Second Partial Essay.

Hi everyone,

Again, for this essay I worked with my classmate Allison Tenorio.

Is love what is missing. Just love!

            This essay pretends to analyze the works “The Battles in the desert” by José Emilio Pacheco and the other one “Lovers of the Arctic Circle” by Julio Medem with the objective of comparing and contrasting both, characters and plays in general, finding similarities and differences among them. Connecting topics such as the traditional and contemporary fiction novel and trying to explain through these works the phrase by Benjamin Disraeli which said: “The magic of our first love consists on our ignorance that it can be endless”. This handwritten tries to interpret the cause why authors wrote the way they did connecting it to the time where they lived and the phenomena that occurred to make them see the world the way they did.

In this partial, the class had the opportunity of analyzing two different works, one was “The battles in the desert” from José Emilio Pacheco and the other one was “Lovers of the Arctic Circle” by Julio Medem. Both stories talk about the first love of a child, they present the emotions that a child feels when he discovers for the first time that is attracted to someone else. Also in both stories there is an issue, which prevents them from being together, in the story of José Emilio Pacheco, the kid can’t be with Mariana because there is a very big difference of age between them so his love is not reciprocated but besides that, his parents prohibit him to talk to her because she was a woman of “low life” and then he never sees her again; while in Julio Medem’s work, it talks about two children whose parents start to live together and they become step brothers so here again they cannot be together because according to their parents they should see each other as a sibling but at the end they fall in love.

Between these two works, there are also so many differences starting from the context and the setting where they take place, it is completely different. “Battles in the desert” takes place in Mexico when Miguel Alemán was the president, then the economy and the society was in a very bad status, in this case the story is about a child that is getting into the adolescence and falls in love with his friend’s mother and also the language used in this work is more colloquial. On the other side, the movie “Lovers of the Arctic Circle” has its setting in Spain and the economy of the country is better than the one presented in Mexico, actually the economic situation of the father of one of the main characters gets better during the story, in this one the step brothers fall in love and try to be together but at the end is the death who separates them and the language used in this one is a little more formal than in the one of José Emilio Pacheco.

The characters in these works are very different and equal at the same time because for example in the “Battles in the desert” Carlitos is a child whose economic situation is not very good but despite that he goes to the school and his siblings go too, one day his friend Jim introduces him to his mother and Carlitos falls in love with her because of her personality but their parents are catholic and think he is doing something too bad that needs to go to the church and receive help. Besides, Carlito’s family was close-minded and received education which taught them to follow rules, not to question them, to be discrete and to do what the church told them. His family tried to make Carlitos this way but he couldn’t control what he felt. Also, Mariana is a very pretty woman who had a child being alone and without having a job and despite this she wasn’t an arrogant person and always had a smile for everyone, she was a woman who fought to make her son’s life better than what hers was.

Otherwise, in Julio Medem’s movie the main characters are Otto, who’s a child that starts to feel attracted to a girl and for coincidence or destiny his father starts to live with this girl’s mother and as they lived in the same house they continued feeling this love and attraction but the problem now was that they were step brothers and life goes on and Otto decides to start a relationship with his step sister, Anna, he was shy, kind and honest. While Anna, who was also in love with his step brother, is a determined, honest, bold and intelligent girl that wanted to be with Otto all the time but when she was trying to find him, she was so concentrated on the boy that she didn’t see the bus coming and she dies in the street, in the exact moment for Otto to watch it all.

Also, when analyzing the way they write, in the work of Emilio, the narrator is omniscient because Carlitos besides being the main character is narrating what´s happening in the story and makes several descriptions of other characters so it could be associated with the characteristics of a traditional novel. Moreover, in the film of Julio, the narrator is not present and everything is implied by the actions of the characters. Although it isn't a novel, it should be noted that sometimes the films are based on novels, if so it could be considered a contemporary novel although this is not the case.

Concluding, to compare jobs is something that helps more to improve understanding and analyzing better the structure and aspects that influenced their elaboration than if they are only read or seen. In this case it helped to appreciate that this two works have differences and similarities. Both help to explain the quote of Benjamin Disraeli about first love mentioned before, and heartbreak rather. In both there exist a situation where two people want to be together but they can't in one because of the age and influence of other characters and in other because the brotherhood relationship that the characters have. Although characters were immature, they fall in love so depth and can´t afford their love isn´t possible. Despite this, they never tried to forget this love, instead of that they continued looking for that special person. This shows that love is a feeling that is present in people of all ages and is something unexplainable for many of them. At the end this jobs ended in tragedy, Mariana disappears and Anna dies hit by a bus.

Although the thematic is similar, as mentioned earlier, the context in which they develop change, the kind of narrator is also different and although they aren't novels they have some of these features.

The works suggest that love is a universal feeling which consists in estimate and feel affection towards another person. In both, the book and the movie, we can identify kinds of love, such as love to the family or the "first love", that is the one with more importance in this case. Love is a feeling that has existed since the origin of humans and is present in the contemporary world. "Battles in the Desert" was published in 1981 while "Lovers of the Arctic Circle" was released in the year 1998 and the feeling, the approach that is given to it still the same.

The sort of this kind of works help to strengthen this feeling and value in society because sometimes love it's what's missing in the world to live better, is what motivates many people to continue living and enjoying every day. So just love.

“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is

finally better than your dreams.”

― Dr. Seuss

References:

§  Anonymous. (2009). “First love”. Proverbia. Recovered from: http://www.proverbia.net/citastema.asp?tematica=682

§  “Lovers of the Arctic Circle” [movie] Directed by Medem, J. 1998 (Spain)

§  Pacheco, J. “The Battles in the Desert”. México: 1981