January 24, 2024 • 40 mins
Hello everyone, and welcome to Books Undone. I'm your host, Livia J. Elliot, and today I have something new four you--the first Guests Talk of the podcast! In this series, I'll invite authors, reviewers, BookTubers and Bookstagrammers to join me on deep-dives of different books and stories, from short-fiction (like today!) to full novels.
Today, alongside Varsha (from Reading by the Rainy Mountain), José (from José's Amazing Worlds), and Susana Imáginario (author of Timelessness series, and booktuber at Den of the Wyrd), I'm discussion HOUSE TAKEN OVER by Julio Cortazar.
Full disclosure: there are spoilers in this podcast, but more importantly, what you will hear is our subjective opinion of it. You are allowed and entitled to disagree and differ.
Find my Guests:
- Varsha: @RainyMntnReads and https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBUveC-bWULjrJ9KH3SmqNQ
- Jose: in English, https://www.youtube.com/@JosesAmazingWorlds in Spanish, https://www.youtube.com/@LaBibliotecadeJose
- Susana: @Chronodendron and https://www.youtube.com/@denofthewyrd
Where else can you find me?
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/liviajelliot
- Threads: https://www.threads.net/@liviajelliot
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/liviajelliot/
- Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/134341414-livia-jean-elliot
- Website: https://liviajelliot.com/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hello everyone and welcome to Books Undone.
(00:11):
I'm your host, Livia J. Eliot, and today I have something new for you, the first guest
talk of the podcast.
In this series, I will invite authors, reviewers, booktubers and bookstores to join me on deep
types of different books and stories from short fiction like today to full novels.
So without further ado, I will let my guests introduce ourselves.
(00:34):
Varsha from Reading by the Rainy Mountain.
Hi, my name is Varsha.
I have a YouTube channel called Reading by the Rainy Mountain.
It's called that because my name Varsha means rain in a lot of Indian languages.
I love to talk about books on the channel and do a lot of book discussions.
Jose from Amazing Worlds.
Hi, I'm Jose.
(00:55):
I run the small Jose's Amazing Worlds YouTube channel and my name is no half as exciting
as Varsha's, but I'm delighted to be here.
Thank you.
And Susana Imaginario, author of Weird Gods and Booktubers.
Hello, my name is Susana Imaginario.
I write mythological slipstream and I run a YouTube channel called Den of the Weird.
(01:17):
Thank you all for joining me.
We are discussing House Taken Over by Julio Cortaza.
Now, before starting, let me do the usual disclaimers.
First, there are spoilers in this podcast, so please be aware of it.
Second, as usual, what you will hear is our subjective interpretation of this short story.
So you are allowed and entitled to disagree and defer.
(01:39):
Third, House Taken Over has a political interpretation within Argentina, but we will not dive into it.
This short story is so allegorical it can be read in multiple ways, and that's what you will find here.
As a bit of a trivia before starting, Julio Cortazar was an Argentine writer and the short story,
House Taken Over, was originally published in 1946 in a literary magazine edited by Jorge Luis Borges,
(02:06):
who is considered one of the fundamental authors of slipstream literature.
Putting a genre to House Taken Over has proven difficult over the years, and many reviewers, podcasters and literature students
classify it from fantasy to psychological fiction and even magical realism.
With that said, let me ask you the first question.
(02:27):
What do you think of the siblings of Session with cleaning up the house?
Their entire routine seems to be adjusted around cleaning the house.
I found that quite bizarre, but then towards the end, it says something about the environment that it gathers a lot of dust.
(02:48):
I mean, I've been in Argentina, I don't know, so I figured that there's a lot of dust.
Where I come from, beyond art, we have to dust constantly because it's by the sea and it's quite dry and there's always dust.
You clean the next day there's dust and my grandmother, my great-aunt, they spent a lot of time dusting.
(03:09):
So I figured it was a similar thing.
Everything goes around it, you know, and they clean every day.
Like the whole routine is, I start in the morning, clean during the whole morning, cook, then leave after that.
And if they are cleaning so much, where the dust comes from, that's a question.
They did have a statement about, which I'll say I didn't fully understand,
(03:33):
that the city is clean, but the dust comes from its people.
I did wonder what that meant.
I thought that was a curious way to phrase it.
Yeah, it felt like they're fighting entropy in a way, but how is the entropy happening?
And they had a very fixed routine for their lives.
(03:56):
They weren't even working jobs apparently.
They were knitting and then indulging, indulging if that's the right word to use here.
I don't know that it is in their hobbies.
And meanwhile, the house is falling apart around them and they have to clean every day.
Honestly, I didn't think too much of the fact that they clean because it opens with the fact that the house is spacious
(04:19):
and that it takes a lot of time to clean.
The way it was described that it could take eight people, eight people could live in it and not run into each other at all.
I almost thought they go through one room a day or something like that.
And then they finish and then they start over.
It felt almost like that might be it.
(04:40):
I think that's the explanation I subconsciously gave myself or why they spent so long cleaning every day.
But then later it became clear that they cleaned their entire area.
Maybe we'll talk about that when we get to that bit, but it was interesting.
Yeah, I have no idea because not knowing what the intention of the story was, the interpretation is obviously subjective.
(05:01):
I don't know if it simply was an attempt by Cortata to create a sense of unease because as you read the story,
there are different levels of weird going on.
Like everything is weird.
The fact that our brother and sister are living together in their forties or whatever it is, that's weird.
The fact that they don't leave the house, it's weird.
(05:23):
Then you've got these things taken over the house.
What is that?
That's weird.
And in the end, they don't escape.
They simply just lock the house and leave the house with it and sell it.
They just leave everything.
It's weird or gets weird and weirder and you leave the story with a sense of unease.
Not having been told anything and it's very open to interpretation.
(05:43):
But I don't know what the intent was simply to create unease and leave it as a psychological thriller.
Or really, there is a much deeper, metaphorical meaning behind it.
That's quite interesting, especially because the noises are such an important element, as you said.
And first, I read the story many years ago.
(06:04):
I didn't catch the detail, but only real.
I realized that both characters,
they actually know what the noises are.
The brother actually goes in and says,
I had to shut the door to the passage.
They have taken over the back part and she answers, you're sure?
And Idri does if they know.
They know what the noises are, kind of like they were expecting it to come in,
(06:27):
but they don't do anything except looking out in half of the house.
So what do you think the noises are?
Could be a variety of things.
Like Jose said, there are some weird and bizarre interpretations of it.
And you're right, I did notice that it said,
they acted like this was something they encountered before.
(06:50):
Maybe they've already taken over parts of the house.
It's not like this is a brand new invasion.
Whoever, whatever the noises are,
it seems like they already exist in the house.
And their presence is expanding.
Yeah, it could be ghosts, for instance,
(07:11):
or it could be, I don't know,
some abusive people that they don't want to fight against.
Or, you know, we said we don't want to get political side
without discussing specifically Argentina's political situation.
What it felt most to me like was an invasion into a country or a region.
(07:32):
And how people have to fight against that
and fight a new regime or fight an army that might be invading
and become refugees or whatever.
That's the metaphor that I thought might best resemble this.
I actually had a different dream on the noises,
especially because it said that they have the house divided in half
(07:55):
with this big oak door.
And in that back part,
they only have things from their parents.
Which are long deceased, kind of like the noises coming from the back to the front.
And I always read them as those things of our past
that we just better let buried, you know, and away from it.
