Un roman decent, numai bun de ascultat în drum spre și dinspre casă spre școală, cu oarecari influențe moderniste (cîteva tentative de introspecție) dUn roman decent, numai bun de ascultat în drum spre și dinspre casă spre școală, cu oarecari influențe moderniste (cîteva tentative de introspecție) dar rămînînd în genere credincios formulei realiste a naratorului omniscient. Personajele, deși sînt migălos construite, rămîn, curios, niște umbre, fără prea mare consistență. Cu toate acestea, scriitura are un farmec ușor demodat, un parfum de sipet descoperit în podul bunicilor.
Din păcate, ori înregistrarea e foarte veche, ori a fost făcută de mîntuială, căci banda sare adesea și sînt multe zgomote de fond, ceea ce stînjenește uneori destul de mult audiția. ...more
I understand that Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is the first novel Gail Honeyman has published. As a debut, it is a very interesting novel indeeI understand that Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is the first novel Gail Honeyman has published. As a debut, it is a very interesting novel indeed, with its fresh and lively voice that leaves the readers with a smile on their lips after closing the book.
I must confess I have had some trouble in establishing its genre, though. To label it "chicklit" seemed to me a little unfair, since this label carries a soupcon of superficiality, of light reading. The author of the Kirkus review appears to have encountered the same problem, calling it “part comic novel, part emotional thriller, and part love story” – a little too many parts, in my opinion, from which at least one an exaggeration and/ or wishful thinking. Nevertheless, it could be all three (and a few others), if you encompass them in a satirical approach, with a touch of neo-modernist psychological (melo)drama (hum, more and more confusing, I told you, not so easy to classify).
Anyway (and all the reviews I’ve browsed agree with this), the most savoury ingredient of the novel is its humour, its gentle satire of the contemporary society, with all its political correctness, mating rituals, smugness of the public image and so on:
I’d made my legs black, and my hair blond. I’d lengthened and darkened my eyelashes, dusted a flush of pink onto my cheeks and painted my lips a shade of dark red which was rarely found in nature. I should, by rights, look less like a human woman than I’d ever done, and yet it seemed that this was the most acceptable, the most appropriate appearance that I’d ever made before the world.
Eleanor Oliphant’s charm springs precisely from the fact that she is so different, with her pixie-like appearance – a little fairy who, although she looks attentively around her, does not completely understand the world she however learnt so much about. The narrative follows her efforts to comprehend the society and fit in it by mimicking its rules, which leads to little scenes like this one, hilarious and touching at the same time:
The barman was well over six feet tall and had created strange, enormous holes in his earlobes by inserting little black plastic circles in order to push back the skin. For some reason, I was reminded of my shower curtain.
This comforting thought of home gave me the courage to examine his tattoos, which snaked across his neck and down both arms. The colours were very beautiful, and the images were dense and complex. How marvellous to be able to read someone’s skin, to explore the story of his life across his chest, his arms, the softness at the back of his neck. The barman had roses and a treble clef, a cross, a woman’s face... so much detail, so little unadorned flesh.
The dark side of the story is not bad either, the narrative being often saved from melodrama by the same quality of the voice that keeps its involuntary humour even in the most traumatic moments of her life:
I slowly opened one eye—it was gummed shut—and saw that the living room was unchanged, the frog pouf staring back at me. Was I alive? I hoped so, but only because if this was the location of the afterlife, I’d be lodging an appeal immediately.
So true is the narrative voice that I must confess I was amused even by some overused jokes, like in the scene in which the heroine, drunk and looking a mess, opens the door to a stupefied Raymond, who exclaims “Jesus Christ!” and to whom she politely introduces herself in turn as “Eleanor Oliphant”.
To conclude, I would say that the strongest points of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine are its genuine humour, the unreliable narrator and the social satire. On the other hand the book has some weak points too, like the improbability of the storyline (everything falls too conveniently into place, the heroine being suddenly absorbed into the whirl of the society after a lifetime of solitude), the commercial twist of the narrative towards the end (Evil as a reality was more convincing for me than Evil as a ghost) and the occasional slip into melodrama:
I have been waiting for death all my life. I do not mean that I actively wish to die, just that I do not really want to be alive. Something had shifted now, and I realized that I didn’t need to wait for death. I didn’t want to. I unscrewed the bottle and drank deeply.
Overall however, for any reader with a need to counter the absurd of existence with a wry laugh, Gail Honeyman’s novel is, so to say, completely fine....more
I can't remember who recommended this book to me, I think I read somewhere it is one of those books you cannot stop reading and here I was expecting aI can't remember who recommended this book to me, I think I read somewhere it is one of those books you cannot stop reading and here I was expecting a good, frightening thriller and getting a romanticized, feminine version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I have to confess I kinda skipped the last part, but, Jeez, the reasons people get divorced nowadays!...more
Even though Easter Parade did not move me as much as Revolutionary Road did (if you are interested, here is the review I wrote about the latter ), it Even though Easter Parade did not move me as much as Revolutionary Road did (if you are interested, here is the review I wrote about the latter ), it is, no doubt, as well written, as cuttingly contradicting the foolish presumption that life is worth living. For Richard Yates knew firsthand how naïve this kind of thinking is, and it is well-known that many a novel of his is inspired by his own biography (as an example, in this novel Pookie is modelled after his mother, nicknamed Dookie).
If Revolutionary Road is mainly about the power of auto deception that forever keeps rolling the wheels of the Wheelers, Easter Parade is simply about the grimness of the days of the Grimes sisters (the names, in both novels, are so ironically appropriate, as you can see) who are unwilling to fight - either against the vicious currents of life and the laziness of their own selves. Of course, the auto deception is equally present, but the characters, even when becoming aware of it, wear it casually, shamelessly, almost with pride and do not hesitate to transform it in deception:
‘Listen, Wilson,’ she began. ‘I want you to leave my sister alone, is that clear?’ As her voice rose and flattened out she understood why she was doing this: she was showing off for Howard. This would prove she wasn’t always tender and loving; she could be tough, resilient, courageous; she had a wholly unsentimental way of looking at the world.
Also the title is as brilliantly deceptive as in Revolutionary Road, with its hint of hope, its glimpse of joy never to be fulfilled. No colorful, happy parade happens on the not-so-revolutionary road either of the two sisters takes, despite the promise of one in that sunny far-away-day of their youth, when Sarah had been dolling herself to go to the Easter parade with her fiancé, while little Emily was looking in wonder and excitement at her preparations.
Forty years later, the excitement long gone, Emily sadly acknowledges that life is as unknown, although not as glamorous, as she perceived it once:
"I’m almost fifty years old and I’ve never understood anything in my whole life.”
In a short but excellent review published in 2009 in The Independent, Douglas Kennedy observed that what make Richard Yates’ writings extraordinary is the merciless way he paints the “all-American self-entrapment and self-loathing”, with no place for redemption or for belief in at least a brighter past. In spite of this such honest than it seems sometimes “too painful to read” depicting, there is a little gleam of hope that even the humblest being is not futile, can leave something behind:
“The fearlessness of Yates's world view astonished me. Here was a writer willing to articulate so many uncomfortable truths about temporal existence and the great human capacity for self-delusion. His eye was unflinching, yet his compassion always manifest. The Easter Parade stands as one of those small, quiet masterpieces which speaks volumes about the fundamental sadness at the heart of everything, and which poses that most unsettling of questions: can we ever really comprehend ourselves?” ...more
Dopo aver letto la mia recensione del Buio oltre la siepe (recensione in inglese che si trova qui per chi sarebbe interessato), una cara amica mia virDopo aver letto la mia recensione del Buio oltre la siepe (recensione in inglese che si trova qui per chi sarebbe interessato), una cara amica mia virtuale su Goodreads mi ha chiesto come mai gli avevo dato solo tre stelle. La mia risposta è stata che di solito do tre stelle ai libri che sembrano rivolgersi più alle mie emozioni "biologiche" e meno alle mie emozioni "estetiche".
