subtextual
i gave up on this book ~2 years ago once my senior fall semester got really busy and i hit the library renewal limit, but now that the winds of literacy are blowing back in my direction i was totally charmed by selin’s thoughts and opinions and observations this time around…..sometimes a book about a freshman reacting to things in her stupid baka life can be so funny and personal. like: the emails, the story about nina, her friendships with svetlana and her roommates, her class materials, her opinions and observations on random people and occurrences in her life. every scene and description of her russian classes were so funny to me because i had the same experience with my chinese classes in college……the stilted dialogue, the really specific characters you follow as you work through the textbook over the semester, the fixation on nailing down semantics, classmates who were really good and others who were helpless. also her wanting to be a writer and feeling miserable and tortured about it was so good it made me ctfu.
that being said, i found the second half to be weaker than the first. the hungary parts didn’t work for me as well as the harvard ones did, i think partly because they took me longer to get through so i was constantly forgetting the rotating cast of hungarian characters, and obviously there was no plot for me to grip on to, so every time i picked it back up i’d always have to rewind a couple of pages to reorient myself, and i got pretty impatient with doing that. and the devolution of her like, youthful hapless meandering to depression and somberness became less fun/gripping to me….i kept thinking BRING BACK SVETLANA!
the ending really floored me though T_T it made me think back to my own college years, in that ostensibly Nothing Happens and Yet Everything Changes....just a perfect encapsulation of that
I had often flipped through a calendar wondering on which of the 366 days (counting February 29) I would die, but it had never once occurred to me to wonder whether I had already met the first person I would have sex with.
I had chosen a ten-point font, both to conserve paper and to discourage people from reading the story, which I didn’t think they would enjoy. Even though I had a deep conviction that I was good at writing, and that in some way I already was a writer, this conviction was completely independent of my having ever written anything, or being able to imagine ever writing anything, that I thought anyone would like to read.
- she’s so real…..
I had the uncanny sensation that this conversation had been pre-figured by the story of Nina: Nina, who had pretended to study the locomotion of reindeer, and whom physics kept pushing east.
- i liked nina’s story sooo much i was sad when it stopped appearing
I felt a wave of nausea to realize that I had propagated these stories just by telling Svetlana what was going on—just because I had wanted to tell some other person the basic events of my own life.
Svetlana said that I thought of myself as a robot who could act only negatively. She said I had cynical ideas about language.
i gave up on this book ~2 years ago once my senior fall semester got really busy and i hit the library renewal limit, but now that the winds of literacy are blowing back in my direction i was totally charmed by selin’s thoughts and opinions and observations this time around…..sometimes a book about a freshman reacting to things in her stupid baka life can be so funny and personal. like: the emails, the story about nina, her friendships with svetlana and her roommates, her class materials, her opinions and observations on random people and occurrences in her life. every scene and description of her russian classes were so funny to me because i had the same experience with my chinese classes in college……the stilted dialogue, the really specific characters you follow as you work through the textbook over the semester, the fixation on nailing down semantics, classmates who were really good and others who were helpless. also her wanting to be a writer and feeling miserable and tortured about it was so good it made me ctfu.
that being said, i found the second half to be weaker than the first. the hungary parts didn’t work for me as well as the harvard ones did, i think partly because they took me longer to get through so i was constantly forgetting the rotating cast of hungarian characters, and obviously there was no plot for me to grip on to, so every time i picked it back up i’d always have to rewind a couple of pages to reorient myself, and i got pretty impatient with doing that. and the devolution of her like, youthful hapless meandering to depression and somberness became less fun/gripping to me….i kept thinking BRING BACK SVETLANA!
the ending really floored me though T_T it made me think back to my own college years, in that ostensibly Nothing Happens and Yet Everything Changes....just a perfect encapsulation of that
I had often flipped through a calendar wondering on which of the 366 days (counting February 29) I would die, but it had never once occurred to me to wonder whether I had already met the first person I would have sex with.
I had chosen a ten-point font, both to conserve paper and to discourage people from reading the story, which I didn’t think they would enjoy. Even though I had a deep conviction that I was good at writing, and that in some way I already was a writer, this conviction was completely independent of my having ever written anything, or being able to imagine ever writing anything, that I thought anyone would like to read.
- she’s so real…..
I had the uncanny sensation that this conversation had been pre-figured by the story of Nina: Nina, who had pretended to study the locomotion of reindeer, and whom physics kept pushing east.
- i liked nina’s story sooo much i was sad when it stopped appearing
I felt a wave of nausea to realize that I had propagated these stories just by telling Svetlana what was going on—just because I had wanted to tell some other person the basic events of my own life.
Svetlana said that I thought of myself as a robot who could act only negatively. She said I had cynical ideas about language.