiosity and intellectual hunger.

At the end of her days, she decides to write down her memoir, an act that shows a profound understanding of the preciousness of her own humanity. She asks "what does having lived mean once you are no longer alive?", and decides to eternalize her story on paper, in the hopes of reaching another human being. Through the meaninglessness of it all, she takes control of her narrative and finds freedom through a relentless search for knowledge.

I was perfectly aware that I had only added another question to all the others, but it was a new one, and, in the absurd world in which I lived, and still live, that was happiness.

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Book Review: The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides

Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides (1999) has been one of my favorite films for a long time. The way she portrays the unutterable intricacies of girlhood stuck with me deeply, so I've always wondered how much of it was a product of her filmmaking and how much came from the story itself. The fact that it's written by a man, Jeffrey Eugenides, also particularly intrigued me: how could a man capture the essence of girlhood in such a way?

Now that I've finally read the book, I feel like I still don't have the answer to this question. On the one hand, a lot of elements that made me feel the way I do about Coppola's film are there; on the other, I also believe that she adds a type of sensibility that only a woman could. Eugenides' book is much more of a study, made by a group of boys fascinated by their object: "The Lisbon girls", the narrator says, "were like something behind glass. Like an exhibit". They narrate the story, in the first person but as a collective voice — the same way that the sisters are seen as a collective unit. There isn't a lot of individuality attached to the girls, expect for the two youngest: Cecilia (13 years old, the misfit and catalyst of the tragedies) and Lux (14, the sexualized one). Bonnie (15), Mary (16) and Therese (17) merge with one another for most of the time, and the novel's narrator often evokes the collective image of the 5 sisters interchangeably.

On the other hand, Sofia Coppola approaches the story in a much more intimate way. Her film gives it a sense of culmination; she takes this coming-of-age thriller of suburban legends and turns it to a palpable, personal tragedy. She (ironically) brings the Lisbon sisters to life. Meanwhile, the original book, its main device being the eyes of the boys (a perspective that the film maintains, but enriches with many other cinematic elements), never seems to reach the full depth of it.

This last idea is actually corroborated by the author himself, who talks, in an article for The Guardian, about how "the collective narration of The Virgin Suicides is an all-male affair. The boys who obsess over the Lisbon girls know little about them. Their cluelessness is the point." He further says:

"I didn’t have the capacity as a writer back then to go into the girls’ heads and present their inner lives. By renouncing omniscience, I reduced the complexity of what I needed to know. (...) The other thing the perspective did was to turn my attention outward."

Indeed, the novel seems to be more interested in reflecting on suburban life at the end of the millennium and in looking at these suicidal girls as a metaphorical representation of a larger symptom of modern decay. The text is much more decadent than its film adaptation (which, in turn, embellishes it): a strong smell pervades the whole story, the houses are plagued by fish flies and the Lisbon house in particular gets more and more littered as the tragedies progress. "Cecilia's window had the dank glow of an unclean fish tank" and the smell of the house was "the smell of wet plaster, drains clogged with the endless tangle of the girls' hair, mildewed cabinets, leaking pipes."

In an interview for The Paris Review, Eugenides talks about only realizing years later why he wrote the book, whose "real influence was the experience of growing up in Detroit":

"While I was growing up, the city was becoming depopulated, there were the riots, all the buildings were falling into decay, they were closed up, burned out (...) so, growing up there, you just saw things giving into entropy. It left in me a sense of evanescence, that things were impermanent. And the story of these girls who die so young, the way their disappearance haunts the narrator of the book, that's really the way I feel about Detroit and growing up there."

This haunting, decadent aspect of the book gives an almost Gothic feel to it, which is intensified by the ghostly aura (and, later on, reality) of the Lisbon girls. Some descriptions sound directly taken from a modern Gothic story: "her face reappeared.", the narrator says about Lux, "For a second it didn't seem alive: it was too white, the cheeks too perfectly carved, the arched eyebrows painted on, the full lips made of wax." In another instance, "Poor Cecilia" appears in their "consciousness at odd moments, most often as we were just waking up, or staring out a car-pool window streaked with rain—she rose up in her wedding dress, muddy with the afterlife". The house, a key element and often a central character in Gothic fiction, here too stands as a metaphorical expression of psychological decay: it "seemed to have collapsed from the inside, like a lung."

Haunted by these five suicidal girls, the collective masculine voice of the narrator tries to put together the pieces to solve an impenetrable mystery: "we long for some shred of evidence, some Rosetta stone that would explain the girls at last." Their investigation is presented almost analytically, at times, through numbered "exhibits", such as interviews, diaries or other objects pertaining to the girls. As Eugenides says in his article, "The Lisbon girls are never seen from the inside: their mental and emotional life is a matter of conjecture and misinterpretation. Like suicide itself, the truth of their lives is ultimately unknowable."

Through an unconventional structure (the novel has only four chapters, each very different in length) and a detached but fascinated gaze, Eugenides' 1993 novel may have been surpassed by its film adaptation, but stands the test of time as "a hieroglyphics of unreadable despair", portraying the subtleties of modern decay.

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Book Review: Dubliners, James Joyce

I've been meaning to read James Joyce for a long time, and last year I tried to start with Ulysses. Huge mistake: I went straight on to the cornerstone of experimental modernism, his largest and possibly most difficult book. I soon realized that Ulysses is a type of reading that needs guidance and preparation. So I decided to postpone it and start with something lighter. Dubliners, one of his earliest works from a more realist phase, was the obvious choice.

A sequence of 15 short stories, this book showcases scenes from the lives of different Dubliners in the beginning of the 20th century. Although not explicitly related to each other, Joyce structured them as to follow the logic of a life cycle: the first stories are from the point of view of children, followed by stories of adolescence, maturity and then public life, ending with "The Dead".

Joyce's writing style in this collection is very naturalistic, with narratives that feel like slices of life, banal, almost unfinished. Most of the characters are quite unlikable — which makes sense, considering the underlying criticism of the Irish middle-class, which Joyce felt was under a "collective paralysis". Some political nuances also permeate here and there on a British-occupied Ireland, but not even this revolutionary sentiment is lively enough to evoke a reaction. Disillusionment is the pervading atmosphere.

Joyce also debuted the literary concept of "epiphanies", which became common in modernist literature. He defined it as "a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself." At the end of many of the stories in Dubliners, the characters have this moment of self-realization.

Ironically, I went for this book because it was Joyce's simplest one and I ended up finding it kind of... boring. I didn't hate it, but it also didn't captivate me a lot. I'm very fond of short stories, so my expectations might have been higher than they should've been. The one I appreciated the most was the last one (and longest), "The Dead", which intertwines glimpses of different people attending a ball, until it shifts focus to a very personal lens.

