RMST 202 Blog

Hello everyone! Week 10's book is Money to Burn  by Ricardo Piglia, a thriller type book following a group in Argentina who commit an armed robbery, and then flee to Uruguay, where they were eventually discovered in an armed shootout.  I am not sure what to write about other than how disturbed I felt reading this. It was very heavy and there were lots of things to think about and digest. Apart from the obvious heist, steeling things and killing people, there was complete sexualization of a 15 year old girl, numerous use of slurs, graphic descriptions of a child's murder, and I think it was all just too much for me. The way the book nonchalantly explained horrific acts was unsettling. Even writing this I'm having trouble paraphrasing but for example on page 52 describing the way a man was drowned in a lake after he had sex with and chained a foreigner to a post. Another example, is when the 15 year old girl was being described and completely sexualized throughout the book....

 Week 5's reading is Agostino by Alberto Moravia, a very short yet interesting reading. I found this the easiest to read and get into so far, partly because it was only 57 pages and I could read it all in one sitting, but also because the plot and characters were pretty much immediately introduced. Readers are immediately wanting to know why Agostino is thinking the way he is. I did not find a single one of the characters likeable, yet I was still interested in the reading which I would not have expected. All of the younger boys were homophobic and just overall mean, and Saro was not a father figure, instead grooming at least one of the young boys. There is an overwhelming amount of description of characters bodies through the eyes of Agostino. He calls his mother large many times, focuses on Saro's mustache and six fingers on each hand, and goes into extreme detail about the boys bodies, especially when they strip naked to go swimming.  The most interesting part of this readi...