Ebbene, ho avuto la stessa impressione mentre stavo leggendo L’amica geniale di Elena Ferrante: cioè di aver sotto gli occhi un libro commovente, coinvolgente, gradevole – insomma che si merita tutto l’elenco di epiteti attribuiti di solito ai buoni libri – eppure mirabile, durabile, sempiterno, come lo è la grande letteratura… proprio non lo so.
Il romanzo comincia con una prolessi annunciando il cambiamento dei tempi narrativi: dopo una conversazione con il figlio della sua amica di cui ha appreso la sparizione di quest’ultima, l’io narrante dichiara maliziosamente che comincia a scrivere questi ricordi per punirla di aver voluto “non solo sparire lei, adesso, a sessantasei anni, ma anche cancellare tutta la vita che si era lasciata alle spalle.” Infatti, in un’intervista pubblicata nel Corriere della sera, l’autrice confessa che voleva da molto tempo scrivere una storia sull’impossibilità di sparire senza traccia, visto che c’è sempre un parente oppure un amico disposto a fare “da testimone inflessibile di ogni piccolo o grande evento della vita” dell’altro.
Così comincia la storia di Elena Greco (la narratrice) e Raffaella Cerullo (la sua amica) o Lenù e Lila, in questo primo volume della loro infanzia e poi adolescenza. Un’amicizia tumultuosa, dove si mescolano generosità e pettegolezzi, rivalità e complementarità, invidia e ammirazione e soprattutto un’impossibilità di vivere l’una senza l’altra, come è ovvio in questo brano dove Lenù, malgrado l’aver fatta, cioè aver continuato gli studi che Lila non ha potuto proseguire per mancanza di soldi, ha un complesso d’inferiorità davanti alla creatività e all'abilità della sua amica, che sta lavorando con entusiasmo a un modello di scarpe concepito da lei stessa:
Dovetti ammettere presto che ciò che facevo io, da sola, non riusciva a farmi battere il cuore, solo ciò che Lila sfiorava diventava importante. Ma se lei si allontanava, se la sua voce si allontanava dalle cose, le cose si macchiavano, si impolveravano. La scuola media, il latino, i professori, i libri, la lingua dei libri mi sembrarono definitivamente meno suggestivi della finitura di una scarpa, e questo mi depresse.
Effettivamente, non è mica male questa trovata narrativa che fa dalle scarpe un simbolo del destino di Lila, un leitmotiv che sottolinea la differenza fra sogno e realtà, fra talento e mediocrità, finalmente fra rione e mondo. Lila, rassegnata all’idea di non andare più a scuola, vede nel calzolaio di suo padre una possibilità di sfuggire alla povertà e, insieme a suo fratello (ma senza l’accordo del padre), comincia a fare un paio di scarpe di lusso, in cui entrambi mettono i loro sogni di ricchezza e celebrità. Purtroppo, queste scarpe fatte e disfatte tantissime volte per renderle perfette non acquisiscono mai le valenze magiche di quelle di Dorothy, invece seguono la stessa sorte di Lila: prima disprezzate da un padre che ha paura di rinunciare alla sua condizione di semplice “scarparo” per un capriccio, un sogno a suo avviso irrealizzabile, poi odiate da un fratello che ci aveva messo troppe speranze, poi agognate da due giovani che pensano conquistare l’amore di Lila attraverso la loro acquisizione e finalmente regalate, l’ultimo tradimento, dall’uomo che Lila amava proprio nel giorno del loro matrimonio all’uomo che lei disprezzava di più.
In uno stile molto scorrevole (e questa scorrevolezza è stata notata e lodata anche dai critici più acerbi del libro) si fa la ricostituzione di un mondo pittoresco nella sua oscurità, il “rione”, una zona incerta ai confini di Napoli, una trappola della povertà e violenza, un buco nero che ingoia indiscriminatamente drammi e farce, stronzerie e genialità, bruttezza e bellezza. Qui si dà in spettacolo la vedova Melina, litigando violentemente con la moglie del suo vicino di casa di cui si è innamorata sperdutamente. Qui è ucciso don Achille, una figura da far spavento ai piccoli e ai grandi ugualmente. Qui vive la maestra Olivieri che riesce a convincere i genitori di Lenù (ma non quelli di Lila, sfortunatamente) di lasciarla a continuare i suoi studi. Qui si spara e si minaccia con la pistola e i padri si arrabbiano e buttano via dalla finestra, letteralmente, i loro bambini:
Avevamo dieci anni, a momenti ne avremmo fatti undici. Io stavo diventando sempre più piena, Lila restava piccola di statura, magrissima, era leggera e delicata. All’improvviso le grida cessarono e pochi attimi dopo la mia amica volò dalla finestra, passò sopra la mia testa e atterrò sull’asfalto alle mie spalle.
Infine, c’è una sorprendente forza evocatrice nelle descrizioni sia dei caratteri e dei paesaggi da mettere in dubbio l’opinione di Jacopo Cirillo, posta all’inizio della sua recensione un po’ cattiva ☺, quando dice che il romanzo “è una lettura perfetta per chi legge poco”. Effettivamente, i suoi ritratti, per esempio, sono sempre pieni di vita e colore, sia quando sono minuziosi, come questo di Lila da bambina precoce e selvaggia:
La sua prontezza mentale sapeva di sibilo, di guizzo, di morso letale. E non c’era niente nel suo aspetto che agisse da correttivo. Era arruffata, sporca, alle ginocchia e ai gomiti aveva sempre croste di ferite che non facevano mai in tempo a risanare. Gli occhi grandi e vivissimi sapevano diventare fessure dietro cui, prima di ogni risposta brillante, c’era uno sguardo che pareva non solo poco infantile, ma forse non umano. Ogni suo movimento comunicava che farle del male non serviva perché, comunque si fossero messe le cose, lei avrebbe trovato il modo di fartene di più.
…sia quando sono fulgoranti, rivelando un vero talento dell’autrice per lo sketch, come quest’immagine plastica da suggerire il passaggio di Lenù dall’infanzia all’adolescenza:
In quell’anno mi sembrò di dilatarmi come la pasta per le pizze. Diventai sempre più piena di petto, di cosce, di sedere.
In ogni caso, J. Cirillo sbaglia anche quando identifica l’io narrante con un narratore omnisciente (e non solo perché mettere insieme i due tipi di narratori è una contradizione in termini, ma anche perché c’è un solo punto di vista e non affatto obiettivo), ma devo dargli ragione quando afferma che le due amiche sono abbastanza sgradevoli nella loro continua caccia alla lode che in fin dei conti rivela solo il fatto che nessuna è all’altezza della relazione definita dal titolo – la genialità: “È per questo che Elena mi sta antipatica. Non perché è l’amica perfettina di Lila la ribelle, non perché ha successo e si fa mille problemi continuamente su tutto, non perché a volte sembra tirarsela mentre altre pare una disgraziata che si autosabota. Ed è per questo che Lila mi sta antipatica. Non perché è l’amica intelligente che non si applica e che se si applica si applica male, non perché è strana e non si capisce bene mai quello che ha in testa, non perché è esageratamente eccentrica e problematica in tutto quello che fa.”