And suddenly they creep over and they come in closer
(08:19):
because we have to deal with them.
So, and they don't, the siblings don't deal with them.
So that's why they rather run away from the past.
So the noises would be in that case,
trauma from the past oppression.
And they are just running away from it rather than dealing with it.
The dust in that case could be just how that trauma or whatever
(08:40):
affects your daily life.
And it stains everything because it comes from its undoubted ways.
That does sound like a great interpretation too.
Almost like you're, you know, sometimes when you experience trauma,
you do things like I know some people who clean a lot
because they are dealing with depression
or something.
(09:00):
So that, I love that interpretation actually.
That sounds really cool.
I interpreted more, I don't usually jump to the supernatural.
And as an aversion that there is an element of almost disgust
rather than fear.
And I guess that ties in with the cleaning.
They want the house to be clean.
(09:22):
But towards the end when Irene lost her yard
and goes under the door and she loved knitting,
her life was all about knitting.
And when she sees that it goes, that it's on the other side of the door,
she just drops it without another look, without a second thought, without regretting it.
And it kind of read like a disgust reaction to it.
(09:46):
Now my knitting is contaminated, it's taken over by whatever is on that side.
And that was such a radical reaction.
So I think, yeah, there was an element of visceral disgust,
aversion to whatever was on the other side, rather than fear.
In the same scene, after she loses the yarn,
Brother says that he left, I think, 10,000 pesos on the other side.
(10:12):
And by that time, so this is said post World War II,
that's a lot of money.
And he just leaves it there and doesn't care about it.
And he's still, as you say, Susana, everything that is on the other side is contaminated.
It's been this thing when you were speaking about my own interpretation of if this is trauma,
many times survivors will want nothing to do with things,
(10:34):
with those ships that were not really in the boat,
were somehow part of the past, like even if they are close or a house or a city,
they won't want to come back.
It brings me to another scene in which after closing the oak door,
they start looking for things.
So they left it on the other side of the house, but they still ask each other,
it's not here and they are described as not having been so somber about losing that
(11:00):
on the other side of the house, but they never attempt to go back and retrieve it.
In that matter of that issue, there's that thing of acceptance,
they're not doing anything to stop whatever is happening,
or they've taken over whatever part of the house and, all right, okay.
And even at the beginning of the story,
they're looking for granted that the house is going to get bought or sold
and they're going to build a block of flats instead,
(11:22):
like there's just some inevitability that they're not even fighting against.
And then even the way the story ends, which goes against the initial premise
that the house was going to get sold, they simply lock it and walk away.
I don't know if allowing is the right word,
but they're just possibly accepting everything that is happening
and it's easier to walk away than to base whatever this is,
(11:45):
spirits or, I don't know, aliens or whatever it is that is taken over the house.
That's probably another metaphor, isn't it?
Everything, the locking, the walking away.
And it's a fairly glum, it's a fairly sort of nihilistic,
I don't know if it's nihilistic, but it's a fairly sad state of affairs
that it's just easier to walk away from your issues, whatever they may be,
(12:07):
than to face them and just get pushed out of your life.
At the start of the book, as you said, Jose, they are warning the fact
that the house will be eventually sold for the bricks.
And at the end, he just throws a case and says,
like, poor Vast are the one that actually takes the house and the house is taken over.
And it's like a complete opposite reaction.
(12:28):
At the start, they wanted to give the house and at the end, they are just like,
take it, I'm sorry for the soul that actually gets it.
Yeah, it felt like they were protecting other people from the house by locking it.
I didn't notice I was looking at it again now and we were talking about it.
That ending was really interesting.
It's not just their demons, it might affect others too.
(12:52):
And to your point, Jose, I think they also did not do anything to prevent it.
I didn't get the impression that they know this is something that happens.
So they didn't lock off or prevent anything from taking over whatever it was.
It felt like it had a power of its own and couldn't do anything to prevent it
or they didn't seem to try.
(13:13):
I don't know if they've given up now or if they never did try.
What you said, Varsha, that they didn't do anything to prevent it
and made me think of generations.
Like sometimes we tend to blame boomers for a lot of things that happened after.
And they had a specific attitude and that actually carried over.
(13:38):
And if you go through every generation, each of us actually had an attitude
and that will carry over as well.
So the noises could also be the consequences of their parents' generations
and what they feel coming in at the house is the current state of the art.
Now, mentioning that, do you think the house is a character?
(14:00):
Because it wasn't Cortotta, one of the biggest translators of El Garólam Poe
into the Spanish language. I think he did a lot of work there.
And there is echoes of the fall of the house of Ushedada,
we had the Netflix show and all the stuff.
And it's also reflected in H.P. Loughrapp's work,
this whole thing about having some family curse that is unscapable,
(14:24):
some sort of inherited curse that you cannot escape.
And I think you can see that in Poe's works, you can see that in Loughrapp's work.
And maybe here there's echoes of that, that there is something that we carry from our ancestors
that we can't escape or fight against.
And maybe there's a similarity there.
It felt to me like the house represented a way of life that's being protected.
(14:47):
I mean, it's both explicit in what they're doing day to day,
but also what we talked about at the very beginning where they spend so much time cleaning the house
and the major consequence of a part of the house being taken over is that they have less to clean.
So it feels like something that they're protecting and watching over,
whatever it is that's being represented, possibly a way of life or a country, I don't know,
(15:13):
but something that they're struggling to keep functioning, I suppose.
On the main interpretation for what I know, it's kind of like protecting a way of life
or something from a change as well.
But in that case, it doesn't really make sense because they are cleaning,
but not doing anything.
There is that passiveness of them towards the noises.
(15:37):
They're not doing anything, but they are cleaning in a way that is really not useful
because it just keeps accumulating.
Keeping status quo, I guess, so that makes a lot of sense.
It's not like they are improving anything.
They're just fighting to keep it as it is, but maybe they're not being very sensible about it.
(15:58):
What do you think of that meaning a stagnation?
That unless that we change, everything is meant to be subjected to a sudden change,
the noises coming in and taking over everything.
People tend to be reluctant to change.
The house, I think, like Pasha said, it represents the status quo rather than a character.
(16:19):
It's their environment.
They want to keep it as they like it.
That's why they were always cleaning.
It's almost a compulsion.
In a sense, it reads like they don't know anything else.
That's what they were used to do.
That's what they keep doing and they kept doing until they couldn't do it anymore.
(16:41):
There is a lot of that, especially when you get older.
You are very reluctant to change, to adapt, to let even change in.
Everything is noise.
I was trying to figure out clues for their ages.
I guess they are in like 40s, 50s.
There's a mention that somewhere that they reached their 40s.
They are not that old, but I kind of get that feeling that they just really want things to be as they are.
(17:09):
The house is their environment, is their space.
Their reason for living almost is to keep it that way.
That's where they feel safe and comfortable.
A bit earlier in the story, before we are told they are about 40s,
they say that their brother lost his fiancé and that the lady actually rejected two or three.
(17:33):
They never married, they lost their parents and they continue on that state, completely reluctant to change.
The narrator, the brother, he says that he doesn't know why Irene, the sister, actually let go of the voice around her.
It may be because of the same, because of that reluctant to change that Susana was mentioning.
(17:54):
There's one bit here that just caught my eye when they were talking about that they were talking about their sleep.
Whenever Irene talked in the sleep, I woke up immediately.
But then they say that they avoid thinking.
