lavellan
The core of this book is trying to find answers to the questions ‘who am i’ and “who are we as a nation” yet I’ve found it falling quite flat after reading Veba Geceleri and Beyaz Kale from Pamuk. Those, in my opinion, are better books of his, but even in Veba Geceleri he starts to spiral and repeat himself so much that the plot was lost to me. I understand that this book is about the endless research of identity in a lot of ways, but the deliverence was weak to me. Is the prose good? Yeah. Is the concept good? Sure. Are there anything else special? No. Honestly his male characters are starting to blend in my mind and his representation of woman only as bedmates or housewives bores me.
It was just the character study of Achilles and Patroclus (Achilles mostly). It felt like Briseis had no personality at all.
The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is one of the best short stories ever written. Besides being a chilling story, it's an important part of early American feminist literature for its way to portray the attitude towards to mental and psychical health of women. The story is first-person narrator, and we read the journal of an unnamed woman who just gave birth and suffers from depression. Her husband rents a big, old house for her to spend time and heal, but doesn't allow her to do anything. Not even simply walk around, write, read or think. She just expected to sit in her room, which means she has nothing else to do but stare at the torn, ugly yellow wallpaper that has strange patterns. She seems sane and reasonable at first glance, but the more we read, the more we understand our narrator is unreliable. She mostly talks about how the pattern of the wallpaper always changes, and how she sees one or multiple women behind the pattern trying to break free. The wallpaper symbolizes a lot of things. Like the formless pattern symbolizes the structure of tradition, which somewhat always affects the freedom and rights of women. It keeps changing but traps them. The wallpaper also symbolizes the narrators' mental state, because she's both mentally and psychically trapped. As our narrator becomes obsessed with the idea of breaking the woman behind the wallpaper free, you start to lose your sense of reality and the end only arouses your curiosity more. After all, if you want to read a great story with a mysterious ending, I highly recommend you to read this.