Malgrado tutto questo, il romanzo mi è piaciuto e continuerò a leggere i seguenti volumi benché si dica che sono meno riusciti del primo. Sia in italiano, se li trovo, voglio dire, perché per il momento non ho che il primo volume, regalato dalla mia amica Lavinia (insieme ai seguenti, ma in inglese), a cui tengo ringraziarne con tutto il mio cuore, sia in inglese. Si vedrà....more
I knew almost nothing about John Updike before reading Rabbit, Run, except that he was a contemporary American writer and a pretty good stylist (and a I knew almost nothing about John Updike before reading Rabbit, Run, except that he was a contemporary American writer and a pretty good stylist (and after finishing the novel I can tell you the last appreciation is an understatement). However I was expecting (I don’t know why, especially since I knew all along the novel was published first in 1960) a postmodernist approach instead of a neo-modernist one. In brief, I thought his literary prestige is due to some innovations in the narrative technique and it was quite a surprise (a delightful one) to discover that he uses to deploy his inimitable, truly mesmerizing narrative voice mostly traditional techniques. That is, there is no cleverly built up structure but a restless, rhythmic beat of a prose that discreetly and masterfully recreates a world by skillfully taming the words.
The reading key that could help us to better understand this world is offered not by the title (which is rather a characterization in nuce of the main character) but by one of the Pascal’s “pensées” put as the motto of our story: “The motions of Grace, the hardness of the heart; external circumstances.”
Indeed, the Grace and the Heart, that is, the Faith and the Love (or rather the lack of them) are the “circumstances” that make move around a world as small as a little town in the 60’s, as big as the timeless universe. A world in which the main character is forever looking for rabbit holes where he could hide from his moral and civic responsibilities that bore him to death. Like a male version of Madame Bovary he is not quite able to understand his own restlessness and discontent, that is, his immature ways: however, his perpetual running makes sense in a bizarre way, which renders him quite likeable even when he becomes aware of hurting the others and almost proud of it:
“When I ran from Janice I made an interesting discovery. (…) If you have the guts to be yourself,” he says, “other people will pay your price.”
In an article published in Harvard Magazine in 1996 (Rabbit Reread ), Robert Kiely names Harry Angstrom an “an ignorant, insensitive, uneducated, self-pitying bigot of no particular talent, imagination, or intelligence”. It is an opinion shared by many a reader who judged him solely by his actions and words than by his thoughts and point of view. Because let’s not forget that he is not only the main character of the story, but its main narrator (although not the only one) in a free indirect style. And it is in the role of the narrator that we discover his astute eye for the detail, his empathy with his surroundings, his desire to make sense of a universe that seems at the same time menacingly big and suffocatingly small:
He brought them up there. To see what? The city stretches from dollhouse rows at the base of the park through a broad blurred belly of flowerpot red patched with tar roofs and twinkling cars and ends as a rose tint in the mist that hangs above the distant river. Gas tanks glimmer in this smoke. Suburbs lie like scarves in it. But the city is huge in the middle view, and he opens his lips as if to force the lips of his soul to receive the taste of the truth about it, as the truth were a secret in such low solution that only immensity can give us a sensible taste.
There is always a subtle play of perspectives to be found in Updike’s prose, an alternation between the big and the small picture, a care for the detail that often springs from the background by means of an unexpected comparisons and / or epithet which reveals a story behind the story, like a possible tense relationship with the neighbor whose door is closed “like an angry face” or a metaphysical anxiety induced by a deserted landscape full of ghosts of “children clambering up from a grave”. Attuned to “the sound and the fury” of his surroundings, Harry tries, by turn, either to resign to or to escape the fate they mercilessly mirror:
He feels the truth: the thing that had left his life had left irrevocably; no search would recover it. no flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him.
It is amazing how an “ignorant, insensitive” oaf like Harry Angstrom is able to recognize and unveil the cannibalism of a city hungry for the modest truth of mediocrity that sustains it, although Robert Kiely is not completely wrong in his assumptions about Rabbit, for our (anti) hero is unable, or simply lacks the patience to understand people, to go beyond their physical appearance he genially notices in the smallest detail with the eye of an artist who wants to catch every shade of color of the body but is not interested at all in the shades of the soul:
Rabbit looks at Ruth. Her face is caked with orange dust. Her hair, her hair which seemed at first glance dirty blond or faded brown, is in fact many colors, red and yellow and brown and black, each hair passing in the light through a series of tints, like the hair of a dog.
Another remarkable stylistic trait is due to what I would like to call jigsaw images: the narrative voice gains unexpected inflexion whenever it chooses to scatter and redo not only landscapes and portraits (for example Ruth’s: “Her wet face, relaxed into slabs, is not pretty; the thick lips, torn from most of their paint, are the pale rims of a loose hole.”) but also states of mind, smashing fleeting images into glittering pieces:
Mr Springer returns and passes through the outside, bestowing upon his son-in-law a painfully complex smile, compounded of a wish to apologize for his wife (we’re both men; I know), a wish to keep distant (nevertheless you’ve behaved unforgivably; don’t touch me) and the car’s salesman reflex of politeness.
Julian Barnes, in his review published in The Guardian (John Updike Rereading. Running Away) is convinced that the Rabbit quartet is “the greatest postwar American fiction”. I only read the first of the four books, but I already strongly agree. This little novel is crafted with such an elegant simplicity that even its somber, Dantesque theme - that there is no escape wherever you run away – seems somehow bearable. For there is always at least a haven – in the beauty of the art....more
I don’t know whether my habit to read three or more books at the same time is good or bad, but it surely gave me the opportunity to discover connectioI don’t know whether my habit to read three or more books at the same time is good or bad, but it surely gave me the opportunity to discover connections between books I would have never put in the same sentence in other circumstances. For example, it was fun to find, in two very dissimilar books, Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow and Dan Lungu’s The Little Girl Who Played God, a similar reaction of the characters in front of some landscape while visiting Italy, which seemed to their awed eyes so impossible picturesque that it had acquired the glossy quality of a postal card. Or to discover that both Alice Munro’s neorealist The View from Castle Rock and Kazuo Ishiguro’s magic realist The Buried Giant managed to find that elusive border between reality and mythology. Not to speak about those times when a book effectively had called another – as Umberto Eco’s Foucault Pendulum did with Alexandrian’s History of the Occult Philosophy – for how could I explain otherwise the fact that I received the second (without even asking) from my former high school teacher just when I was struggling to put in order some random information about occultism wickedly given to me by the first?