It says, whenever Irene talked in her sleep, I woke up immediately and stayed awake.
I never could get used to this voice from a statue or a parrot, a voice that came out of the dreams, not from a throat.
(18:18):
Irene said that in my sleep, I flailed about enormously and shook the blankets off.
That caught my eye too, because statue or parrot?
I know. It's like, this is a bad translation. I'm missing something here.
But it could be like a figure of speech or sometimes those things get lost in translation.
What you say about the noises and that part on the nights, they are always quiet and calm during the day.
(18:45):
So whatever hunts them, hunts them at night.
That generally happens to people. You are calm the entire day and suddenly you go to sleep and anxiety drops on you.
It feels as if there is some emotional bagage that the siblings have that may be undone with.
(19:06):
I think I misread the bit about noises when I was first reading the story.
It says, we seldom allowed ourselves silence there, but when we went back to our room, sort of our living room, then the house grew quiet.
So as long as they are in the kitchen, there is a lot of household noises and background noises and I guess Irene occasionally sings.
So it's constantly, there is constantly some noise when they are not in their own rooms.
(19:31):
And then when they go to their bedrooms, then it gets super quiet and that's when they hear everything, including Irene sounding like a parrot apparently.
But the first time I read it, I read it as if they were making noise to scare the things away.
But what you said makes more sense that they try for silence, but while they're in the kitchen, they can't help it even.
(19:55):
They can't help but make noise so they allow themselves the noise.
It just so to me, they all choose kind of mindless tasks.
They are all trying not to think about the problem.
Cleaning is an automatic mindless task. Neating when you are pretty good at it.
I am a neater and I often need when I'm stressed, when I'm trying to figure something out.
(20:18):
It helps me, you know, just the repetition, the sounds to clear my mind and focus on other things.
He, I think he reads and he collects stamps, you know, again, things that can be very immersive, but makes it very easy to shut everything else out.
Their days are spent trying to distract themselves from thinking or facing or doing anything outside their little room, their comfort zone, physically and mentally.
(20:46):
It does go on and on about needing and I permitted just a little neat peek in here.
I don't think you researched needing very well, because one bit annoyed me because he was saying that when she didn't like something,
she would need it again. And then just a few paragraphs after he was saying, well, at least I can read the book more than once.
(21:09):
She can't need the same thing more than twice. Well, you can.
I won't recommend it straight away. You have to wash the yarn and make sure it's straight again, but you can.
You can't need the same thing.
I really like the image of the ball jumping in the basket and she was like, what the heck?
And then I realized that could happen. I've never knit myself, but that's such a cute image inserted into everything else in the story.
(21:35):
Yeah. And I think that the point of needing, as Susana said, that they focus on such mindless things and it reinforces that topic of avoidance that we were mentioning before.
Like they have this big thing going on, those noises that they know about, they lost half of the house and they are still meeting.
(21:57):
The guy just finds this hobby of finding the stamps and organizing them.
And it's like they couldn't find anything more pedestrian to focus their attention on, rather than dealing with the stuff of the noises, they just do anything else.
Yeah, I guess it's the two possibilities that I guess we're sort of wrestling with now, or at least in my mind is one that they are knitting to block out what's going on, which I guess the second one is very similar in that they're doing anything they can to keep normalcy.
(22:34):
And this for some reason is their normal, these tasks, their daily routine, whatever it looks like is their normal.
And no matter what's happening in the outside world, they're fighting to keep what they do until they absolutely have to stop.
Very at the start of the story, he mentions that they are in, I think, 1939 in the story.
(23:00):
And the narrator says something like we can't get anything else during this time and that's a post war era, right, where imports were blocked.
And he cares so little about the world, it reinforces what you were saying, Versa that the only thing that matters is within the house, the rest of the world, the scarcity, the world, it really doesn't matter to them.
(23:23):
Or they're trying to keep it so that it doesn't matter whatever they do, if they can feel like they're able to keep up this semblance of normality, this thing from shattering and falling apart, then they can still pretend that everything is okay.
And they have that luxury, it doesn't go into it, but they were fell off financially.
(23:45):
So they had no incentive to change, to go out, to go work. You know, they're just very passive, they have their income, they have their house and that was fine.
And then when it stopped being fine, they just, they moved on.
But you kind of got the impression that they had more than just the house, they weren't just suddenly homeless.
(24:06):
Because again, there was no panic, there was a bit of sadness, but there was no panic about being suddenly homeless, they made that choice.
Ooh, that made me think of a different thing. This might be related only obliquely, I think.
But is it perhaps commentary or could it be interpreted as the people who have the means to bring about change are choosing to stay passive and not do anything about it.
(24:34):
And they're just happy to continue in their realities and not bother with things that could be influenced or changed for better, we think.
Yeah, again, it goes back to how people are very reluctant to change.
And if the change doesn't affect you directly, as seen to a degree where you know, you're out of food and out of shelter or your children are not suffering it.
(25:01):
It's very easy to let go. That's how things escalate. And before you know it, there's a lot breaking out or some big changes.
Because it is those who have the means often stay silent because it is more convenient, it's more convenient to just shut the world, just ignore.
Yeah, and it's also the fact that some societal change will have a different impact in the different layers of society.
(25:29):
So if these characters are presented as being middle class or even better, because they really have no concerns about money, it's unlikely that they will do anything under any situation.
Even when they leave their house, they don't care.
As Susana said, it doesn't seem that they will face any scarcity or anything. They just don't care. They are fine. Doesn't matter what happens to the rest of them.
(25:54):
And they have that token pity about whoever takes on the house after.
Yeah, just a mild concern. That's it.
I just wanted to say, I don't know, just have this thought and moving tangentially here, so sorry.
But I was just thinking about conversation we were having last night and how the story could stay relevant to today.
And whether these changes that we can scape, one of my pet hates is social media or artificial intelligence and whether these things taken over, that we can scape that is here to stay is social media or artificial intelligence.
(26:29):
And the testament of the quality of a piece of writing or a piece of art is its relevance over time. And I think you could reinterpret the story in that context of today and it still works.
And actually, I do believe that artificial intelligence is here to stay. I don't know eventually how it would, you know, what was its final version.
(26:55):
But yeah, all we can do about it is lock the door and walk away because this thing is coming whether we like it or not.
Even the title, I went and checked the original title, but house taken over. It's not house invaded. It's not house destroyed.
It's not house lost or house burned or, you know, it's taken over. It's a very passive thing.
(27:18):
You know, it's something that it's almost like, oh, it was involved. In my mind, I have this image of is that the house was just involved by this big blob of something.
It was just absorbed into something. They can open it. But again, very passive, very slow, and it fits the narrative.
And yeah, it could be it adapts to anything, AI, any changes in society, religious, political, ideological. You always start by, you know, oh, please, let it stop, let it go away.
(27:51):
You know, it's just a phase, you know, people will forget. And then when that doesn't happen, you're still like, okay, I personally am not going to get involved.
I'm just going to stay in my world if you have that option. And it literally needs to be inside your house, not being a door for you to do something.
Most people, I love that. So as a psychological piece, it's very good in that regard, because it doesn't need to be political. It's just human psychology.
(28:22):
And another event that it could apply, it's the pandemic. For example, how some people wanted to pretend that nothing was going to change, that it was fine, that it was just go away, and then everything changed.
It's kind of like a warning that it doesn't matter what you do, the change is going to take over. It's going to change. You'd rather get your things in place and adapt or just leave.
