Category: English

At the restaurant

.Reading time 1 minute.

She was sitting on the table next to mine. Husband and kids were there as well. It was 12pm. I had just sit and ordered coffee. They started browsing through the menus and decided to ask each for an entrance, plate, dessert. A glace of wine. ‘Yes, please’, she said. The kids would have chicken nuggets and ice cream, chocolate, vanilla, strawberry. The waiter came. The husband said: ‘For me a red wine, for her a soft drink’. A look at her, her gaze on me, pale, speechless, and aggression. Wife is also a child. Infantilization, unsuitable to make basic decisions, de dominant, the leader, the strong male has to be shown in the little niceties. It is what’s respectable these days. The waiter angrily, reproachingly, said: ‘only water for you then’. She said nothing, not there, not after, silence, resignation. For the sake of the family, that is what’s called these days. A look at her ‘take your wine’, I wanted to say, her pale face ‘I don’t have the strength’. ‘Stop him on his game’, that’s so easy to say’. It takes time to learn.

Winter List

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

MyStories

I Ask for Peace

.Reading time 1 minute.

Once upon a time,

there was an agreement,

that in case of conflict,

the civilian population, will be protected,

there would be no discrimination,

on bases of identity, race, nationality,

no thinking of political costs.

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Great Expectations —By Charles Dickens

.Reading time 4 minutes.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

Book Review

“I had a Dickens childhood”, heard once. Only reading the life or Pip, or at least his beginnings, one becomes aware of what that means. Despite the reactions a reader must feel learning about the circumstances in which he lived and the bad luck that was always on his side, making things worse, Pip seemed not to notice. Not at the beginning.

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The Years —By Annie Ernaux

.Reading time 7 minutes.

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Book Review

 

As per her signature style, The Years is a very intimate account of facts. Some reviewers argue this is a portrait, implying a description of one’s self, that could easily fall into an autobiography. If this book is indeed a portrait, it reflects not only the side of Ernaux personality, but also the personality and moods of an entire country, France. As an adopted French, I should have read this book in its original language. I found the translation a bit dry, especially in relation not to the narrative itself, but to the consequences of that narrative into the reader’s emotions. Ernaux knows her country and her culture very well. This is why in The Years she did not speak by the first person of singular, but by the first person of plural. It is a narrative based on a political and a social perception that belongs to an entire country, in a specific period of time that fortunately (or unfortunately) extend to these times. 

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Ocean Thoughts

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Look at them,

And all the energy they have,

They’re like us, baby, exactly like us,

Only us are bigger, more powerful,

Only not wiser, what we cannot see,

We think it cannot be.

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Blue Nights — By Joan Didion

.Reading time 6 minutes.

Book Review

‘You notice as it first as April ends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warming —in fact not at all a warming— yet suddenly summer ends near, a possibility, even a promise’. When those blue nights are finished is not anymore a warming but a warning of darkness, of solitude, of silence. This is how Joan Didion explains the title of her book, it is an opening to a heart wrenching story. The story of a mother who sees her own child die, slowly, painfully, in an ICU for twenty months. This is a story in which Didion also analyses carefully and to the detail whether her daughter showed signs of dying, emotionally dying, way before, and her own involvement as a mother in such a cruel destiny.

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Look Up

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Nexus —By Henry Miller

.Reading time 4 minutes.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

Book Review

‘There isn’t a thing in the world worth fighting for except peace of mind’. All his books are autobiographical and interconnected between them, from ‘Tropic of Cancer’ and ‘Tropic of Capricorn’, to ‘Plexus’, ‘Sexus’ and lastly ‘Nexus’. All have the same main character, the same author, Henry Miller and his exhaustive struggle to become a known writer, despite the innumerable difficulties that seem to attack him from every angle. A childhood with a toxic mother, followed by a total incapacity to overcome poverty and finishing with a wife that possesses so many prisms and fake stories to every question that not even the same Miller can decipher.

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Winter Wine

.Reading time 1 minute.

I love autumn terracotta colours. Yet, when winter approaches it comes by the hand of a cold whitish whisper. Both like to settle softly around the whole island. I resent them,  I resist them as much as I can.

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