And now I happen to find myself in front of another apparently eccentric confrontation: Jane Austen versus Elena Ferrante, challenging each other in a debate over centuries about adultery through their irritating characters, Fanny Price and Elena Greco, both annoyingly overdoing their point of view until the first one becomes a caricature of the morality and the second – of the amorality. If the heroine of Mansfield Park hides behind her noble principles a certain rigidity and narrowness of thought, together with a lack of imagination and spirit, the narrator of The Story of the Lost Child displays her ignorance of them with aggressive arrogance, acting like the heroines in those bad romances who endlessly cry and suffer and love to be betrayed. Her behaviour is so pathetic that it cannot even be labelled as immoral, only amoral, since she does not seem to have any sense or knowledge of the moral principles, only a penchant for futility that will shatter her and her family life. As her mother-in-law justly observes in a cruel but truthful character analysis, Lenù is guilty of the unforgivable sin of vulgarity (without even the excuse of the lack of education that Mme Bovary had, for example):
Then she said to me in a low voice, almost a whisper, that I was an evil woman, that I couldn’t understand what it meant to truly love and to give up one’s beloved, that behind a pleasing and docile façade I concealed an extremely vulgar craving to grab everything, which neither studying nor books could ever tame.
I have to admit that the first part of this fourth volume of the Neapolitan books, with Lenù running after the worthless Nino like a headless chicken, either amused or irritated me, not only because it revealed a suddenly very superficial character behaving like a moron (thus pretty inconsistent with the image in the former books), but also because my sense of order strongly disagreed with the compositional imbalance of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde structure from which Dr. Jekyll disappeared altogether, for Lila and/ or Lenù, have become petty and trivial, mightily competing for the first place in detestability. Moreover, the Neapolitan slum, which had become such an amazing character in the third volume, is transformed here into a childishly imagined hungry monster that does not want to conquer the foreground anymore but does its worst to blend all the characters in its sinister background. At the end of the day, as Lenù will have the epiphany of, it is only about that typical case of “you can leave the stradone (or the rione or whatever) but you cannot make the stradone leave you”:
Suddenly I felt with shame that I could understand, and excuse, the irritation of Professor Galiani when she saw her daughter on Pasquale’s knees, I understood and excused Nino when, one way or another, he withdrew from Lila, and, why not, I understood and excused Adele when she had had to make the best of things and accept that I would marry her son.
Fortunately, the second part gets better, although the circular structure disclosing the meanings of the first images is a little old-fashioned and its symmetry – from dolls to child and return to the dolls, although emotionally touching, is somehow too sought, too artificial.
Moreover, Lila is stuffed in this final book with so many meanings that she becomes more an allegory than a character, that is, she is in danger to lose any consistency. Indeed, she is charged in turn with the role of the narrator’s daemon (“everything that came from her, or that I ascribed to her, had seemed to me, since we were children, more meaningful, more promising, than what came from me”), she often embodies her sometimes better sometimes bothersome conscience (“I want to seek on the page a balance between her and me that in life I couldn’t find even between myself and me”), when she is not her ideal alter ego with impossible standards to meet (“there was the possibility that her name (…) would be bound to a single work of great significance: not the thousands of pages that I had written, but a book whose success she would never enjoy”), or her mentor that unknowingly had given life to her writings by making her always hear, while creating, the narrative voice Lila had used as a child to compose the Blue Fairy story (Judith Shulevitz, in her insightful review published in The Atlantic Magazine astutely made a connection with Pinocchio’s blue fairy to point that both of them had the gift to bestow life). Finally, in a role reversal, it is Lila who becomes her Galatea, her creation stepping out of fiction to lose herself in a world that can’t tell anymore who’s the creator and who’s the created:
Lila is not in these words. There is only what I’ve been able to put down. Unless, by imagining what she would write and how, I am no longer able to distinguish what’s mine and what’s hers.
Nevertheless, Ferrante knows all the secrets of the compelling narrative and all in all the series of the Neapolitan novels was a long captivating reading, sometimes truly brilliant, especially the first volume, which would have deserved almost a four-star rating. However I preferred a more monotonous three-star rating for all four volumes because although the second and the fourth were closer to two stars than three, I was overall really impressed with the way the author lived up to expectations from the beginning to the end, not making too many concessions to the sometimes questionable taste of the general public. The beauty of the last sentence of the novel is the image of the creator orphaned of his creation. When all is said and done, the characters forever leave the author to relocate in their readers minds:
I thought: now that Lila has let herself be seen so plainly, I must resign myself to not seeing her anymore.
This third book of the Neapolitan novels (which, by the way, I liked better than the second but not as much as the first), is surprisingly well-writte This third book of the Neapolitan novels (which, by the way, I liked better than the second but not as much as the first), is surprisingly well-written for a sequel, I say surprisingly because, with some notable exceptions I usually find sequels very diluted, shadows that try to suck their force from a first, more vigorous narrative.
Well, this is not the case of Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, which reinforced the impression I had while reading the second book (The Story of a New Name– my review here to whom may interest) that Lila and Lenù are the two faces of the same coin, or better, that each of them is the creation of the other. In a complicated mirror technique, the two characters assume in turn, either the Dr. Jekyll or the Mr Hyde’s role, in a hate-love relationship sometimes beneficial, sometimes destructive:
Everything I read in that period ultimately drew Lila in, one way or another. I had come upon a female model of thinking that, given the obvious differences, provoked in me the same admiration, the same sense of inferiority that I felt toward her. Not only that: I read thinking of her, of fragments of her life, of the sentences she would agree with, of those she would have rejected. (…) I had been forced by the powerful presence of Lila to imagine myself as I was not. I was added to her, and I felt mutilated as soon as I removed myself. Not an idea, without Lila. Not a thought I trusted, without the support of her thoughts. Not an image.
There is an endless game of approaching and distancing, of identifying and separating, of imitating and reasserting oneself, until you are not sure anymore not only of who is one and who is the other, but also of who is the better half of the other ☺:
We had maintained the bond between our two stories, but by subtraction. We had become for each other abstract entities, so that now I could invent her for myself both as an expert in computers and as a determined and implacable urban guerrilla, while she, in all likelihood, could see me both as the stereotype of the successful intellectual and as a cultured and well-off woman, all children, books, and highbrow conversation with an academic husband. We both needed new depth, body, and yet we were distant and couldn’t give it to each other.
Anyway, their lives flow inexorably together, follow the same meanders, even change, to use the same metaphor without malicious implying, the riverbed. Each one pretends to have found her ideal self in the other whereas secretly wishing to destroy her other self, to break her mirrored image into thousand pieces. Like them, their men seem at the same time alike and different – Enzo with his devotion for Lila and Pietro with his intellectual background have the same positive impact in the (two?) heroines’ lives, whereas Michele and Nino ominously shadow them.
The theme of leaving and returning, suggested by the title, is also ambiguous and complicated, because you cannot escape what you have never truly left behind as the beginning of this third volume, with a five-year old memory of the neighbourhood suggests, with a powerful, brilliant image that asserts that, if the regressus ad originem does not really exist, it is only because you have been forever caught in the uterus of the world, your umbilical chord has never been cut, you have never made it outside, you have never been born:
I had fled, in fact. Only to discover, in the decades to come, that I had been wrong, that it was a chain with larger and larger links: the neighbourhood was connected to the city, the city to Italy, Italy to Europe, Europe to the whole planet. And this is how I see it today: it’s not the neighbourhood that’s sick, it’s not Naples, it’s the entire earth, it’s the universe, or universes. And shrewdness means hiding and hiding from oneself the true state of things.