(28:49):
Oh, I like that. So I've been thinking about the brother and sister as victims. But I think what you just said, Olivia, switches it up to not exactly but for lack of a better word, because I can't think of one.
Puppet raters, right? Like if there's positive change and there's people fighting against it, eventually it might take over and you have to stop, you have to either leave or accept, I guess. I mean, I was only thinking about them.
(29:19):
That might be overstating it a bit. But I was only thinking of them as victims of something bad happening to them. But it could also be that there are people refusing change, positive change, perhaps.
But that's inevitable in cases that that's inevitable. They don't really have a choice.
I don't think it's positive. I mean, they are really much to almost a debilitating degree. They are just minding their own business.
(29:47):
I know that there's nothing to indicate that the change is good. Quite the contrary. It's taking over. It's making noise. It's moving things around. Then ask their permission. Then introduce themselves or whatever it they are.
I see it as something very invasive to some degree. I still see them as victims, as misguided or I don't understand why they don't fight back, why they don't do anything about it. But yeah, they just seem people that are happy minding their own business.
(30:20):
And that's the same. Most change can be intrusive. You just have to accept. It doesn't matter if we think AI is a good idea or not. It's here to say, let's stay away from some of the more invasive ideologies that rely on others to be enforced.
Which I think is just no change should never be imposed, especially to those who are not doing any harm.
(30:46):
When you were discussing, I thought that change has to be inclusive. So it's not only that they are resisting the change, but the noises are not doing anything to bring them on alongside that change.
And it made me think of a personal experience. I remember when I was 12, 15, I remember my grandparents struggling with technology. They couldn't get into Facebook. It was that age, like early 2000s.
(31:14):
And they couldn't get into tech. And nobody was teaching them. And the argument was that they will always tell, teach me, I don't know how to do it. It's too hard.
When you were discussing, it made me think of the same thing. Some changes can be too difficult for people who are too ingrained on a particular way of being.
The change is going to take over because society changes. But unless we make it inclusive, they are just going to get taken over and expelled out of it, rather than kept within the house.
(31:48):
I agree that in the story that there are no indications that the change is positive in any way. What I meant was that it could be a positive change that's being interpreted by the brother and sister as being intrusive.
And that comes back to what you were saying about the few, I guess, that and it shouldn't be that way, perhaps, that someone's forced to lose their way of living because they're not becoming one with the crowd or refusing to fight a battle a certain way or so on.
(32:19):
But yeah, I meant it as a metaphor that the story could just as easily work the other way. I was thinking negative change, positive influence. It could just as easily be the other way round and be exactly interpreted the same way by the others, maybe for a larger or people who are not the brother and sister.
It's a positive change. And that it's good for society as a whole, I suppose it depends what it is and how it's interpreted.
(32:47):
Yeah, but think if we take the interpretation of inevitable change, I think through history you can see that sometimes change is inevitable. And ideally, yes, it should be inclusive, but in practice, it's not.
I don't know, you could relate it to back in the 80s in the UK when Margaret Thatcher moved the country from a predominantly industrial, sort of steel manufacturer coal mining to a more services society, you had all the miners strikes you had, you know, but it's a difficult change because you have to move from one state to another and some people are going to be left behind.
(33:23):
And those, you know, manual workers lost their jobs and it was very traumatic. But then ideally as a society, you move on to a better state. You talk about technology, you know, all people are sort of inevitably going to be left behind.
I don't know any sort of change when you move home or, you know, you marry or you have kids or whatever. There are some inevitable changes that are difficult to deal with for certain groups.
(33:48):
And I think, you know, like Libya, yes, it should be inclusive, but sometimes it's just not. The only thing I would say about the stories, and Susana alluded to before, is the lack of fighting, is the lack of, you know, you can adapt or die, isn't it?
And I think maybe I would like to see a bit more adaptation from the two characters rather than just, like you said, possibly needing or collecting stamps. It seems like a very sort of passive investment of your time.
(34:19):
What we were discussing so far, it felt as if we were all implicitly concerned that the change was imposed. And sometimes it just happens, as Jose said. It's not inclusive because it just happens.
Yeah, I don't think sometimes change happens with unexpected consequence. Probably whenever the first internet came about, they did not foresee what would come out of it, isn't it?
(34:45):
So sometimes, inadvertently, you set off emotion, a chain of events that culminates into something totally unexpected. And therefore change, you know, sometimes it's organic and spontaneous and inevitable.
Yeah, and I guess that goes back to what we were talking about earlier about being passive and not taking any action to prevent or change what's going on, even with the cleaning like we talked about, they aren't doing anything differently.
(35:14):
They're happy to let the dust accumulate and go dusted for two hours every day.
Now, in a completely different tangent, because I was looking at things, do you think or am I just reading too much into things that there's some incestual suggestions here?
This particular line stroke me.
I mean, voice concept that the quiet simple marriage of sister and brother was the indispensable and of ends to align established in this house by our grandparents. So very family oriented and then lower couple paragraphs down.
(35:50):
And the house I want to talk about the house and Irene, I'm not important. And it goes on and how much he loves to watch her knitting and how she turned out to suitors with no particular reason. And, you know, it's kind of protected over sister which is normal, but it does seem to go beyond that.
It's almost like, you know, the faithful dog, you know, always at her side and helping and amazed by her knitting and the balls rolling over. And, you know, there's something here besides the house, something why they chose this life and they chose to be in a house with each other.
(36:33):
And this this way some unspoken agreement, because it does, it does come up a couple of times and such a short story or something to be mentioned more than once there's always a purpose.
And it is a bit critical of her but always in an endearing sort of way. So I wonder if there's if there's something there.
(36:55):
I think that's part of what I mentioned at the beginning about the levels of weird of the story that you've got going on. And I think that that's one level of you know why this brother and sister is a weird relationship.
Maybe there is something there about what you mentioned, maybe, maybe, you know, I think if one of the intents of the story was to make the reader uncomfortable, that would certainly go a long ways to achieving that alongside everything else that is going on.
(37:22):
I had a more allegorical interpretation of that. If we go back to that idea of brother and sister being a group on society, in many cases specific classes are called incestors, not literally, but because they only blend with themselves, right?
It's the same people or the same circles all over again. There is no inclusion of somebody different and they just stay within the known people and the team. And we have seen that happening on classes or on industries.
(37:53):
Sometimes you have a very niche industry and the same professionals move over all the different companies, you know, and it gave me one, Susana was reading that I thought like, perhaps he was not actually writing that literally,
but just implying like this tightly knit group that doesn't accept anybody from outside, that doesn't want change, that it's not going to spread, that it's not going to mingle.
(38:17):
They had a very serene existence. Their hands like silver sea urchins, needles flashing and one or two nicking facets on the floor, the balls of your jumping about. It was lovely.
Imagine this afternoon in a very peaceful just in the post war and everything outside at the house is in a completely different state.
(38:40):
Why would you want to change that? Of course, you want to hold on to that for as long as you can maybe anything else that you want to discuss?
No, I'm quite happy with this discussion. When I first read it, I didn't get it as a man. I don't get it. What's the point of this? You know, I couldn't see it and all the more we didn't talk about it and I'm starting to appreciate just the layers, layers and layers.
(39:05):
And yeah, I'm very glad we did this.
