The Read Around The World Book Club discussion
March 2019 - VENEZUELA
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First half of the book
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Melanie
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Feb 27, 2019 12:34AM
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40 pages in and the writing has swept me off my feet. I was excited/wary of reading a Venezuelan classic, having suffered with some of them at school. Teresa de La Parra has gave me hope for my homeland’s literature. Ma. Eugenia is a young woman so self absorbed and proud who’s brought down to the harsh reality of early twentieth century Venezuelan high society. My favorite parts so far are: the comedic Uncle Pancho (sardonic and grotesque, this is the Venezuelan style) and the philosophical musings of Maria Eugenia.
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I'm on page 64 and it's definitely not my kind of book... I will finish it to find out more about Venezuela , society, history etc. (plus I actually bought it for the bookclub because libraries didn't have it here in Ireland) but I like my books to be more "darker", please somebody tell me the main character will "mature" later in the book/ will have more depth, and I won't have to read this girly language all the time.... It is not one of those books I can't wait to pick up, actually I have to read it along with another book to manage to get through it..
Is she developing more as a character/ woman later on in the book?
Unfortunately I never lived in Caracas, so my knowledge of the area is scant Mel. It feels like a completely different country than the one I left. I really hope María Eugenia matures as the novel progress... She’s not exactly likeable.
I’m at 52% and really struggling. At first I was enjoying it, finding the writing quite funny and sharp, and I felt sure that Maria Eugenia would learn some life lessons along the way. Now it’s feeling less likely that that’s going to happen, and I’m tiring of it. Very little is actually happening and there’s no variation in tone. There’s only so much of her self-absorbed nonsense I can take!
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At Julia's balkonie I began to skim, so I struggled till page 200 or so. It's not for me. And it is enough, so I dnfed it ...
I’m not halfway through yet, so my feelings for María Eugenia aren’t that strong. She acts like the spoiled child she was groomed to be... something about her and the novel reminds me of Hans Castorp (from The Magic Mountain) I am taking my time with the book, reading little bits between others. I am still very much surprised with the quality of the writing and the feminist cry that resounds in every page.
There’s a scene where uncle Pancho is complaining about not being able to ‘spy’ on people in the windows opened to the world in the evening, because apparently our voyeuristic appetite has been satisfied by cinema... I found that little piece of history so delightful! And you can still find people in very small towns in Venezuela (too smalls to have a cinema or any other public distraction) to sit in their front porches or in front of their doors and look out into the street... ‘to see who might go by’ an activity called something like ‘to porch’
The racism in the book is another aspect that has profoundly surprised me. Coming from a mixed-race background in Venezuela I never experienced the blatant verbal hostility but as a form of joke... like my cousins telling me I had a ‘black nose’ or the odd comment among some of the members of my university toward darker skinned classmates. So this was a first.