The image of the city as a huge, monstrous, hungry organism, although not new, is powerful enough to deserve to be compared with Henry Miller’s Paris or John Dos Passos’ New York. In the same way, Naples refuses to remain a mere background and occupies, with angry pride, a foreground where it cries out its violent and inevitable story:
In that season of rains, the city had cracked yet again, an entire building had buckled onto one side, like a person who, sitting in an old chair, leans on the worm-eaten arm and it gives way. Dead, wounded. And shouts, blows, cherry bombs. The city seemed to harbour in its guts a fury that couldn’t get out and therefore eroded it from the inside, or erupted in pustules on the surface, swollen with venom against everyone, children, adults, old people, visitors from other cities, Americans from NATO, tourists of every nationality, the Neapolitans themselves.
Yes, I liked to hate it, this ill, frenzy world, which doesn’t care to redeem itself, built by a gifted writer who doesn’t spare us the ugliness of the human nature, even in the most celebrated human traits, often idealized (according to her, at least) into qualities, like self-sacrifice, like geniality, like friendship, like love. A world that prays to be forgotten, a world that prays to be told. ...more
I remember seeing, some time ago, a movie that was bordering comedy and drama without truly becoming neither, n
Through the Revolving Looking Glass
I remember seeing, some time ago, a movie that was bordering comedy and drama without truly becoming neither, not even a melodrama. It was sometimes touching, sometimes funny, sometimes only artificial – like many a successful box office today. The name of the movie was Sliding Doors and it was the plot’s idea I liked most: two alternative futures for the heroine, depending on some apparently minor circumstance – her catching or not a train.
Well, while thinking hard 😊 about the second volume of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, The Story of a New Name, it suddenly struck me that its main technique (the whole series main technique, I guess) is roughly the same – the revolving doors one, combined with the good old motive of the double so favoured by Romantic and/ or Gothic literature. Lila and Lenù are nothing but two faces of one and only character in two different circumstances generated by the turning point of continuing or abandoning her education:
My life forces me to imagine what hers would have been if what happened to me had happened to her, what use she would have made of my luck. And her life continuously appears in mine, in the words that I’ve uttered, in which there’s often an echo of hers, in a particular gesture that is an adaptation of a gesture of hers, in my less which is such because of her more, in my more which is the yielding to the force of her less.
Furthermore (and this gets better and better, oh, genial me!) each of them reinvent the other by degrees, both as an ideal and an enemy, in a game of magnifying and diminishing mirrors. This could explain why a reader accused the narrative voice of omniscience – in fact the narrator tells two stories about the same characters, often from the point of view of the only self able to tell a coherent story (thus the first person narrative) since the other, left in a cruder world, has to be picked up (this was one powerful comparison) like the contents of a luggage accidentally opened:
How easy it is to tell the story of myself without Lila: time quiets down and the important facts slide along the thread of the years like suitcases on a conveyor belt at an airport; you pick them up, put them on the page, and it’s done. It’s more complicated to recount what happened to her in those years. The belt slows down, accelerates, swerves abruptly, goes off the tracks. The suitcases fall off, fly open, their contents scatter here and there. Her things end up among mine: to accommodate them, I am compelled to return to the narrative concerning me (and that had come to me unobstructed), and expand phrases that now sound too concise.
In fact, if the shoes were the obvious leitmotiv in the first book, alluding to a Cinderella story gone wrong, here it has been replaced by a more subtle one: the scattered suitcase, symbol not of a life, but of a narrative, since the Cinderella story is now supplanted by the Rising Artist story, Faustian way:
I began to read The Blue Fairy from the beginning, racing over the pale ink, the handwriting so similar to mine of that time. But already at the first page I began to feel sick to my stomach and soon I was covered with sweat. Only at the end, however, did I admit what I had understood after a few lines. Lila’s childish pages were the secret heart of my book. Anyone who wanted to know what gave it warmth and what the origin was of the strong but invisible thread that joined the sentences would have had to go back to that child’s packet, ten notebook pages, the rusty pin, the brightly coloured cover, the title, and not even a signature.
From this perspective, the abominable wounds the two “friends” successfully manage to inflict each other make an eerie perfect sense – Elena reads Lila’s notebooks to gain perspective of her other destiny, Lila sleeps with the love of Lenù’s life to punish her for her obsession with a rather evil being, Lenù begins to write Lila’s story to punish her for wanting to sink into oblivion without her permission, and so forth and so on. For it seems clear to me that the book is not intended as the story of a friendship, but as a bizarre parallel bildungsroman passed through the merciless introspective analysis the narrator subjects herself when she does not objectively psychoanalyse her other herself. But in the end, it always comes to one single being, and its key word is “imagine”:
I thought: yes, Lila is right, the beauty of things is a trick, the sky is the throne of fear; I’m alive, now, here, ten steps from the water, and it is not at all beautiful, it’s terrifying; along with this beach, the sea, the swarm of animal forms, I am part of the universal terror; at this moment I’m the infinitesimal particle through which the fear of every thing becomes conscious of itself; I; I who listen to the sound of the sea, who feel the dampness and the cold sand; I who imagine all Ischia, the entwined bodies of Nino and Lila, Stefano sleeping by himself in the new house that is increasingly not so new, the furies who indulge the happiness of today to feed the violence of tomorrow.
I read this second volume as eagerly as the first. Until this idea of the double hit me, I confess I was somehow annoyed with the progress of the fable, which seemed to me sometimes in a precarious balance between sublime and ridicule, with its characters sliding slowly and irreversibly from caricatural to grotesque. However, if my Model Author’s intentions coincide with the empirical one’s, this could be an interesting reading key to put things in a new and thrilling perspective. I’ll keep reading the other two volumes and let you know 😊....more
Non avevo mai sentito parlare di Milena Agus quando la mia amica Ema mi ha inviato Mal di pietre. Nonostante questo, ho cominciato a leggerlo subito, Non avevo mai sentito parlare di Milena Agus quando la mia amica Ema mi ha inviato Mal di pietre. Nonostante questo, ho cominciato a leggerlo subito, non solo perché la recensione di Ema era molto interessante (si può leggere qui , in rumeno ☺) ma soprattutto perché era in italiano e c’era un po’ che non leggevo niente in questa bellissima lingua et anche perché (lo dico con la vergogna appropriata, figuriamoci) non aveva molte pagine.
Frattempo ho saputo (evviva l’Wikipedia!) che l’autrice è un’esponente del gruppo “Nuova letteratura sarda”, che è insegnante d’italiano e che è diventata nota proprio con Mal di pietre, il suo secondo romanzo dopo Mentre dorme il pescecane.
Devo ammettere che durante la lettura ho avuto dei pensieri contradittori riguardo a questo piccolo libro. A volte mi sembrava intollerabilmente sentimentale, a volte un po’ naïve nel suo patetismo – questa storia di una donna alla ricerca dell’amore assoluto oltre il quale nulla ha senso e il male emotivo di cui si era tradotto in un male fisico – i calcoli renali (per quale motivo, non lo so, forse perché le pietre sono un simbolo della durevolezza, dell’immobilità nel tempo et nello spazio, opposte all’acqua che corre e si dissipa dappertutto, forse perché i reni sono i filtri delle impurità dell’organismo come l’amore il filtro delle emozioni ma ambedue si possono bloccare lasciando il corpo e l’anima indifesi, oppure forse perché il mal di reni è uno dei mali fisici più intesi tutto come l’amore tra i mali psichici):
…nonna lo aveva spogliato e appoggiato delicatamente la gamba di legno ai piedi del letto e baciato e accarezzato a lungo la sua mutilazione. E in cuor suo per la prima volta aveva ringraziato Dio, di averla fatta nascere, di averla tirata fuori dal pozzo, di averle dato un bel seno e dei bei capelli, perfino, anzi soprattutto, i calcoli renali.
