Over the semester, we have read the work of 8 writers, spread out over 10 stories, a film and 9 novels. Which work that we studied did you find the most interesting or intriguing -- and why? Don't explain why you found one work better than another; instead, identify a work and explain what you found (and still find) so interesting about it.
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The book I found most interesting this semester has to be Perfume. I truly enjoyed everything about it from the writing style to the characters and plot. I really enjoyed the writing style because explaining a sense in words is very difficult, but when Suskind talks about the different types of wood and other scents I was almost able to smell them just from the words written on the page. I also started to pay more attention to what was going on around me in terms of smells. Of our senses, smell is always regarded as the least important, especially after sight and hearing, but Perfume gives a new perspective on the importance of smell. I also really enjoyed the characters. Throughout the entire novel I could not make up my mind about how I felt about Grenouille. On the one hand I admired him because he was so talented, on the other I pitied him because his life was so devoid of human attention, and while I was both in awe and pity of him, I could not help but be disturbed by his lack of humanity. And yet, while it may seem as though I did not like him and was disgusted by his actions, I also wanted him to be able to make the ultimate perfume. After reading the book I decided to find the movie, which I also loved. Although they missed several chunks of the book, what they did show followed the book pretty accurately, minus the fact that Grenouille was not hideously deformed looking. The book is so multifaceted that it can appeal to not only different emotions in the same reader, but to many different kinds of readers as well. Also, the plot is very fantastically realistic. While the events are clearly fiction and could never happen, the story is narrated in a very factual manner. Overall, I don't think there's anything I didn't like about it.
ReplyDeleteElina Kremen
Michael Furman
ReplyDeleteThe selections that I found the most intriguing this semester were the selected works by Edgar Allen Poe, that we read the first week. Including “The Black Cat”, “The cask of Amontillado”, and “The Fall of the House of Usher”. These stories are extremely grotesque, and inhumane. With the narrator murdering his wife and hanging the cat from a tree after he cuts out its eye in ‘The Black Cat’, and Montressor buries alive Fortunado, leaving him to starve to death in damp darkness in ‘The cask of Amontialldo’.
The fact that I like these stories is certainly not because I find them, or any of the characters relatable, nor do I find any of Poe’s stories realistically possible. I think the main reason I enjoy Poe is because of his writing style. His stories are extremely fast paced, quick reads. Poe is great at building suspense and intrepidation with his stories, even if the reader knows what is coming. In ‘The Cask of Amontialldo’, the reader knows that Montressor is going to kill Fortunado, but the reader is still kept in suspense as to how, and to why. Even once Montressor starts building the wall, the reader is still anxous for some type of conclusion.
In conclusion, I think it is Poe’s fast paced, suspenseful writing style, that make me enjoy reading his writing.
michael furman
The book I found most interesting was Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. I had seen the book before but hadn't thought to read it because of the new cartoony cover and the fact that I don't really like standard detective stories. What makes the book so interesting, of course, is that it is nothing like a standard detective story and only uses the genre as a guise for a much more complicated kind of exploration. My favorite story within the trilogy has to be "City of Glass". There's something very tragic in a premise that centers on giving a secluded writer's life meaning through a case that comes to no conclusion, essentially forgetting that he was ever involved in it in the first place. To me, "City of Glass" is at its most heartbreaking when the Quinn meets the "real" Paul Auster, the man he thought was the detective he had been impersonating for the sake of the case. Meeting actual Paul Auster (who I guess is alot like real Real Paul Auster) ends up giving him a reflection of who he was, a successful writer with a family, rather than insight into the exciting new life he thought he had been creating for himself. It all goes downhill from there as Quinn's identity simply disappears. The idea of playing with identity and using the identities of others as reference points makes everybody's identity kind of blurry and makes the New York Trilogy a fascinating, confusing read.
ReplyDeleteLeticia Cortes
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ReplyDeleteOf all the works we read this semester, I found Invitation To A Beheading to be the most fascinating. I had always wanted to read Lolita and this experience with Nabokav has certainly pushed me towards procuring a copy for myself. Invitation To A Beheading is an incredibly smart book. I found myself charting out the characters of Rodion, Rodrig and Roman to distinguish such similarly strange names, only to realize that they were written to be interchangeable. I took notes on all the bizarre happenings that faced Cincinnatus in jail and really could not distinguish what was real or fake. Everything was just revealed to be absolutely ridiculous. Reading the novel felt like solving a puzzle. It engaged me intellectually and challenged my conventional approach to reading books. Every time I figured something out, I felt like I won a small victory. Seeing that the characters were purposefully interchanged, and that the absurdities of the novel were intended to be ridiculous really made me feel accomplished about reading the novel. But what I think I appreciated the most about this novel was the engaging discussion that we had about it in the class. Reading about the jail cell turning into a ship on the sea, the jailer waltzing around with Cincinnatus and the family bringing pieces in pieces of the wall from their home did not sound quite so absurd until they were spoken aloud and discussed in class. It was easy for me to get wrapped up in the world of a novel, taking in those “realities” as analogies. Nabokov revealed to me how easily one can fall into a world without art, or a world with forced art, and the discussion in class just further validated that lesson.
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