Thank you so much, everyone, for being here and for the incredible and thoughtful discussion. Let's do a round of outros so that the listeners can find you. Susana, you can find me on page two forums and on X as chronodendron.
And my books are available pretty much everywhere. The series is in Timelessness. The first book is We Are Gods.
(39:30):
Jose.
I can also be found on the page two in forums and also my channel on YouTube, of course, there's amazing worlds. Thank you.
Varsha.
I haunt the page two in forums all the time as well. And you can find me on my YouTube channel, Reading by the Rainy Mountain. The About page has other ways to reach me and links to my podcast.
You will find the links to their channels and spaces in the episode description. In any case, I love to hear your thoughts on how's taken over and on the style of the best thoughts. Thank you for listening and happy reading.
Hello everyone and welcome to Books Undone.
(00:11):
I'm your host, Livia J. Eliot, and today I have something new for you, the first guest
talk of the podcast.
In this series, I will invite authors, reviewers, booktubers and bookstores to join me on deep
types of different books and stories from short fiction like today to full novels.
So without further ado, I will let my guests introduce ourselves.
(00:34):
Varsha from Reading by the Rainy Mountain.
Hi, my name is Varsha.
I have a YouTube channel called Reading by the Rainy Mountain.
It's called that because my name Varsha means rain in a lot of Indian languages.
I love to talk about books on the channel and do a lot of book discussions.
Jose from Amazing Worlds.
Hi, I'm Jose.
(00:55):
I run the small Jose's Amazing Worlds YouTube channel and my name is no half as exciting
as Varsha's, but I'm delighted to be here.
Thank you.
And Susana Imaginario, author of Weird Gods and Booktubers.
Hello, my name is Susana Imaginario.
I write mythological slipstream and I run a YouTube channel called Den of the Weird.
(01:17):
Thank you all for joining me.
We are discussing House Taken Over by Julio Cortaza.
Now, before starting, let me do the usual disclaimers.
First, there are spoilers in this podcast, so please be aware of it.
Second, as usual, what you will hear is our subjective interpretation of this short story.
So you are allowed and entitled to disagree and defer.
(01:39):
Third, House Taken Over has a political interpretation within Argentina, but we will not dive into it.
This short story is so allegorical it can be read in multiple ways, and that's what you will find here.
As a bit of a trivia before starting, Julio Cortazar was an Argentine writer and the short story,
House Taken Over, was originally published in 1946 in a literary magazine edited by Jorge Luis Borges,
(02:06):
who is considered one of the fundamental authors of slipstream literature.
Putting a genre to House Taken Over has proven difficult over the years, and many reviewers, podcasters and literature students
classify it from fantasy to psychological fiction and even magical realism.
With that said, let me ask you the first question.
(02:27):
What do you think of the siblings of Session with cleaning up the house?
Their entire routine seems to be adjusted around cleaning the house.
I found that quite bizarre, but then towards the end, it says something about the environment that it gathers a lot of dust.
(02:48):
I mean, I've been in Argentina, I don't know, so I figured that there's a lot of dust.
Where I come from, beyond art, we have to dust constantly because it's by the sea and it's quite dry and there's always dust.
You clean the next day there's dust and my grandmother, my great-aunt, they spent a lot of time dusting.
(03:09):
So I figured it was a similar thing.
Everything goes around it, you know, and they clean every day.
Like the whole routine is, I start in the morning, clean during the whole morning, cook, then leave after that.
And if they are cleaning so much, where the dust comes from, that's a question.
They did have a statement about, which I'll say I didn't fully understand,
(03:33):
that the city is clean, but the dust comes from its people.
I did wonder what that meant.
I thought that was a curious way to phrase it.
Yeah, it felt like they're fighting entropy in a way, but how is the entropy happening?
And they had a very fixed routine for their lives.
(03:56):
They weren't even working jobs apparently.
They were knitting and then indulging, indulging if that's the right word to use here.
I don't know that it is in their hobbies.
And meanwhile, the house is falling apart around them and they have to clean every day.
Honestly, I didn't think too much of the fact that they clean because it opens with the fact that the house is spacious
(04:19):
and that it takes a lot of time to clean.
The way it was described that it could take eight people, eight people could live in it and not run into each other at all.
I almost thought they go through one room a day or something like that.
And then they finish and then they start over.
It felt almost like that might be it.
(04:40):
I think that's the explanation I subconsciously gave myself or why they spent so long cleaning every day.
But then later it became clear that they cleaned their entire area.
Maybe we'll talk about that when we get to that bit, but it was interesting.
Yeah, I have no idea because not knowing what the intention of the story was, the interpretation is obviously subjective.
(05:01):
I don't know if it simply was an attempt by Cortata to create a sense of unease because as you read the story,
there are different levels of weird going on.
Like everything is weird.
The fact that our brother and sister are living together in their forties or whatever it is, that's weird.
The fact that they don't leave the house, it's weird.
(05:23):
Then you've got these things taken over the house.
What is that?
That's weird.
And in the end, they don't escape.
They simply just lock the house and leave the house with it and sell it.
They just leave everything.
It's weird or gets weird and weirder and you leave the story with a sense of unease.
Not having been told anything and it's very open to interpretation.
(05:43):
But I don't know what the intent was simply to create unease and leave it as a psychological thriller.
Or really, there is a much deeper, metaphorical meaning behind it.
That's quite interesting, especially because the noises are such an important element, as you said.
And first, I read the story many years ago.
(06:04):
I didn't catch the detail, but only real.
I realized that both characters,
they actually know what the noises are.
The brother actually goes in and says,
I had to shut the door to the passage.
They have taken over the back part and she answers, you're sure?
And Idri does if they know.
They know what the noises are, kind of like they were expecting it to come in,
(06:27):
but they don't do anything except looking out in half of the house.
So what do you think the noises are?
Could be a variety of things.
Like Jose said, there are some weird and bizarre interpretations of it.
And you're right, I did notice that it said,
they acted like this was something they encountered before.
(06:50):
Maybe they've already taken over parts of the house.
It's not like this is a brand new invasion.
Whoever, whatever the noises are,
it seems like they already exist in the house.
And their presence is expanding.
Yeah, it could be ghosts, for instance,
(07:11):
or it could be, I don't know,
some abusive people that they don't want to fight against.
Or, you know, we said we don't want to get political side
without discussing specifically Argentina's political situation.
What it felt most to me like was an invasion into a country or a region.
(07:32):
And how people have to fight against that
and fight a new regime or fight an army that might be invading
and become refugees or whatever.
That's the metaphor that I thought might best resemble this.
I actually had a different dream on the noises,
especially because it said that they have the house divided in half
(07:55):
with this big oak door.
And in that back part,
they only have things from their parents.
Which are long deceased, kind of like the noises coming from the back to the front.
And I always read them as those things of our past
that we just better let buried, you know, and away from it.
And suddenly they creep over and they come in closer
(08:19):
because we have to deal with them.
So, and they don't, the siblings don't deal with them.
So that's why they rather run away from the past.
So the noises would be in that case,
trauma from the past oppression.
And they are just running away from it rather than dealing with it.
The dust in that case could be just how that trauma or whatever
(08:40):
affects your daily life.
And it stains everything because it comes from its undoubted ways.
That does sound like a great interpretation too.
Almost like you're, you know, sometimes when you experience trauma,
you do things like I know some people who clean a lot
because they are dealing with depression
or something.
(09:00):
So that, I love that interpretation actually.
That sounds really cool.