Ma ogni volta che cominciavo a pensare che forse non vale la pena continuare la lettura, trovavo qualche immagine bella e delicata, con una forza di suggestione così inaspettata che demoliva rapidamente i miei pregiudizi e contradiceva subito la mia suspicione che quello che leggevo era simili-letteratura:
Io sono nata che mia nonna aveva più di sessant’anni. Mi ricordo che da piccola la trovavo bellissima e stavo sempre incantata a vedere quando si pettinava e si faceva sa crocchia all’antica, con le trecce di capelli che non sono mai diventati bianchi, né radi, e che partivano dalla discriminatura in mezzo per poi essere raccolti in due chignon. Ero orgogliosa quando veniva a prendermi a scuola con quel suo sorriso giovane fra le mamme e i padri degli altri, perché i miei, essendo musicisti, erano sempre in giro per il mondo.
La storia è semplice ed è narrata in un modo molto scorrevole: la nipote dell’eroina principale (l’io narrante), ricostruisce con nostalgia e tenerezza la gioventù di sua nonna dalle storie che quest’ultima gli aveva raccontate spesso durante la sua infanzia. Storie di una cerca quasi fiabesca di un ideale, a un’età in quale voleva l’amore così disperatamente che avrebbe preferito piuttosto morire che vivere senza trovarlo. Storia di un matrimonio forzato con un uomo gentile ma che lei non poteva amare e della rassegnazione di vivere vicino a lui magari una vita tranquilla e confortabile nella soleggiata Sardegna. Infine, storia di un viaggio magico a Civitavecchia per fare le cure termali a causa dei suoi calcoli renali che non solo gli facevano molto male, ma la impedivano ad avere bambini. Ed è lì, in un posto abbastanza brutto e triste, che nonna sembra incontrare finalmente il suo grand’amore, il Reduce, un uomo soffrendo della stessa malattia e con cui può finalmente essere se stessa:
… nonna diceva sempre che la sua vita si divideva in due parti: prima e dopo le cure termali, come se l’acqua che le aveva fatto espellere i calcoli fosse stata miracolosa in tutti i sensi.
Interessante è ugualmente il fatto che, benché le luci della ribalta siano fissate sulla nonna paterna, le sue storie s’intrecciano delicatamente con altre due, sfocate nel fondale: quella della nonna materna e quella della nipote. L’altra nonna della narratrice ha sofferto anche lei di troppo amore, ma la sua tragedia, nata dalla violazione delle convenzioni sociali, è solo suggerita dalla sua immagine priva di allegria che resta nella memoria della nipote:
I primi tempi telefonò quasi ogni giorno e non diceva dov’era. La sorella maggiore, che le aveva fatto da madre perché quella vera era morta di parto alla sua nascita, piangeva e le diceva che il padre ormai si vergognava di uscire per strada e i fratelli minacciavano di andarla a cercare in capo al mondo e di ammazzarla. Non telefonò più. Chiuse per sempre con l’amore, i sogni…
D’altra parte, l’infanzia della narratrice, illuminata dell’immagine della nonna come lo è, non è così serena come appare a una prima vista, perché la bambina soffre pure di una mancanza affettiva, rifugiandosi nell’amore della nonna in assenza dell’amore dei genitori:
Mia nonna è stata tutta per me, almeno quanto mio padre tutto per la musica e mia madre tutta per mio padre.
La mia intelligentissima amica Ema mi diceva un giorno fa che sebbene l’amore filiale abbia saltato una generazione, forse la nipote è stata più fortunata e ha trovato la felicità nell’amore rifiutato alle sue nonne. Può darsi che Ema abbia ragione, a meno che l’idea suggerita dal libro non sia che l’amore resta per sempre elusivo, intangibile e doloroso benché a volte sia confuso con la contentezza domestica.
In ogni caso, questa tripla visione sull’amore come un mal (di cuore, di pietre) trasmesso da una generazione ad altra, insieme a un finale assolutamente geniale, bastano per garantire una lettura pienamente soddisfacente. Per non parlare del ritmo incantevole della narrazione, con le sue inflessioni magiche, come quest’evocazione di Milano, fata da tanti epiteti ed enumerazioni che avrebbe dovuto infastidirci e che invece crea un’immagine sorprendentemente fresca e viva:
…Milano era grandissima, altissima, coi palazzi massicci, decorati in modo sontuoso, bellissima, grigia, nebbiosa, tanto traffico, il cielo a pezzetti fra i rami spogli degli alberi, tante luci di negozi, fari di auto, semafori, sferragliare di tram, la gente fitta con le facce nei baveri dei cappotti dentro un’aria di pioggia.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found reading the classics sort of comforting. Could it be because it is always reassuring to enjoy an oeuvre I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found reading the classics sort of comforting. Could it be because it is always reassuring to enjoy an oeuvre whose value has already been confirmed by time? Or maybe the comfort lies in some subconscious pride for humanity who found a way to steal from gods a bit of eternity? Whatever the explanation, one thing is obvious: Jane Austen did not disappoint me this time neither, on the contrary, made me want to re-read more of her.
A friend of mine said, during a discussion about Sense and Sensibility, that her books are repetitive in pattern and feel sometimes like excessively romantic. I beg to differ – I appreciated every one of her novels for entirely different reasons and their only thing in common I could find was the witty depiction of the society at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth’. Her novels might seem at first only charming love stories that end more or less with a happily ever after, although never in a syrupy way. But love is often only a pretext for the analysis of a more prosaic subject – the institution of matrimony and its importance in the society of those times.
Among Jane Austen’s novels (to re-read!) Pride and Prejudice is by far my favourite, not only because of its iconic, powerful couple (here I agree that love comfortably occupies the forefront of the story), but also because of the author’s ability to use irony and humour with such an elegance and subtlety that the modern reader can fully enjoy it even in the absence of extensive knowledge of the habits and customs of the society depicted. On the other hand, Emma reveals Austen as a forerunner of the modernist novel, either in the masterful creation of an unreliable narrator and in the psychological analysis.
In regards to Sense and Sensibility, though, well, this was Jane Austen’s first book, published anonymously (like all her other books – wasn’t Virginia Woolf who suspected that more than one book published under the Anonymous signature had been written by a woman?) and at her expenses, at the end of an era – the classicism and the beginning of another – the romanticism. Interpreting the two feminine characters as exponents of the two literary movements could provide one reading key, suggested by the title itself anyway.
Of course matrimony is given here, like in the other novels, the starring role. Characters seek marriage in order to obtain or consolidate fortunes or titles, hence a position in society and they are often disposed to sacrifice their “heart desires” for this. Therefore, the reader is presented with a colourful gallery of couples, in which the married ones are an amusing foreshadowing of the to-be-married ones, and which vary from comic to grotesque with a spice of dramatic for the two heroines but end in the same cheerful ordinary way, to let them blend too into a society that believes mostly in appearances. Altogether, the couples are delightful, cheerfully borderlining between caricature and protrait.