I'm still curious about his other works, especially because I know they all differ a lot from each other. To be honest, I'm still quite frightened of Ulysses, so before venturing to that one, I might keep it chronological and try A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man first.

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Book & Film Review: Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and its plastic film rip-off

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë was one of the first classics I ever read (if not the first), when I was 13. I only remember having an idea of how intense it was. Rereading it 15 years later, the exact same sceneries appear in my mind; but the light in which I see them is brand new.

The novel starts in a very Gothic manner: from the point of view of an outsider, we get acquainted with the strange protagonist of the novel and the sombre atmosphere that surrounds him. The night that the narrator spends on Wuthering Heights could be taken straight out of a horror story, setting from the beginning a sense of something unnatural and intangible. This should be a straightforward clue as to the nature of Heathcliff and Cathy's relationship, which operates on a spiritual level, hard to grasp to everyone around them. The imagery of souls is recurrent:

(...) they were calmer, and did not need me to console them. The little souls were comforting each other with better thoughts than I could have hit on: no parson in the world ever pictured heaven so beautifully as they did, in their innocent talk (chapter 5)

In some of the most famous passages of the book, both refer to each other in that way: "Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same" (c. 9), says Cathy, while Heathcliff utters in another passage:

(...) you said I killed you - haunt me, then! (...) I know that ghosts HAVE wandered on earth. Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! (...) I CANNOT live without my soul!' (c. 16)

It is clear that their relationship is not physical nor carnal, except for the one moment when kisses are mentioned, in chapter 15 — the scene when she is dying. The complete shift of this essential part of their dynamic in Emerald Fennell's new "adaptation" annihilates it's depth and transforms it into a cheap online search bar containing the word "smut". She says in an interview that, reading the book, "she wanted stuff to happen that never happened" — in other words, this is nothing more than the fanfic she wanted to read as a horny teenager. And, helped by the popularity of BookTok's trend of "dark romance", no wonder production companies saw a perfect commercial opportunity.

But, honestly, this vapid Fifty Shade-esque take on a completely platonic relationship from a deeply complex 19th century work of literature would've been somewhat acceptable — had she not committed a far worse crime.

The Race Issue

I don't think I realized the heavy racist undertones upon reading it for the first time as a pre-teen — reason why I don't blame Fennell when she talks, in the aforementioned interview, about there being a version she remembered reading; however, rereading it now, as a full grown adult with a fully developed brain... these undertones couldn't be clearer if they were neon signs staring me in the face. What is not an undertone, however, is the color of Heathcliff's skin: right there on the third page of chapter 1, the narrator states "He is a dark skinned gypsy". And yet, somehow, most film adaptations completely ignore this fact (with the exception of the 2011 adaptation by Andrea Arnold), which is more or less historically understandable when it comes to earlier versions, but in the year of our lord 2026?

Fennell's version completely eradicates the absolutely essential aspect of Heathcliff's ethnicity. Although not specified, we know he is "as dark almost as if it came from the devil" (chapter 4); he's called a "gipsy brat" (c. 4) and "a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway" (c. 6). None of those definitions could ever be applied to the very white Australian actor Jacob Elordi. The character is racially ambiguous, yes, but not in the least ambiguous about being white — the color of every other English character in the novel —, which, if he was, wouldn't even be a question or pointed out in the first place. Funnily enough, the character of Hindley, Cathy's brother and one of the main sources of racism towards Heathcliff, is completely erased in the film.

Does the skin color of a character matter that much? In this case, definitely. His non-whiteness is essential to understanding his predicament, his treatment by others and how his personality develops in this context. As a child, he was found starving, houseless and alone by Cathy's father in the streets of Liverpool — a port city, as David Daiches meaningfully notes in the Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition: "was he the offspring of some foreign sailor, did he have some negro blood, or did he himself come from a distant country?". Interestingly enough, in Fennell's film, Heathcliff is actually found nearby and Mr. Earnshaw goes so far as to say "This isn't Liverpool"...

We never know exactly where Heathcliff comes from in the novel, but this Otherness is the precise determinant factor for how he's received and how hateful he becomes. "We don't in general take to foreigners here, Mr Lockwood, unless they take to us first", says Nelly on chapter 6. Upon arriving in Yorkshire, Heathcliff's referred to by everyone as "it", a dehumanization that only stops when he's given a Christian name, but continues in other forms: he's called a "dog" and an "acquisition" and deemed "unfit for a decent house" (c. 6). One of the most blatant examples of the racist treatment towards him is the following scene from chapter 6 (which, of course, is nowhere to be seen on the film):

Don't be afraid, it is but a boy - yet the villain scowls so plainly in his face; would it not be a kindness to the country to hang him at once, before he shows his nature in acts as well as features? (...) "Frightful thing! Put him in the cellar, papa. He's exactly like the son of the fortune-teller that stole my tame pheasant.

To top it all off, Fennell not only casts a white man as Heathcliff, she does something even more bizarre by casting a man of Pakistani descent as Edgar Linton, the rich gentleman who Cathy marries because of his social status. The contrast between him and Heathcliff, namely how they look, is essential to the plot: "I wish I had light hair and a fair skin, and was dressed and behaved as well, and had a chance of being as rich as he will be!'", says Heathcliff about Linton on chapter 7. Taking all of this into account, these casting choices felt like being laughed in the face to anyone who read the book.

Wuthering Lows

Other details that didn't sit quite right with me were the colours of Cathy's and Isabella's hair, which for some reason were shifted: Cathy's "brown ringlets" (c. 7) became Margot Robbie's trademark blonde, while "the brightness of Isabella's yellow hair" (c. 10) was nowhere to be seen on Alison Oliver's dark mane. I'm usually not puritanical about these kinds of details, if they don't affect the narrative; however, the point could be made that their hair colour being specified in the text is significant. Cathy's dark hair is, after all, a visual element that links her with Heathcliff ("I AM Heathcliff!", she says in chapter 9); while the Linton siblings who each of them marry and whose personalities are completely opposite to theirs, are both blonde: "Whatever our souls are made of (…) Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire" (c. 9).

There's a lot of points to be made about how incorrect, inconsistent and dishonouring this so-called adaptation (no, the quotation marks don't absolve you, Fennell) is to the source material, but I don't want to linger on any other detail so as to not divert from the real, bigger problems. Although Joseph's not young nor polite, Nelly's not jealous nor vengeful, and latex-looking, plasticised fabrics didn't exist in the 18th century, none of this would be an issue if the film respected the essence of the book it proposes to adapt. Neither would it be an issue if it had any other title and it wasn't intended as a direct adaptation. I'm not a purist, I like innovative takes on literature — but a vapid, eroticized, whitewashed take is neither innovative (a quick search on Netflix will do the trick), nor anything resembling Wuthering Heights.