I interpreted more, I don't usually jump to the supernatural.
And as an aversion that there is an element of almost disgust
rather than fear.
And I guess that ties in with the cleaning.
They want the house to be clean.
(09:22):
But towards the end when Irene lost her yard
and goes under the door and she loved knitting,
her life was all about knitting.
And when she sees that it goes, that it's on the other side of the door,
she just drops it without another look, without a second thought, without regretting it.
And it kind of read like a disgust reaction to it.
(09:46):
Now my knitting is contaminated, it's taken over by whatever is on that side.
And that was such a radical reaction.
So I think, yeah, there was an element of visceral disgust,
aversion to whatever was on the other side, rather than fear.
In the same scene, after she loses the yarn,
Brother says that he left, I think, 10,000 pesos on the other side.
(10:12):
And by that time, so this is said post World War II,
that's a lot of money.
And he just leaves it there and doesn't care about it.
And he's still, as you say, Susana, everything that is on the other side is contaminated.
It's been this thing when you were speaking about my own interpretation of if this is trauma,
many times survivors will want nothing to do with things,
(10:34):
with those ships that were not really in the boat,
were somehow part of the past, like even if they are close or a house or a city,
they won't want to come back.
It brings me to another scene in which after closing the oak door,
they start looking for things.
So they left it on the other side of the house, but they still ask each other,
it's not here and they are described as not having been so somber about losing that
(11:00):
on the other side of the house, but they never attempt to go back and retrieve it.
In that matter of that issue, there's that thing of acceptance,
they're not doing anything to stop whatever is happening,
or they've taken over whatever part of the house and, all right, okay.
And even at the beginning of the story,
they're looking for granted that the house is going to get bought or sold
and they're going to build a block of flats instead,
(11:22):
like there's just some inevitability that they're not even fighting against.
And then even the way the story ends, which goes against the initial premise
that the house was going to get sold, they simply lock it and walk away.
I don't know if allowing is the right word,
but they're just possibly accepting everything that is happening
and it's easier to walk away than to base whatever this is,
(11:45):
spirits or, I don't know, aliens or whatever it is that is taken over the house.
That's probably another metaphor, isn't it?
Everything, the locking, the walking away.
And it's a fairly glum, it's a fairly sort of nihilistic,
I don't know if it's nihilistic, but it's a fairly sad state of affairs
that it's just easier to walk away from your issues, whatever they may be,
(12:07):
than to face them and just get pushed out of your life.
At the start of the book, as you said, Jose, they are warning the fact
that the house will be eventually sold for the bricks.
And at the end, he just throws a case and says,
like, poor Vast are the one that actually takes the house and the house is taken over.
And it's like a complete opposite reaction.
(12:28):
At the start, they wanted to give the house and at the end, they are just like,
take it, I'm sorry for the soul that actually gets it.
Yeah, it felt like they were protecting other people from the house by locking it.
I didn't notice I was looking at it again now and we were talking about it.
That ending was really interesting.
It's not just their demons, it might affect others too.
(12:52):
And to your point, Jose, I think they also did not do anything to prevent it.
I didn't get the impression that they know this is something that happens.
So they didn't lock off or prevent anything from taking over whatever it was.
It felt like it had a power of its own and couldn't do anything to prevent it
or they didn't seem to try.
(13:13):
I don't know if they've given up now or if they never did try.
What you said, Varsha, that they didn't do anything to prevent it
and made me think of generations.
Like sometimes we tend to blame boomers for a lot of things that happened after.
And they had a specific attitude and that actually carried over.
(13:38):
And if you go through every generation, each of us actually had an attitude
and that will carry over as well.
So the noises could also be the consequences of their parents' generations
and what they feel coming in at the house is the current state of the art.
Now, mentioning that, do you think the house is a character?
(14:00):
Because it wasn't Cortotta, one of the biggest translators of El Garólam Poe
into the Spanish language. I think he did a lot of work there.
And there is echoes of the fall of the house of Ushedada,
we had the Netflix show and all the stuff.
And it's also reflected in H.P. Loughrapp's work,
this whole thing about having some family curse that is unscapable,
(14:24):
some sort of inherited curse that you cannot escape.
And I think you can see that in Poe's works, you can see that in Loughrapp's work.
And maybe here there's echoes of that, that there is something that we carry from our ancestors
that we can't escape or fight against.
And maybe there's a similarity there.
It felt to me like the house represented a way of life that's being protected.
(14:47):
I mean, it's both explicit in what they're doing day to day,
but also what we talked about at the very beginning where they spend so much time cleaning the house
and the major consequence of a part of the house being taken over is that they have less to clean.
So it feels like something that they're protecting and watching over,
whatever it is that's being represented, possibly a way of life or a country, I don't know,
(15:13):
but something that they're struggling to keep functioning, I suppose.
On the main interpretation for what I know, it's kind of like protecting a way of life
or something from a change as well.
But in that case, it doesn't really make sense because they are cleaning,
but not doing anything.
There is that passiveness of them towards the noises.
(15:37):
They're not doing anything, but they are cleaning in a way that is really not useful
because it just keeps accumulating.
Keeping status quo, I guess, so that makes a lot of sense.
It's not like they are improving anything.
They're just fighting to keep it as it is, but maybe they're not being very sensible about it.
(15:58):
What do you think of that meaning a stagnation?
That unless that we change, everything is meant to be subjected to a sudden change,
the noises coming in and taking over everything.
People tend to be reluctant to change.
The house, I think, like Pasha said, it represents the status quo rather than a character.
(16:19):
It's their environment.
They want to keep it as they like it.
That's why they were always cleaning.
It's almost a compulsion.
In a sense, it reads like they don't know anything else.
That's what they were used to do.
That's what they keep doing and they kept doing until they couldn't do it anymore.
(16:41):
There is a lot of that, especially when you get older.
You are very reluctant to change, to adapt, to let even change in.
Everything is noise.
I was trying to figure out clues for their ages.
I guess they are in like 40s, 50s.
There's a mention that somewhere that they reached their 40s.
They are not that old, but I kind of get that feeling that they just really want things to be as they are.
(17:09):
The house is their environment, is their space.
Their reason for living almost is to keep it that way.
That's where they feel safe and comfortable.
A bit earlier in the story, before we are told they are about 40s,
they say that their brother lost his fiancé and that the lady actually rejected two or three.
(17:33):
They never married, they lost their parents and they continue on that state, completely reluctant to change.
The narrator, the brother, he says that he doesn't know why Irene, the sister, actually let go of the voice around her.
It may be because of the same, because of that reluctant to change that Susana was mentioning.
(17:54):
There's one bit here that just caught my eye when they were talking about that they were talking about their sleep.
Whenever Irene talked in the sleep, I woke up immediately.
But then they say that they avoid thinking.
It says, whenever Irene talked in her sleep, I woke up immediately and stayed awake.
I never could get used to this voice from a statue or a parrot, a voice that came out of the dreams, not from a throat.
(18:18):
Irene said that in my sleep, I flailed about enormously and shook the blankets off.
That caught my eye too, because statue or parrot?
I know. It's like, this is a bad translation. I'm missing something here.
But it could be like a figure of speech or sometimes those things get lost in translation.
What you say about the noises and that part on the nights, they are always quiet and calm during the day.
(18:45):
So whatever hunts them, hunts them at night.
That generally happens to people. You are calm the entire day and suddenly you go to sleep and anxiety drops on you.
