Reviews for Where Europe Begins

The average rating for Where Europe Begins based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-06-29 00:00:00 Fernando Smith Most of the words that came out of my mouth had nothing to do with how I felt. But at the same time I realized that my native tongue didn't have words for how I felt either. It's just that this never occurred to me until I'd begun to live in a foreign language. There are some works where I must be content with the single fish I have managed to catch. The flopping thing might not make much sense, or be very pretty, or in general be anything other than weird in a way I can't wrap my head around. I'd prefer being disturbed to this state of the uneasily vague, for disturbance implies something to disturb and eventually discover through the most sinister of echolocation. Instead, I have a fish, and as I have no interest in becoming fluent in both Japanese and German, the fish will suffice. As in other museums as well, a power relationship is illustrated here: that which is represented is always something that has been destroyed. The word not being said that I may have found out quicker had I read the original Japanese/German (each story is in one or the other but whether I want to discover which is in what has not been answered with the affirmative) is reality. Metonymy's a popular concept these days but it is not often that the entire mediating principle is sidestepped completely, leaving the interaction between letter of story of culture of world of living and the body a direct impact rather than a muffled rationality. You can't talk your way out of this one. "How did you get such an Asian face?" "What are you talking about, Mother? I am Asian." "That's not what I meant. You've started to have one of those faces like Japanese people in American movies." Before I dropped a class due to the professor changing their grading principle every time we met, we were looking at ads, murals, public property pictures built upon principles of patriarchal dominance where the theme song of a woman not getting into the higher echelons of art unless naked and splayed in ink and oil has changed very little in the intervening centuries. We are walking portraits of what others have continually registered as carefully constructed otherwise; I don't know about your language, but I'm having enough trouble with picking apart my androcentric context with my androcentric English without even thinking about taking on another. Apparently it was standard practice to retouch the photo of a suicide to make her look unattractive. There's blood and sex and death and giant tongues and drowning monks and maybe lesbians? It's less of a sexual attraction and more the voice of the gods, or however we each individually process our integrated In the beginning was the Word. The human body, too, contains many booths in which translation are made. I suspect that these are all translations for which no original exists. There are people, though, who assume that everyone is given an original text at birth. They call the place in which these texts are stored a soul. I could continue my thought and take this as a references to my indoctrinated Catholicism, or I could take a second to step outside the process. Both at the same time and then some, though. That's the translation. Most readers don't like to read short texts because they have so little time. They would rather go for a walk in a long novel and not have to change. The short texts would go for a walk inside their bodies, which they would find exhausting.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-01-17 00:00:00 Robert Partridge This rating is partly my fault, and I fully acknowledge this. I don't know how I managed it, but for the first time in my life, I read a book wrong. I thought it was a novel, and it's actually a short story collection. Just so you know, the synopsis on the back of my edition is not the one on Goodreads and therefore doesn't explicity state that it is a short story collection. So I'm not THAT dumb. But gosh, I felt like it when I opened my mouth to discuss in that seminar. >.> Anyway, after realising my mistake and revisiting the book enlightened on its contents, I did enjoy the short stories. Some of them were a bit too magical realist for me, a bit too whimsical, and lost me somewhere along the way. But a lot of them blew my mind a little bit. Because they were amazing, and the writing style perfectly suited the stories too. The themes I really appreciated reading about in the collection were some of the ideas about the surreal, the themes to do with language and translation, of the body and movement, of feminism and of displacement. I think they were handled well and expertly woven into the stories. As always, with a short story collection, this one was a mixed bag. Some ups, some downs. But a good collection. Read for university.