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Book Review: The Silmarillion, J. R. R. Tolkien

After reading The Hobbit, I decided to do the most unhinged thing possible and follow it up not with The Lord of the Rings (which would be the natural progression), but with The Silmarillion. Why would I go from Tolkien's first and most child-friendly fantasy novel, to a posthumous collection of myths, you ask?

Well, my favorite thing about the Middle-earth universe is the Elves, so I'd always been the most interested in The Silmarillion, since it's the one that's more focused on them. I even intended to start reading Tolkien from there, but I was strongly advised against it by friends (and that's the main reason I went for The Hobbit first instead).

"There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made."

Edited and published 4 years after his death by his son Christopher, The Silmarillion contains most of Tolkien's legendarium, from the beginning of days ("Ainulindalë") to the Third Age (in which The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are set). My favorite parts were the beginning, which felt the most mythological, and the end, which felt the most familiar. The first part, "Ainulindalë", tells how the world ("which the Elves call Arda") was created through music, made by angelic beings called the Ainur. The second part, "Valaquenta", describes the Ainur who went to Arda, there becoming the Valar and the Maiar.

The "Quenta Silmarillion" is the bulk of the book, spanning over 20 chapters. We see the ancient days of Middle-earth, before the western region of Beleriand was drowned. This is the part that gets a bit exhausting and the narrative feels more medieval and war-ridden.

"The days are dark, and there is no hope for Men"

The penultimate part, "Akallabêth", greatly renewed my interest. It tells of Númenor, an island raised by the Valar as a gift to the Edain (a race of Men who helped defeat Morgoth). It also details its downfall, inspired by the myth of Atlantis (one which always interested me deeply).

The last part, "Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age", was probably the most exciting, because it's the most familiar to anyone who has seen and/or read The Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit. It's the first time in The Silmarillion that the hobbits and the Wizards are mentioned, and here the narrative of both Tolkien's novels is summarized, including further context on the making of the Rings of Power.

All in all, The Silmarillion is a very different reading from The Hobbit; I would only recommend it if you're really into Middle-earth and/or lore in general. It reads like a History book, very straightforward and factual. It's not a difficult reading, but it can get quite confusing and a bit overwhelming with the amount of names of people and places (which sometimes have even multiple designations, in different languages). But if you're interested in Tolkien's universe, dive in!

[blossomingbooks]

2026 Literary Calendar

There are some literary quotes that always resonate in my mind whenever a specific month begins. I wanted to share those quotes with you, so I figured why not make a literary calendar, to bring literature with us all year round?

Here it is; I hope you like it and make good use of it. I wish you a splendid 2026, filled with splendid books! 📚✨ 

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Book Review: Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen

Born on this day 250 years ago, Jane Austen has been one of my favorite authors since I was 16, eagerly devouring the pages of Pride and Prejudice for the first time. To celebrate her 250th birthday, I decided to gift myself one of Folio Society's beautiful editions of her novels, which I'd been coveting for 10 years... I'd always wanted to get Emma, but since I had Sense and Sensibility on this year's TBR, I got this one instead!

This edition, illustrated by Philip Bannister, opens with a short introduction by Italian writer Elena Ferrante. She defines Austen as “an extremely cultured, extremely perceptive lady who was well acquainted with the ways of the landed gentry, who knew the rituals of the London bourgeoisie, who was aware of how unstable the world is — of how everything changes in spite of sense and in the tumult of sensibility”.

This description is very much in tune with what I like most about Jane Austen: her witty depiction of societal customs. I think there's a certain misconception about her work, which puts it in a superficial box of romance plots and 19th century upper-class aesthetics. Although that is the appeal for a large part of her audience (and it did much for me when I started getting acquainted with her works), for me what keeps her novels interesting in the long run are the deeper layers of psychological allegory and social criticism. I think her flair for irony and satire is extremely underrated, and I find her novels — which fall into the comedy-of-manners genre — really fun to read.

In Sense and Sensibility, her first published novel, these aspects are very present. Focusing on sisters Elinor and Marianne, eldest and middle daughters of Mrs Dashwood, the novel shows two opposite ways of engaging with the world — one through sense, the other through sensibility. Although there's a contrast that requires attenuation between the Romantic sensibility of Marianne and Elinor's reasonable sense, the latter seems to fall much more in line with Austen herself. Although Elinor's self-possession also has its faults, it's clearly regarded with greater admiration, and her reason and tolerance are more rewarded at the end. Austen's parodic descriptions of exacerbated feelings (not just in this novel but overall — see her Gothic satire, Northanger Abbey) demonstrate how much she opposed the literary trend of her time, too self-indulgent for her sharp critical eye — it's no wonder that her work opened the doors for the Realist movement that arose in the mid-19th century.

Another aspect of Austen's novels that I think gets misjudged by contemporary readers is the female condition in them. Dismissed as too traditional and dealing with characters that only care about getting married, her novels are a mirror to 19th century society, when marriage was the only currency in which women could trade. But Austen not only exposes this reality; her novels could even be considered feminist, since her protagonists tend to find marriage on their own terms (intellectual, emotional, or even practical), in spite of their restrictions.

In fact, Sense and Sensibility has a very patriarchal starting point: the death of the Dashwoods' father, who leaves his property to a male heir instead of to its female residents, who in turn are left to depend upon the generosity of friends and family. Money is an ever-present aspect, especially for Elinor, the prudent eldest daughter who keeps her senseless mother in check. Her position in her family mirrors the position of women in society — a theme that feels relevant till this day, when the caretaking load upon women is intensified by their right to work (equity in household duties has yet to follow the achievement of female financial independence). Having to self-restrict for the sake of the comfort and happiness of others around her, Elinor's emotions are greatly repressed, and even dismissed, as can be seen in the following reasoning of her mother's:

She now found that she had erred in relying on Elinor’s representation of herself; and justly concluded that every thing had been expressly softened at the time, to spare her from an increase of unhappiness, suffering as she then had suffered for Marianne. (…) Marianne’s affliction, because more acknowledged, more immediately before her, had too much engrossed her tenderness, and led her away to forget that in Elinor she might have a daughter suffering almost as much, certainly with less self-provocation, and greater fortitude.

I hadn't read Jane Austen in a long time, so this felt like greeting an old friend: not as exciting and intimate as in the old days, but very agreeable. I feel like I first approached her novels as a Marianne, with the "romantic refinements of a young mind", and re-encountered her now as an Elinor: moderate in my expectations, with a more discerning judgement. This was my 5th Austen novel and it's far from my favorite (forever a tie between Pride and Prejudice and Emma), but it's an extremely enlightened introduction to her themes and style.