It feels as if there is some emotional bagage that the siblings have that may be undone with.
(19:06):
I think I misread the bit about noises when I was first reading the story.
It says, we seldom allowed ourselves silence there, but when we went back to our room, sort of our living room, then the house grew quiet.
So as long as they are in the kitchen, there is a lot of household noises and background noises and I guess Irene occasionally sings.
So it's constantly, there is constantly some noise when they are not in their own rooms.
(19:31):
And then when they go to their bedrooms, then it gets super quiet and that's when they hear everything, including Irene sounding like a parrot apparently.
But the first time I read it, I read it as if they were making noise to scare the things away.
But what you said makes more sense that they try for silence, but while they're in the kitchen, they can't help it even.
(19:55):
They can't help but make noise so they allow themselves the noise.
It just so to me, they all choose kind of mindless tasks.
They are all trying not to think about the problem.
Cleaning is an automatic mindless task. Neating when you are pretty good at it.
I am a neater and I often need when I'm stressed, when I'm trying to figure something out.
(20:18):
It helps me, you know, just the repetition, the sounds to clear my mind and focus on other things.
He, I think he reads and he collects stamps, you know, again, things that can be very immersive, but makes it very easy to shut everything else out.
Their days are spent trying to distract themselves from thinking or facing or doing anything outside their little room, their comfort zone, physically and mentally.
(20:46):
It does go on and on about needing and I permitted just a little neat peek in here.
I don't think you researched needing very well, because one bit annoyed me because he was saying that when she didn't like something,
she would need it again. And then just a few paragraphs after he was saying, well, at least I can read the book more than once.
(21:09):
She can't need the same thing more than twice. Well, you can.
I won't recommend it straight away. You have to wash the yarn and make sure it's straight again, but you can.
You can't need the same thing.
I really like the image of the ball jumping in the basket and she was like, what the heck?
And then I realized that could happen. I've never knit myself, but that's such a cute image inserted into everything else in the story.
(21:35):
Yeah. And I think that the point of needing, as Susana said, that they focus on such mindless things and it reinforces that topic of avoidance that we were mentioning before.
Like they have this big thing going on, those noises that they know about, they lost half of the house and they are still meeting.
(21:57):
The guy just finds this hobby of finding the stamps and organizing them.
And it's like they couldn't find anything more pedestrian to focus their attention on, rather than dealing with the stuff of the noises, they just do anything else.
Yeah, I guess it's the two possibilities that I guess we're sort of wrestling with now, or at least in my mind is one that they are knitting to block out what's going on, which I guess the second one is very similar in that they're doing anything they can to keep normalcy.
(22:34):
And this for some reason is their normal, these tasks, their daily routine, whatever it looks like is their normal.
And no matter what's happening in the outside world, they're fighting to keep what they do until they absolutely have to stop.
Very at the start of the story, he mentions that they are in, I think, 1939 in the story.
(23:00):
And the narrator says something like we can't get anything else during this time and that's a post war era, right, where imports were blocked.
And he cares so little about the world, it reinforces what you were saying, Versa that the only thing that matters is within the house, the rest of the world, the scarcity, the world, it really doesn't matter to them.
(23:23):
Or they're trying to keep it so that it doesn't matter whatever they do, if they can feel like they're able to keep up this semblance of normality, this thing from shattering and falling apart, then they can still pretend that everything is okay.
And they have that luxury, it doesn't go into it, but they were fell off financially.
(23:45):
So they had no incentive to change, to go out, to go work. You know, they're just very passive, they have their income, they have their house and that was fine.
And then when it stopped being fine, they just, they moved on.
But you kind of got the impression that they had more than just the house, they weren't just suddenly homeless.
(24:06):
Because again, there was no panic, there was a bit of sadness, but there was no panic about being suddenly homeless, they made that choice.
Ooh, that made me think of a different thing. This might be related only obliquely, I think.
But is it perhaps commentary or could it be interpreted as the people who have the means to bring about change are choosing to stay passive and not do anything about it.
(24:34):
And they're just happy to continue in their realities and not bother with things that could be influenced or changed for better, we think.
Yeah, again, it goes back to how people are very reluctant to change.
And if the change doesn't affect you directly, as seen to a degree where you know, you're out of food and out of shelter or your children are not suffering it.
(25:01):
It's very easy to let go. That's how things escalate. And before you know it, there's a lot breaking out or some big changes.
Because it is those who have the means often stay silent because it is more convenient, it's more convenient to just shut the world, just ignore.
Yeah, and it's also the fact that some societal change will have a different impact in the different layers of society.
(25:29):
So if these characters are presented as being middle class or even better, because they really have no concerns about money, it's unlikely that they will do anything under any situation.
Even when they leave their house, they don't care.
As Susana said, it doesn't seem that they will face any scarcity or anything. They just don't care. They are fine. Doesn't matter what happens to the rest of them.
(25:54):
And they have that token pity about whoever takes on the house after.
Yeah, just a mild concern. That's it.
I just wanted to say, I don't know, just have this thought and moving tangentially here, so sorry.
But I was just thinking about conversation we were having last night and how the story could stay relevant to today.
And whether these changes that we can scape, one of my pet hates is social media or artificial intelligence and whether these things taken over, that we can scape that is here to stay is social media or artificial intelligence.
(26:29):
And the testament of the quality of a piece of writing or a piece of art is its relevance over time. And I think you could reinterpret the story in that context of today and it still works.
And actually, I do believe that artificial intelligence is here to stay. I don't know eventually how it would, you know, what was its final version.
(26:55):
But yeah, all we can do about it is lock the door and walk away because this thing is coming whether we like it or not.
Even the title, I went and checked the original title, but house taken over. It's not house invaded. It's not house destroyed.
It's not house lost or house burned or, you know, it's taken over. It's a very passive thing.
(27:18):
You know, it's something that it's almost like, oh, it was involved. In my mind, I have this image of is that the house was just involved by this big blob of something.
It was just absorbed into something. They can open it. But again, very passive, very slow, and it fits the narrative.
And yeah, it could be it adapts to anything, AI, any changes in society, religious, political, ideological. You always start by, you know, oh, please, let it stop, let it go away.
(27:51):
You know, it's just a phase, you know, people will forget. And then when that doesn't happen, you're still like, okay, I personally am not going to get involved.
I'm just going to stay in my world if you have that option. And it literally needs to be inside your house, not being a door for you to do something.
Most people, I love that. So as a psychological piece, it's very good in that regard, because it doesn't need to be political. It's just human psychology.
(28:22):
And another event that it could apply, it's the pandemic. For example, how some people wanted to pretend that nothing was going to change, that it was fine, that it was just go away, and then everything changed.
It's kind of like a warning that it doesn't matter what you do, the change is going to take over. It's going to change. You'd rather get your things in place and adapt or just leave.
(28:49):
Oh, I like that. So I've been thinking about the brother and sister as victims. But I think what you just said, Olivia, switches it up to not exactly but for lack of a better word, because I can't think of one.
Puppet raters, right? Like if there's positive change and there's people fighting against it, eventually it might take over and you have to stop, you have to either leave or accept, I guess. I mean, I was only thinking about them.
(29:19):
That might be overstating it a bit. But I was only thinking of them as victims of something bad happening to them. But it could also be that there are people refusing change, positive change, perhaps.
But that's inevitable in cases that that's inevitable. They don't really have a choice.