Take, for example the Palmers, presented more humorously than with malice, for their harmless union brought together two characters entirely different but who manage to live happily together, to the neverlasting wonder of their friends and acquaintances, even though Elinor finds a reasonable explanation for this:
His temper might perhaps be a little soured by finding, like many others of his sex, that through some unaccountable bias in favour of beauty, he was the husband of a very silly woman, but (…) that this kind of blunder was too common for any sensible man to be lastingly hurt by it.
Fanny and John Dashwood, on the other hand, are depicted with an acerbic satire, that reveals the grotesque harmony of their living, the way in which they complete each other in pettiness and auto sufficiency, a parody of Plato’s androgyne myth:.
Had he married a more amiable woman, he might have been made still more respectable than he was: he might even have been made amiable himself; for he was very young when he married, and very fond of his wife. But Mrs. John Dashwood was a strong caricature of himself; more narrow-minded and selfish.
It is not hard to guess that their marriage foreshadows Robert’s marriage with Lucy.
Concerning Elinor and Marianne, however, the author seems to abandon irony for a while, for she involves both of them in apparently more dramatic but symmetrical situations, generated by the love triangles: Marianne – Willoughby – Sophia and Elinor – Edward – Lucy. In each of these triangles the men are to chose – one between love and duty, the other between love and money. Neither choses love but, in a moralistic way, the one who chose duty is granted love. However, the geniality of the author keeps her from falling neither into melodrama nor into excessive didacticism, for if Edward’s noble sacrifice is rewarded only with a quiet, modest rural life, Willoughby’s choice is not sanctioned with a deep suffering, as to suggest that maybe his marriage was the norm, not Edward’s:
…that he was for ever inconsolable, that he fled from society, or contracted an habitual gloom of temper, or died of a broken heart, must not be depended on—for he did neither. He lived to exert, and frequently to enjoy himself. His wife was not always out of humour, nor his home always uncomfortable; and in his breed of horses and dogs, and in sporting of every kind, he found no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity.
Sense and Sensibility is an extraordinary debut for Jane Austen not only in the reconstruction of an era with its values but also in the clever employment of various narrative techniques, like charming irony, sharp observation and unexpected alternation between an omniscient narrator and a reflector one. All this used with such a wittiness that you forget Ortega y Gasset aesthetical interdictions and laugh heartily at passages like this one:
“He is such a charming man, that it is quite a pity he should be so grave and so dull. Mama says HE was in love with your sister too. I assure you it was a great compliment if he was, for he hardly ever falls in love with any body." (Charlotte Palmer speaking)
Or this one:
Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition.
Moreover, the compositional balance is skilfully provided either by the alternation between reason and emotion and by the parallelism of the stories. Thus the significance of the title gains unexpected depths, since it has at least three interpretations: a social one (money versus sentiment), a psychological one (reason versus emotion) and an aesthetic one (classicism versus romanticism). And for all three, the author seems to imply, it’s not necessarily about a choice, but about a way in between. Therefore, the image of the path leading from Barton to Delaford, which ends our story, is the last reading key to follow:
Between Barton and Delaford, there was that constant communication which strong family affection would naturally dictate; and among the merits and the happiness of Elinor and Marianne, let it not be ranked as the least considerable, that though sisters, and living almost within sight of each other, they could live without disagreement between themselves, or producing coolness between their husbands.
I don’t know why I kept reading Hanya Yanagihara’s Little Life until its very end. It was a painful reading, not because its content moved me, but becI don’t know why I kept reading Hanya Yanagihara’s Little Life until its very end. It was a painful reading, not because its content moved me, but because I felt that it tried so hard to emotionally blackmail me– and how proud of myself I am for the way I fought back every step of the way! I am kidding, but the truth is I am not a fan of this genre of books, which try to make the readers think they are shedding aesthetical tears when all the way they are shedding only biological ones. I mean, it is only human to be overthrown by tragedy, but if the effect is not cathartic, it is not real art.
I will not argue further, because all I would have liked to say has already been better expressed by Daniel Mendelsohn in his long, harsh, but well-sustained review, A Striptease Among Pals, published on December 3rd 2015 in The New York Review of Books.
Here are some quotes I strongly agree with:
“Yanagihara’s real subject, it turns out, is abjection. What begins as a novel that looks like it’s going to be a bit retro – a cross between Mary McCarthy and a Stendhalian tale of young talent triumphing in a great metropolis – soon reveals itself as a very twenty- first- century tale indeed: abuse, victimization, self-loathing. This sleight-of-hand is slyly hinted at in the book’s striking cover image, a photograph by the late Peter Hujar of a man grimacing in what appears to be agony. The joke, of which Yanagihara and her publishers were aware, is that the portrait belongs to a series of images that Hujar, who was gay, made of men in the throes of orgasm. In the case of Yanagihara’s novel, however, the “real” feeling – not only what the book is about but, I suspect, what its admirers crave—is pain rather than pleasure. (…) Inasmuch as there’s a structure here, it’s that of a striptease: gradually, in a series of flashbacks, the secrets about Jude’s past are uncovered until at last we get to witness the pivotal moment of abuse, a scene in which one of his many sexual tormentors, a sadistic doctor, deliberately runs him over, leaving him as much a physical cripple as an emotional one. (…) (Was there not one priest who noticed something, who wanted to help? Not one counselor?) (…) You suspect that Yanagihara wanted Jude to be one of those doomed golden children around whose disintegrations certain beloved novels revolve—Sebastian Flyte, say, in Brideshead Revisited. But the problem with Jude is that, from the start, he’s a pill: you never care enough about him to get emotionally involved in the first place, let alone affected by his demise. Sometimes I wondered whether even Yanagihara liked him. (…) In the end, her novel is little more than a machine designed to produce negative emotions for the reader to wallow in—unsurprisingly, the very emotions that, in her Kirkus Reviews interview, she listed as the ones she was interested in, the ones she felt men were incapable of expressing: fear, shame, vulnerability. (…) We know, alas, that the victims of abuse often end up unhappily imprisoned in cycles of (self-) abuse. But to keep showing this unhappy dynamic at work is not the same as creating a meaningful narrative about it. Yanagihara’s book sometimes feels less like a novel than like a seven- hundred- page long pamphlet. (…) In a culture where victimhood has become a claim to status, how could Yanagihara’s book—with its unending parade of aesthetically gratuitous scenes of punitive and humiliating violence—not provide a kind of comfort? To such readers, the ugliness of this author’s subject must bring a kind of pleasure, confirming their preexisting view of the world as a site of victimization and little else. This is a very “little” view of life. Like Jude and his abusive lover, this book and its champions seem “bound to each other by their mutual disgust and discomfort; like the image on its cover, Yanagihara’s novel has duped many into confusing anguish and ecstasy, pleasure and pain.”...more
Mă întreb din ce motiv i-o fi schimbat Editura Eminescu Anișoarei Odeanu. la reeditarea în 1971, titlul romanului, din Călător din noaptea de Ajun (aș Mă întreb din ce motiv i-o fi schimbat Editura Eminescu Anișoarei Odeanu. la reeditarea în 1971, titlul romanului, din Călător din noaptea de Ajun (așa cum apare el în 1936), în Anotimpul pierdut. Să fi fost din motive strict comerciale sau poate din cauza unei vagi conotații religioase a primului titlu? Habar n-am, dar schimbarea nu mi se pare un cîștig, nici din punct de vedere stilistic, nici măcar publicitar.