[blossomingbooks]

Book (& film) analysis: Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (& del Toro)

After watching Guillermo del Toro's film adaptation last week, I haven't stopped thinking about Frankenstein. It led me to revisit Mary Shelley's novel, and I realized that I had never posted about this book which was so significant on key moments of my literary journey (I first read it at 15 and later studied it in college). So I figured that this was my cue to share my appreciation for Shelley's masterpiece, while at the same time analyzing how this new adaptation dialogues with and honours the author's vision.

Written in 1818 and revised in 1831 (the latter being the version I'm acquainted with), Frankenstein by Mary Shelley starts as an epistolary novel and it has a circular structure. Through 3 different narrative levels, it uses a technique called embedded narrative (that is, a story within a story). The framing narrative is from the perspective of Walton, the Captain of an expedition to the Arctic (the book starts and ends with his letters to his sister), which frames Victor's tale — as the latter is telling his story to the Captain. Victor's retelling, in its turn, encloses yet another narrative level: the Creature's story, which he tells Victor when they meet in the Alps, halfway through the book.

Guillermo's del Toro film adaptation isn't perfect. It strays from the canon in many aspects: it develops Victor’s childhood much beyond the original; it invents a new key character named Henrich Harlander; Elizabeth Harlander (Lavenza in the book) is William's bride, instead of Victor's (William in the novel is a child); Victor isn't terrified of but fascinated by the Creature when he awakens and doesn't abandon him, but mistreats him; there’s a “romantic” plot between Elizabeth and the Creature; the Creature is unable to die; Victor and the Creature have a reconciliation moment before the first dies.

However, the film honours Shelley's vision through some key aspects. For one, it mirrors the novel's structure very well by starting and ending in the Arctic, through the Captain's point of view, and by being divided in two parts: "Part 1: Victor's Tale" and "Part 2: The Creature's Tale". The use of the Arctic in this film (absent from the famous 1931 adaptation, for example) is meaningful, considering its symbolism in the novel: the 19th century's fascination with the discovery and exploration of the poles represents the boundaries of human knowledge being overcome, a central theme in the narrative.

Del Toro also expands on a theme hinted at throughout the novel and ironically emphasized by popular culture: the confluence between creator and creature. In Shelley's text, one of the first descriptions of Victor Frankenstein is as an "interesting creature"; in general discourse, Frankenstein is widely referred to as the creature, instead of the creator. Del Toro's adaptation not only emphasizes that Frankenstein is the scientist, not the creature, but also twists this misconception by focusing on Victor Frankenstein’s monstrosity. Unlike in the book, del Toro's Victor mistreats his creation, going as far as trying to kill him for not being the perfect creature he envisioned, while his brother William directly tells him "you are the monster". The titular character becomes then much more evidently the villain (unlike in most famous representations of the story).

My favorite part of the book has always been the chapters written in the point of the view of the Creature. His account of the beginning of his existence is deeply touching and, for me, the heart of the narrative. The reader can't help but feel empathy towards this being whose perception of the world is so entirely brand new. This natural condition of purity and innocence (which mirrors the Romantic notion of man's original goodness, while social learning leads to a moral corruption) is beautifully shown in del Toro's Creature, portrayed with poignant sensitivity by Jacob Elordi.

This central part of the book has been crudely overlooked in the most famous adaptations. The awakening of the Creature's awareness (both of himself and of the world) happens gradually, through the senses; then through language and literature. In del Toro's version, this part stands out as the closest from the book: we see him hiding in the hovel next to a family's cottage, watching them and growing affection, learning language through them and through books (including a direct reference to Paradise Lost by John Milton). The film's extended interaction between him and the family's blind patriarch is heartening, highlighting a key moment in the novel: the unprejudiced empathy from a blind person showcases how mistreated the Creature is solely because of his appearance. He looks different from what people are used to, his "otherness" is at the source of society's prejudice — a powerful theme to explore in current times.

Another prominent aspect of del Toro's adaptation is its war dimension: Victor's benefactor, Henrich Harlander (a brand new non-canonical character), is an arms merchant, which means that Victor's scientific experiment is sponsored by war. Harlander also informs Victor of upcoming battles so he can collect dead bodies; therefore, the Creature is made up of different parts of soldiers killed in battle. The Creature is, then, a product of violence, both from war and from Victor's trauma of his own father's violence (which he, in turn, inflicts on the Creature).

What del Toro's adaptation does is redeem Shelley's Creature, so monstrously portrayed in popular culture, while also giving Victor his fair dose of accountability for his hubris (although fairly exaggerated). In truth, the characters in the book are much more interchangeable and morally ambiguous; however, considering the popularization of such a simplified perception of these characters, del Toro's take is justifiable.

While the book centers on the effects and perils of industrialization, reflecting on the consequences of trying to go beyond human understanding and meddling with the natural order of things by playing God (thus why the subtitle “the Modern Prometheus"), del Toro's film brings a more human approach by applying these concepts to intergenerational trauma. God is the father figure, relentless and cruel. In Shelley's novel, there's a Romantic disenchantment and fear of progress; in del Toro's film, there's redemption, reconciliation — a return to what's human, after so much violent and dehumanizing progress.

[blossomingbooks]

Book Review: Catarina e a Beleza de Matar Fascistas, Tiago Rodrigues

[Longer version of this collective review]

[PT]

Desde que esta peça estreou que a quero muito ver mas está sempre esgotada... Como não sabia quando (ou se) iria conseguir assistí-la, decidi comprar o livro na última FLL, porque sentia que era um texto que se tornava cada vez mais urgente de conhecer.

E não estava errada. Tendo sido escrita em 2020 e passando-se em 2028, a narrativa é assustadoramente próxima à nossa realidade. Os números e contextos poderiam facilmente ser factos daqui a poucos anos, de tal forma que toda a peça soa dolorosamente profética.

O que mais gostei nesta peça foi a premissa: uma família, descendente de uma colega de Catarina Eufémia, tem a tradição e missão de matar um fascista por ano, no dia do assassinato desta última. Baseada num acontecimento real, é uma premissa que dá palco à memória de uma figura trágica da história da ditadura portuguesa. Para honrar Catarina Eufémia, as personagens dirigem-se umas às outras com o seu nome, um ritual simbólico de comunidade face à tirania (remetendo a movementos como o #JeSuisCharlie de 2015).

O que eu não esperava era o dilema da protagonista (a Catarina distinguida no papel como Sara, nome da atriz) chegada a sua vez de matar. Esperava que o obstáculo da narrativa viesse de fora, então foi uma surpresa vê-lo a ser despoletado internamente. Ao início não soube muito bem o que sentir, comecei a ter a impressão de que a "moral" seria ter clemência com fascistas, o que me pareceu contraproducente (o velho paradoxo da tolerância). Porém, a cena final desconstrói esse pressuposto: enquanto a família discute sobre o que fazer com o fascista, enquanto a Catarina designada para o homicídio tem o seu dilema moral, o fascismo prevalece. Este conflito interno culmina em desgraça apenas para a família; na cena final, o fascista levanta-se, intacto e inabalado. Retrato fiél de como a extrema direita triunfa face à discórdia e à fragmentação.