I don't think it's positive. I mean, they are really much to almost a debilitating degree. They are just minding their own business.
(29:47):
I know that there's nothing to indicate that the change is good. Quite the contrary. It's taking over. It's making noise. It's moving things around. Then ask their permission. Then introduce themselves or whatever it they are.
I see it as something very invasive to some degree. I still see them as victims, as misguided or I don't understand why they don't fight back, why they don't do anything about it. But yeah, they just seem people that are happy minding their own business.
(30:20):
And that's the same. Most change can be intrusive. You just have to accept. It doesn't matter if we think AI is a good idea or not. It's here to say, let's stay away from some of the more invasive ideologies that rely on others to be enforced.
Which I think is just no change should never be imposed, especially to those who are not doing any harm.
(30:46):
When you were discussing, I thought that change has to be inclusive. So it's not only that they are resisting the change, but the noises are not doing anything to bring them on alongside that change.
And it made me think of a personal experience. I remember when I was 12, 15, I remember my grandparents struggling with technology. They couldn't get into Facebook. It was that age, like early 2000s.
(31:14):
And they couldn't get into tech. And nobody was teaching them. And the argument was that they will always tell, teach me, I don't know how to do it. It's too hard.
When you were discussing, it made me think of the same thing. Some changes can be too difficult for people who are too ingrained on a particular way of being.
The change is going to take over because society changes. But unless we make it inclusive, they are just going to get taken over and expelled out of it, rather than kept within the house.
(31:48):
I agree that in the story that there are no indications that the change is positive in any way. What I meant was that it could be a positive change that's being interpreted by the brother and sister as being intrusive.
And that comes back to what you were saying about the few, I guess, that and it shouldn't be that way, perhaps, that someone's forced to lose their way of living because they're not becoming one with the crowd or refusing to fight a battle a certain way or so on.
(32:19):
But yeah, I meant it as a metaphor that the story could just as easily work the other way. I was thinking negative change, positive influence. It could just as easily be the other way round and be exactly interpreted the same way by the others, maybe for a larger or people who are not the brother and sister.
It's a positive change. And that it's good for society as a whole, I suppose it depends what it is and how it's interpreted.
(32:47):
Yeah, but think if we take the interpretation of inevitable change, I think through history you can see that sometimes change is inevitable. And ideally, yes, it should be inclusive, but in practice, it's not.
I don't know, you could relate it to back in the 80s in the UK when Margaret Thatcher moved the country from a predominantly industrial, sort of steel manufacturer coal mining to a more services society, you had all the miners strikes you had, you know, but it's a difficult change because you have to move from one state to another and some people are going to be left behind.
(33:23):
And those, you know, manual workers lost their jobs and it was very traumatic. But then ideally as a society, you move on to a better state. You talk about technology, you know, all people are sort of inevitably going to be left behind.
I don't know any sort of change when you move home or, you know, you marry or you have kids or whatever. There are some inevitable changes that are difficult to deal with for certain groups.
(33:48):
And I think, you know, like Libya, yes, it should be inclusive, but sometimes it's just not. The only thing I would say about the stories, and Susana alluded to before, is the lack of fighting, is the lack of, you know, you can adapt or die, isn't it?
And I think maybe I would like to see a bit more adaptation from the two characters rather than just, like you said, possibly needing or collecting stamps. It seems like a very sort of passive investment of your time.
(34:19):
What we were discussing so far, it felt as if we were all implicitly concerned that the change was imposed. And sometimes it just happens, as Jose said. It's not inclusive because it just happens.
Yeah, I don't think sometimes change happens with unexpected consequence. Probably whenever the first internet came about, they did not foresee what would come out of it, isn't it?
(34:45):
So sometimes, inadvertently, you set off emotion, a chain of events that culminates into something totally unexpected. And therefore change, you know, sometimes it's organic and spontaneous and inevitable.
Yeah, and I guess that goes back to what we were talking about earlier about being passive and not taking any action to prevent or change what's going on, even with the cleaning like we talked about, they aren't doing anything differently.
(35:14):
They're happy to let the dust accumulate and go dusted for two hours every day.
Now, in a completely different tangent, because I was looking at things, do you think or am I just reading too much into things that there's some incestual suggestions here?
This particular line stroke me.
I mean, voice concept that the quiet simple marriage of sister and brother was the indispensable and of ends to align established in this house by our grandparents. So very family oriented and then lower couple paragraphs down.
(35:50):
And the house I want to talk about the house and Irene, I'm not important. And it goes on and how much he loves to watch her knitting and how she turned out to suitors with no particular reason. And, you know, it's kind of protected over sister which is normal, but it does seem to go beyond that.
It's almost like, you know, the faithful dog, you know, always at her side and helping and amazed by her knitting and the balls rolling over. And, you know, there's something here besides the house, something why they chose this life and they chose to be in a house with each other.
(36:33):
And this this way some unspoken agreement, because it does, it does come up a couple of times and such a short story or something to be mentioned more than once there's always a purpose.
And it is a bit critical of her but always in an endearing sort of way. So I wonder if there's if there's something there.
(36:55):
I think that's part of what I mentioned at the beginning about the levels of weird of the story that you've got going on. And I think that that's one level of you know why this brother and sister is a weird relationship.
Maybe there is something there about what you mentioned, maybe, maybe, you know, I think if one of the intents of the story was to make the reader uncomfortable, that would certainly go a long ways to achieving that alongside everything else that is going on.
(37:22):
I had a more allegorical interpretation of that. If we go back to that idea of brother and sister being a group on society, in many cases specific classes are called incestors, not literally, but because they only blend with themselves, right?
It's the same people or the same circles all over again. There is no inclusion of somebody different and they just stay within the known people and the team. And we have seen that happening on classes or on industries.
(37:53):
Sometimes you have a very niche industry and the same professionals move over all the different companies, you know, and it gave me one, Susana was reading that I thought like, perhaps he was not actually writing that literally,
but just implying like this tightly knit group that doesn't accept anybody from outside, that doesn't want change, that it's not going to spread, that it's not going to mingle.
(38:17):
They had a very serene existence. Their hands like silver sea urchins, needles flashing and one or two nicking facets on the floor, the balls of your jumping about. It was lovely.
Imagine this afternoon in a very peaceful just in the post war and everything outside at the house is in a completely different state.
(38:40):
Why would you want to change that? Of course, you want to hold on to that for as long as you can maybe anything else that you want to discuss?
No, I'm quite happy with this discussion. When I first read it, I didn't get it as a man. I don't get it. What's the point of this? You know, I couldn't see it and all the more we didn't talk about it and I'm starting to appreciate just the layers, layers and layers.
(39:05):
And yeah, I'm very glad we did this.
Thank you so much, everyone, for being here and for the incredible and thoughtful discussion. Let's do a round of outros so that the listeners can find you. Susana, you can find me on page two forums and on X as chronodendron.
And my books are available pretty much everywhere. The series is in Timelessness. The first book is We Are Gods.
(39:30):
Jose.
I can also be found on the page two in forums and also my channel on YouTube, of course, there's amazing worlds. Thank you.
Varsha.
I haunt the page two in forums all the time as well. And you can find me on my YouTube channel, Reading by the Rainy Mountain. The About page has other ways to reach me and links to my podcast.
You will find the links to their channels and spaces in the episode description. In any case, I love to hear your thoughts on how's taken over and on the style of the best thoughts. Thank you for listening and happy reading.
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