A cena final foi muito desoladora. Ter que ler páginas e páginas de um monólogo fascista, sem a indignação do público que acontece durante a peça em cena, deixou-me desalentada. Não há nenhuma resolução, nenhum consolo, nenhuma catarse. Sai-se dali com um sabor amargo, sem saber para onde nos virarmos — assim como na realidade, após cada eleição, cada passo de vitória do fascismo. É desolador porque é desesperadamente real. E é exatamente por isso que é uma obra tão urgente e tão impactante, cada vez mais...

[ENG]

I've been wanting to watch this play since it premiered, but it's always sold out... Since I didn't know when (or if) I'd be able to watch it, I decided to buy the book, because I felt that it was a text that became each day more urgent to know.

And I wasn't wrong. Written in 2020 and taking place in 2028, the narrative is frighteningly close to our reality. The numbers and contexts could easily be facts in a few years, in such a way that the whole play sounds painfully prophetic.

What I liked most about this play was the premise: a family, descending from a colleague of Catarina Eufémia, has the tradition and teh mission of killing one fascist per year, on the day of the latter's murder. Based on these real events, it's a premise that gives the stage to the memory of a tragic figure in the history of the Portuguese dictatorship. To honor Catarina Eufémia, the characters call each other by her name, a ritual symbolic of community in the face of tyranny (recalling movements such as #JeSuisCharlie from 2015).

What I wasn't expecting was the dilemma of the protagonist (the Catarina specified on the text as Sara, the name of the actress) when comes her time to kill. I expected that the obstacle of the narrative would come from out, so it was a surprise to see it triggered internally. In the beginning I didn't know exactly what to feel, I started having the impression that the "moral" of the story would be to have leniency towards fascists, which seemed to me counterproductive (the old paradox of tolerance). However, the final scene deconstructs this assumption: while the family fights over what to do with the fascist, while the Catarina designated for the murder has her moral dilemma, fascism prevails. This internal conflict culminates in disgrace only for the family; on the final scene, the fascist stands up, intact and unshaken — a faithful portrait of how the extreme right triumphs in the face of discord and fragmentation.

The final scene was very disheartening. Having to read pages and pages of a fascist monologue, without the outrage of the public that happens during the staged play, left me dispirited. There is no resolution, no consolation, no catharsis. One leaves it with a bitter feeling, not knowing where to turn to — just like in reality, after each election, each victory step of fascism. It's disheartening because it's desperately real. And it's exactly because of that, that it's such an urgent and impacting work, each day more so...

[blossomingbooks]

Book Review: The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller

Like anyone else who was on Tumblr around 2012, I've known about Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles for a long time. Although it sparked some curiosity back then, I never gave it too much thought. But, last year, when her second novel Circe surprised me (to the point of entering my top 10 favorite books), I finally decided to give the author's famous debut a chance.

Early disclosure: it didn't surpass Circe for me. I know that's not a popular opinion, and it may have to do with the fact that I read her novels in a reverse order from most people; maybe the first impression is the most impactful. But Circe really touched a nerve in me; maybe because its themes hit closer to home (how could I resist a lonely, angry feminist witch?), maybe because on her second novel, Miller's writing felt more matured, fully-fledged in its lyrical potential.

However, none of this is to say I didn't like The Song of Achilles. On the contrary: it was thoroughly a very engaging reading. I specially enjoyed the first half, when we get to see the early parts of Patroclus' and Achilles' lives, not as widely known as the Trojan war is. I only had one minor issue with it (and this might be a spoiler if you know absolutely nothing of the premise): the description of their first sexual involvement, when they were 16, made me a bit uncomfortable. I understand that this is perfectly plausible — specially considering the approach to sexuality in ancient Greece (pederasty being a prime example) —, but it was hard for me to dissociate from the fact that I, an adult, was reading a detailed account, written by another adult, of teenagers having sex. Since the sources don't agree on Achilles' age when he went to Troy (some say 15, while others point to as late as 23) and this happens shortly before, I think the author could have chosen a later age without detriment to canonicity.

Song of Patroclus

"We were like gods, at the dawning of the world, and our joy was so bright we could see nothing else but the other."

When I started reading this book, I was surprised to see that it was narrated by Patroclus. I'm not sure if I expected it to be Achilles, or a third-person narrator, but knowing what I already knew from having studied the Iliad [major spoilers will be discussed from now on], I was very intrigued to know how the latter parts of the story would be told if the main catalyst was the narrator's death.

In fact, even though the book is called "The Song of Achilles", it's not his song as much as it is Patroclus'. His is the voice that speaks to us, it's through his eyes that we see the famous protagonist. It does make sense that the character would choose this title, Achilles being the love of his life and sole drive in everything he does. However, the whole time it felt to me like I was reading the Song of Patroclus (though I know this doesn't carry the weight of fame nor rolls off the tongue as much). After following him all the way from childhood (before Achilles even comes into the picture) to his after-life, he becomes very near and dear to the reader. His sensibilities, his refusal of violence in a world where that is the norm for men and his empathy and caring, specially for women (in a world where they are mere commodities) make him the real Aristos Achaion ("best of the Greeks", title given to Achilles).

On the other hand, Achilles feels more complicated in my eyes. Although sharing some of Patroclus' worldviews, specially in their earlier days — the two of them feel very much apart from society, inhabiting a world of their own —, he gradually incarnates more and more the spirit of his time. It's obviously harder for him to completely dissociate from his context, with the weight of his fate, divinity and fame pressuring him. His love and devotion to Patroclus, while undeniable, seem to not be enough against the vices of pride and stubbornness that poison his mind later on (and ultimately, causes Patroclus' downfall).

Considering all of this, I found myself not feeling sad when either of them died — I was too angry with Achilles. I saw everyone who had read this book talk about it as if it was the saddest thing they had ever read, but all I could feel was indignation. I also thought the book would end with Patroclus' death, so I was surprised to find that he kept narrating posthumously, in "the half-life of the unburied spirit". This was an interesting outcome to the narrating question I had at the beginning, better than my predictions that the narrating voice would be transferred to either Achilles or a third person in the final chapters. The after-life narration, instead, intensifies the sorrow of these events, turning an expected tragedy into a more personal heartache.

It all culminates in the final chapter. Thinking I wouldn't be as sad as expected, the final conversation between Patroclus' lonely, doomed spirit and Thetis (Achilles' mother, who opposed their relationship throughout the whole narrative) was like a punch in the gut. His memories of Achilles felt like a heartbreaking montage of flashbacks, while her unexpected vulnerability (reminding the reader to have compassion for a character who, although a goddess, is still a woman in a world of men) and redemption defeated me completely. Tears started streaming down my face and, at last, I understood... In a last stroke of genius, Miller transforms a widely known, distant tale into an intimate, sorrowful tragedy.

[blossomingbooks]

Book Review: Florida, Lauren Groff

I got curious about this book by Lauren Groff last year, when Florence Welch posted a story saying it inspired her for her feature on Taylor Swift's "Florida!!!" (which just happens to be my favorite song from her last album). In her post, Welch said that this short story collection was "full of ghosts and swamps and storms", which really intrigued me — so, naturally, I added it to my TBR.

I approached this book expecting some kind of horror keynote, which is not necessarily the case: the themes of each story are fairly mundane, its subjects very human and the writing quite introspective. It does contain certain horror motives, but they're used to accentuate the interior life of its characters more than anything else. Florida's natural landscape and wild fauna create an eerie atmosphere that serves as backdrop for the characters' torments.

In "Ghosts and Empties", we follow a new mother through her daily nighttime strolls on her neighborhood, a mental health exercise that turns into a compilation of astute social observations ("It is astonishing how people live, the messes they sustain", she says, looking into a window). "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners", on the other hand, is a lifetime account of a lonely Floridian boy who escapes from the brutality of his herpetologist father and the unhappiness of his mother through his passion for numbers: "As messy as the world was, the numbers, predictable and polite, brought order".

The next two stories bring more suspenseful, frightening premises: in "Dogs Go Wolf", two young sisters are left abandoned in a wild fishing island, while a family takes a vacation in the wilderness, surrounded by a tiger (and other dangers) in "The Midnight Zone". But my favorite story was probably "Eyewall", the one that clearly inspired Florence Welch's verses in "Florida!!!": a woman stubbornly stays inside her house despite the incoming hurricane, which brings in not only material destruction but also ghosts of her past. In the eye of the storm, and in her inebriated state, the edges of reality start to blur, leaving the reader wondering what's real and what isn't.

"The hurricane with my name when it came I got drunk and I dared it to wash me away Barricaded in the bathroom with a bottle of wine Well, me and my ghosts, we had a hell of a time" (Florence + the Machine, in "Florida!!!")

On the next two stories, "For the God of Love, For the Love of God" and "Salvador", as well on the last one, "Yport", the scenery drastically changes, unexpectedly leaving Florida behind. In "Salvador" (to my surprise, my own hometown!), the Floridian protagonist is vacationing in Brazil, when, ironically, a storm hits the city. The other two stories, instead, takes us to France: two couples spend the summer in the French countryside, while a mother takes her two sons to Yport to research Guy de Maupassant and escape the Floridian heat (both physical and metaphorical). Although the settings differ, in all three stories Florida keeps lurking in between the lines: its inhabitants can't escape it, even when travelling far, the same way that they can't escape themselves. Florida's heat and dreads follow them everywhere, because it's intrinsic to who they are.

Next, in "Flower Hunters", a mother "buries her failure" in reading a book about a naturalist who pioneered in exploring Florida's forests. In "Above and Bellow", a promising college student has to leave her apartment and decides to surrender herself to homelessness for an undetermined amount of time — "she was only one living lost thing among so many others, not special for being human." Finally, one of the darkest parts of the book, "Snake Stories" draws a meaningful parallel between snakes and men, when the narrator is confronted with the amount of rapes in her city: "the new venom that has entered the world, a venom that somehow acts only on men, hardening what had once been bad thoughts into new, worse actions."

In many of these stories, I had the feeling I was reading about the same character. The protagonist of the last one, for example, felt like a version of the mother in the first story some years later, giving the anthology a cyclical quality. Many characteristics would repeat themselves, leaving me wondering: are the female protagonists all versions of the same character? Or are they all versions of the author herself? Whatever it may be, the string that ties it all together is there, personalized by the state of Florida, "a damp, dense tangle / an Eden of dangerous things."

In this tangle, snakes intertwine with a sense of identity, alligators feed on recurrent feelings of dread and tigers expose the conflicting nuances of motherhood, all engulfed in swamps that hide their menace, only to be released cathartically through storms. Through Groff's words, Florida becomes, more than a particular place, a way to see the world and its chaos, and to see yourself through it.

[blossomingbooks]

Book Review: The Secret History, Donna Tartt

Death is the mother of beauty,' said Henry. 'And what is beauty?' 'Terror'

Donna Tartt's debut novel had been on my "to read" list ever since it was mentioned in a college class I took on detective stories. Although I've always been drawn to dark academia, I've been more acquainted with it in cinema than in literature. So, what better place to start than at the pivotal novel of this literary subgenre?

The Secret History lays the groundwork for its own resolution from the beginning. The very first page of the prologue lays bare what we think is the major plot point: Bunny's murder by his peers. Although this is, in fact, the central event of the narrative, it's not really its climax. Bunny's murder divides the book in two parts: Book 1 narrates the events up until that moment, while Book 2 follows the aftermath. Before knowing of this structure, I thought that the whole book would be about how they got there, and why they did it. So imagine my confusion seeing the amount of pages left, when the outcome was so near… When it finally happened, I was stunned: how is there still half a book left after this??

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start by saying that Book 1 is very gripping. The story is narrated by Richard, a newcomer on scholarship at Hampden College who is mystified by a group of Classics students. The atmosphere of this first part is mysterious, and the main characters walk in an enigmatic, alluring mist. Quite fittingly, Richard draws “certain tragic similarities” between himself and the protagonist from The Great Gatsby, one of his favorite novels: both fictionalize themselves to infiltrate the elite world where the object of their obsessions reside (although, arguably, he’s closer to the narrator, Nick Carraway, in his fascination with the protagonists' mystique).

In Book 2, the mood shifts. After Bunny’s murder, everything is surrounded by grief and guilt. It switches to a barer, more dramatic and grimmer tone — which is stretched for so long, that I started worrying if the narrative would end on a banal, underwhelming note. At this point, both the reader and the narrator think that they already know everything — an assumption that is quickly dispelled when the enigmatic aura of the first book returns. I read the last few chapters frenetically, intrigued as I was to discover how this narrative would unfurl.

Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? (…) To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal!”

One of my favorite things about this book was its foreshadowing. The author leaves subtle hints here and there in such a casual way that you don't even think much of it; then later something happens and you realize it was there all along. When I finally caught on to this, I found myself noticing things that even the narrator hadn't. At the end, certain dialogues or speeches recall key moments from the first chapters, making one realize how foreshown the narrative is.

Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

Morally, this is a disturbing and infuriating reading. We’re always seeing from the perspective of the accomplice and the murderer(s). The banality with which the characters deal with the murder of a friend (I'm pretty sure that one of them, in particular, is a psychopath) is absurd, and I was constantly furious with the narrator for indulging it. We see the characters through his eyes, reason why I’m inclined to think of him as a bit of an unreliable narrator: his fascination for them leads us to gloss over their actions and forget that, ultimately, these are not good people. In his own words, his "own fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good” clouds his judgement substantially. Many a time I found myself wanting revenge for Bunny who, although far from perfect, was easily the best of them (and who’s to say that Richard’s portrayal of him wasn’t biased and purposely negative in order to justify his own complicity?).

The Classics group live within a privileged bubble of elitism and individualism. In fact, "none of them were the least bit interested in anything that went on in the world, and their ignorance of current events and even recent history was rather astounding". Their desire to reach an idealized aesthetic makes them blind and indifferent to the outside world, as another character notes about their professor: 

There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty – unless she is wed to something more meaningful – is always superficial. It is not that your Julian chooses solely to concentrate on certain, exalted things; it is that he chooses to ignore others equally as important.

Overall, it's a hauntingly complex narrative about the clash between Dionysian ecstasy and Apollonian intellect. Very well written, conceptually rich and morally conflicting, it evokes much more beyond the dark tones of academic buildings on an autumnal New England setting.

[blossomingbooks]

Book review: The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot.

This year, F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece turned 100, and I realized I never posted a review of this classic that was so formative for me when I read it as a teenager! This seemed like the perfect time to do so: to celebrate its anniversary, I've been rewatching the film adaptations and revisiting my favorite parts of the novel.

I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

Narrated by Nick Carraway (the simultaneous insider and outsider), The Great Gatsby tells the story of Jay Gatsby, a mysterious self-made man who was once an outsider and wrote himself into the world of Long Island's elite. Born into it was Daisy Buchanan, the “beautiful little fool” with whom Gatsby had been in love for years, but whose greatest comfort is her own wealth.

Fitzgerald’s body of work is greatly known for criticizing the "American dream" — a type of ambition full of hopes and lies that destroy those who aim for the unreachable. Gatsby is one of those, and Daisy is his American dream. She represents all of his hopes and ambitions of escaping the social predicament he was born into — as well as being, ultimately, the cause for his downfall.

This book appealed to me for many reasons. I was captivated right away by Fitzgerald’s writing, which felt, paradoxically, complex in its simplicity. This is probably due to the focus he puts on personalities and concepts instead of actions. Jay Gatsby, in particular, is definitely one of the most interesting characters in classic literature:

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. (...) it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

Besides being a story about the dangers of ambition and of trying to revive the past, The Great Gatsby is also an extraordinary social commentary. Deeply class-conscious, the novel starts with Nick reflecting on an advice given by his father: "'Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,' he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.'" The story goes on to poke on the money and wealth of the glorious and simultaneously delusional 1920s, dominated by an upper class which only protects itself and lives carelessly towards the rest of the world:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…

The most iconic key element of the novel is the green light, which Gatsby metaphorically reaches for — representing his hope and, on the other side of the same coin, his ambition. This green light is his ultimate goal and desire, blurring the lines of reality and leading to his undoing. This element famously returns at the end, in what I honestly consider to be some of the best ending lines in the history of literature:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further… And one fine morning-- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

It's wild to think that this novel is 100 years old; although so characteristic of its time, its themes are so universal and recognizable that it feels current. Owing to Fitzgerald's psychosocial acumen, The Great Gatsby remains, till this very day, a timeless classic.

[blossomingbooks]

Book Review: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

I rarely do rereads, because there's always so many books on my TBR and so little time... However, I had been meaning to go back to The Picture of Dorian Gray for a long time, since it was one of the first classics I ever read, when I was 13. I've always defined it as one of my favorite books, so I needed to revisit it to know if it still kept that place.

Long story short, it definitely does. I'm very glad to have reread it now as an adult, because it really enriched my perception of the book. As a pre-teen, I was able to grasp and enjoy the story conceptually, but now I was able to find much more beyond its Gothic themes and Decadent aesthetic.

Something that definitely didn't catch my young eye is the social and class criticism, which really caught me off guard since I've always seen Wilde as such a bourgeois figure. On that note, I had the feeling that the character of Lord Henry was somewhat autobiographical; but upon rereading, he seems more likely to be a critique of Victorian society. Wilde himself said:

[The Picture of Dorian Gray] contains much of me in it – Basil Hallward is what I think I am; Lord Henry, what the world thinks me; Dorian is what I would like to be – in other ages, perhaps.

Understanding this and researching about Wilde's biography was a relief, because the misogyny in Lord Henry's haughty speeches is blatant. However, his character seems to have been purposely written to be despicable. Although punctuated by interesting reflections and aphorisms, he's clearly a product of his time and represents not only the hedonistic corruption of Dorian's mind, but the overall moral hypocrisy of the elite circles in Victorian society. We read about "the great aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing" and how "the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial", because "beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich.”

A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do. That is the one use of the idle classes of a country.

Society—civilized society, at least—is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef.

Moreover, rereading this after having read À Rebours, the book that "poisoned" the mind of Dorian Gray, was also very satisfying. Although never named, the description of this book perfectly fits Joris-Karl Huysmans' decadent novel, which Wilde later mentioned during his trials. The parallel between the two novels is very pertinent and, to a point, metafictional. In chapter 11, he digresses about the chapters in À Rebours', in such a manner that it reads just like the French novel. In the same way that Dorian feels fascinated by the latter, so does Wilde's novel enthrals the reader:

For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence of this book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never sought to free himself from it. (...) The hero, the wonderful young Parisian in whom the romantic and the scientific temperaments were so strangely blended, became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself. And, indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it.

This time around, I also paid attention to the differences between the original 1890 novella and the extended, more censored 1891 novel version. I think it's safe to say that the original novella, although less developed on some characters' backgrounds, loses nothing on the way of the story's essence and conceptual thesis. Still, it was interesting to see which chapters were added later, as well as the edits made on homoerotic connotations such as follows (which merely serve as evidence to confirm a very palpable subtext):

I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. Somehow, I had never loved a woman. (...) I quite admit that I adored you madly, extravagantly, absurdly.

Finally, I can't finish this review without mentioning the Preface, which is a masterpiece in its own right: it contains, in a single page, both Wilde's artistic manifesto and his response to some contemporary controversies which aroused over his novel. "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book", he states: "Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."

[blossomingbooks]

Book Review: "The Machine Stops", E. M. Forster

I don't usually post reviews for individual short stories, but this one by English author E. M. Forster is so absurdly prophetic and imperative for our current landscape that it felt necessary to share and discuss.

In this narrative, civilization has progressed to a point where everyone lives underground, in rooms filled with artificial light and air, where all of one's needs are met by "the Machine": "through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being." With technological elements that resemble devices and features we have today, one could easily assume this was written in the 21st century, or, at least, in the last decades of the 20th. But no: Forster wrote about things such as instant messages ("pneumatic post"), videocalls and the Internet as far back as 1909 — reason why this is often considered to be the starting point for technological dystopian fiction.

“You talk as if a god had made the Machine, (...) I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you."

The author starts the story by saying "Imagine, if you can" — a necessary disclaimer for society in the beginning of the 20th century, but expendable to the contemporary reader: imagining is no issue when many details of this world are terrifyingly similar to our reality (terrifyingly evocative, namely, of the lockdown we experienced globally in 2020). Human relations are entirely virtual, replacing "direct experience" (which is considered a waste of time), while people are used to getting everything they need and want immediately, within the confines of their rooms. So "irritation — a growing quality in that accelerated age" is prevalent, while books have become obsolete. Only one was left, acting as a sort of bible: the Book of the Machine.

Besides the obvious general implications of the hyper-development of technology, one particularity struck me the most: there was a "button that produced literature." This instantly recalled to me the current discussions about A.I. and how carelessly it's being used as a replacement for art and individual creation:

“Beware of first-hand ideas! (...) Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand (...) And in time (…) There will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless".

Both in fiction and in our reality, the practicality of such technology is chosen to the detriment of its ecological consequences:

"But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of Nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine."

The third and last chapter poses the question implied by the title: what happens when the Machine stops? In the narrative, the answer is clear; but to the contemporary reader, this interrogation echoes in the mind: what would happen if our machine stopped? We who are so dependent on virtual spaces — to communicate, to craft our identity, to exist... And more and more to shape our critical thinking, and even to create. If the machine stopped, what would we have left?

Reading this in the countryside, surrounded by green hills next to a quiet river, was particularly impactful. In the last few months, "the machine" has taken a toil on my mental health, and a return to nature, to sentience, seems to be the only possible antidote.

[blossomingbooks]

Book Review: The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

Starting this review was tough. I'm used to read and analyse fiction, but this novel is way too intertwined with the author's life for me to see it as such, which makes its analysis a bit tricky.

Considered a roman à clef — a genre of semi-autobiographical novel where real-life events and people are disguised by a façade of fiction —, The Bell Jar comprehends six months in the life of a 19-to-20 year old. Through a protagonist called Esther Greenwood, Plath masques her own early experiences: starting in New York as a student intern at a magazine, then back in her hometown and finally in a mental hospital.

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. (...) I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

Trying to look at it through a literary point-of-view, I found Plath's Confessionalist style to be very compelling. Reality is filtered through a very personal sieve in this first-person narrative, turning impressions into drops of poetic digressions. Her famous metaphor of the fig tree is a poignant reflection on coming-of-age, while the references to the novel's title create a moving allegory for mental illness:

“(...) because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”

“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”

At the beginning of the novel, I would say the protagonist isn't very likeable: she's rather rude, judgmental and condescending. However, with later context, this behavior could be interpreted as signs of hypomania — a state of irritability that characterizes bipolar II disorder. Throughout the novel, the character becomes more complex, falling deeper into a spiral of mental breakdowns and suicidal ideations.

I had read Plath's posthumous poetry collection Ariel around 7 years ago and a few verses stuck with me ever since ("I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted / To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty."). Coming back to those poems now after reading The Bell Jar, and going through some others from The Colossus (her only poetry collection published in life), I feel like they're all an extension of the same narrative — which makes sense, considering the nature of confessional poetry.

Plath's poetry dialogues intimately with her only novel, drawing a consistent landscape of her mind and poetics. Even her unconsummated second novel, Double Exposure, which she began writing right after the publication of The Bell Jar (and whose manuscript was "lost" — I'm sure her husband, Ted Hughes, who destroyed some of her journals from the time when they were separating, had nothing to do with it), was supposed to "show that same world (of The Bell Jar) as seen through the eyes of health."

(spoilers ahead)

It's hard to confront the ending without thinking of Plath's real-life events. Knowing she had committed suicide shortly after the publication of this novel, I thought it would end in a bitter, almost fatidic tone. Instead, it took me by surprise. It ended in a much more hopeful tone than I had expected, which was, considering everything, even more heartbreaking. We follow Esther on her last days at the mental hospital, getting ready to re-enter the world, unsure of what's to come but visibly healthier and more hopeful.

"How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?", she wonders, in what feels like a prophetic line considering that in reality, not long after, it did descend again. The most disconcerting thing is that, on Plath's conversations with friends and her mother, she seemed to feel very distant from those experiences and feelings. She defined The Bell Jar “as an autobiographical apprentice work which I had to write in order to free myself from the past":

"What I've done," I remember her saying, "is to throw together events from my own life, fictionalizing to add color -- it's a pot boiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown. . . I've tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar." (from a letter by Aurelia Plath)

This intention is also found within the story, in a very metaliterary moment when her protagonist starts writing a novel: “My heroine would be myself, only in disguise. She would be called Elaine. Elaine. I counted the letters on my fingers. There were six letters in Esther, too. It seemed a lucky thing.”

Now, on to some additional elements that might usually pass unmentioned under the weight of mental illness: firstly, I would consider this a feminist novel. Although it's not the main theme, feminist issues permeate the whole narrative. The protagonist's feelings towards traditional female roles, marriage and having children ("If I had to wait on a baby all day, I would go mad") are very challenging for the time:

“It would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast and coffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he'd left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day he'd expect a big dinner, and I'd spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted. This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A's, but I knew that's what marriage was like”

“when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.”

Although Plath did end up getting married and having children, the conflict between her intellectual career and being a wife/mother clearly made itself felt till the end of her days — having, arguably, a major impact on the deterioration of her mental health. Another feminist aspect in the novel is contraception, which is interesting to read about nowadays, considering how different and taboo it was. When getting "fitted" for a diaphragm, she says:

“I climbed up on the examination table, thinking: "I am climbing to freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from marrying the wrong person (…) just because of sex”

Finally, on to the most uncomfortable topic: there were some minor passages that felt a bit racist to my contemporary eyes. "I looked yellow as a Chinaman", she says, somewhere in the beginning, later also comparing herself to a "sick Indian”. Afterwards, in the mental hospital, there's a rather weird episode when a nameless "Negro" (how she repeatedly refers to him) delivers the patients their food and, at some point, another character says something is “ugly as Aztecs”.

These 21st century considerations aside, The Bell Jar is very much a work of its time — the social and cultural backdrop is very particular to American life in the 50s. Nonetheless, the psychological substance stands the test of time, by drawing a very intimate portrayal of depression and mental illness, while also resonating more universally with the feelings of inadequacy and uncertainty of growing up:

"I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it. I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead (...) Instead, all I could see were question marks."