În altă ordine de idei, îmi propusesem de multă vreme să citesc acest roman, pe care-l amintește și Mihail Sebastian în Jurnalul său (e adevărat, doar ca să-l înțepe un pic pe Camil Petrescu, care ar fi sfătuit-o pe autoare să-l șteargă din dedicație pe Sebastian și să-l lase doar pe el), mai ales că știam că George Calinescu o numise „întîia ingenuă a literaturii române”. Acum constat că ar fi fost probabil o idee mai bună să încep cu poezia ei, căci am pățit ca-n proverbul acela cu pomul și cu sacul. Vreau să spun că nu am găsit prea multe argumente (pe lîngă vocea feminină și cîteva găselnițe stilistice) ca să-l înscriu printre operele memorabile ale literaturii noastre. Dimpotrivă, dacă ar fi să-l caracterizez cu un singur cuvînt, acela ar fi – banal. Banal în sensul de cuminte, în contextul în care nu propune (și nici nu ascunde) nimic extraordinar, ca să folosesc un truism. Nici în structura epică, nici în construcția personajelor, nici în perspectiva narativă, cu toată prefața extrem de laudativă a lui Camil Petrescu. Să vedem.
Structura tripartită Peter – Răscruci – Singurătate are rolul de a puncta trei etape în viața naratoarei Olga Ropescu : povestea de iubire, vindecarea treptată, redefinirea sinelui. O structură lipsită de pretenții, al cărei principal merit, echilibrul, nu o distinge în noianul de opere de același fel, create după modelul clasic. Mi-a plăcut totuși că fiecare parte se încheie cu un gest aparent nesemnificativ, dar care încheie decisiv și simbolic un capitol de existență, printr- o imagine fie auditivă, fie vizuală fie tactilă: zgomotul pe care-l face căzînd în cutia goală ultima scrisoare a Olgăi către Peter; foșnetul ziarului deschis de aceasta imediat după ce dă glas (la propriu) suferinței sale și obrazul eroinei lipit de scoarța copacului în final.
Universul epic, atît cel exterior cît și cel interior, este descris de o tînără superficială și plicticoasă, care își lasă adesea gîndurile neterminate, spre exasperarea cititorului. Paradoxal, acesta e meritul cel mai mare al acestei proze, în care Camil Petrescu a văzut o tehnică pointilistă, lăudînd disprețul autoarei pentru „efecte” narative. Perspectiva e lineară atît din punct de vedere temporal cît și afectiv. Într-adevăr, personajul e absolut credibil în monumentala sa banalitate, bovaric într-o cheie atît de minoră că devine aproape invizibilă. Din „pudoare intelectuala”, ca să folosesc o altă sintagmă a lui Camil Petrescu, Anișoara Odeanu creează un narator-personaj foarte autentic în sinceritatea sa, dar de-o platitudine descurajatoare:
Avea privirea aceea groaznic de tâmpită pe care o au uneori oamenii îndrăgostiți. Nu-l iubesc pe Peter, e stupid să se creadă că trebuie neapărat să-l iubești pe un om la care te gândești mai mult. Eu, de exemplu, mă gândesc la Peter pentru că n-am ce să fac până se servește masa.
Candoarea unor afirmații ca aceea de mai sus poate să amuze o vreme, dar devine plicticoasă prin repetiția mecanică, iar ceea ce ar fi fost un subiect foarte interesant pentru o nuvelă (si-mi vin în minte Oamenii din Dublin ai lui Joyce), devine obositor prin lungime.
Cît despre cele două personaje masculine, ele sînt, evident, șterse, pentru că eroina nu poate (sau nu vrea) să le cunoască nici un pic. Informațiile vagi și trecute prin sensibilitatea de rinocer a Olgăi conturează un Peter imatur și antipatic și un Mircea care ar fi putut deveni o figură memorabilă dacă naratoarea l-ar fi lasat.
Din cînd în cînd totusi, găsești mici bijuterii stilistice care te scot din amorțeală și te fac, vorba lui Bacovia, să cetești înainte. Cele mai izbutite sînt comparațiile: „Mă simțeam agățată de Peter, toată, ca ornamentele de bradul de Crăciun…”; „Ivi, plângând mereu, îmi dădea impresia unui copil cu scutecele veșnic ude.”; „Valurile băteau malurile spumos, toată plaja era udă. Închideam ochii și o ascultam cum sună ca și când s-ar goli câte un vas de apă în altul, nesfârșit.”
Din păcate, ele sînt înecate de cumplitul convenționalism al altora, care contrazic afirmația lui Camil Petrescu privind neobișnuita putere descriptivă a autoarei: „E-n haine de flanelă bej, cu tot soarele adus cu el, Peter. N-are ochelari și e foarte frumos. Surâde cu gropițe în obraji și observ pentru întâia dată că are buzele foarte fin desenate.”; „Am pus-o în plic, am coborât jos în zumzetul primăverii de pe străzi și am pus-o la cutie.”
În concluzie, un roman cuminte, neremarcabil nici din punctul de vedere al formei, nici al conținutului. Nu pierzi nimic citindu-l, dar nici ignorîndu-l. Așa și-așa. ...more
I was always suspicious about the reasons an author might have to disambiguate the title of his book – I saw it rather as a sort of mocking warning toI was always suspicious about the reasons an author might have to disambiguate the title of his book – I saw it rather as a sort of mocking warning to the reader not to look further, for there are no hidden meanings, it is just a name – of a character, or a house, or a street.
And in Revolutionary Road the disambiguation comes soon enough, in the second chapter of the first part, right after the first encounter with the main characters and the information of the timeframe:
He started the engine and drove carefully away, down to the turn at the base of Revolutionary Hill and on up the winding blacktop grade of Revolutionary Road.
Right. Stop seeking symbolism, metaphorism or any other crazy idealism, that is, stop investing the title with unnecessary depths, the narrative voice seems to argue, it is only about a street, with a pretentious name, true, and that’s all.
But is it? The joker of this domestic tragedy, the Shakespearian fool who always speaks the truth, John Givings, begs to differ, in an intentional qui pro quo that cruelly displays the full irony of the title:
“Old Helen here’s been talking it up about you people for months,” he told them. “The nice young Wheelers on Revolutionary Road, the nice young revolutionaries on Wheeler Road…”
The irony of noble feelings that become only labels, or stereotypes, or street names, with no other significance, for not only the famous road leads to a stagnant, standardly boring suburbia, but also the characters’ names are misleading – their wheels, so to speak, stopped spinning a long time ago and are not likely to start again, despite their increasing (and fruitless) efforts.
In fact, the whole book is about the power of self-deception: Franklin Wheeler, the main character in the novel, has an image of himself as he thinks he is (a tragic figure trapped in a meaningless life), and an image of himself as he wishes he was (“an intense, nicotine-stained, Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man”), together with many other images, not necessarily consistent with each other, created by his wife, his friends, his acquaintances, his colleagues and his boss, images he works to improve or to change even when he is not sure what they show anymore.
Like a broken mirror, all these images have a pathetic quality: they reflect but they cannot restore the ideal unity of the superior being Frank feels he should have been, if only… Again, it’s John role to shatter this illusion too, by pointing mercilessly his weaknesses and shortcomings, sneering almost gleefully at him when he learns about the cancelled trip to Europe where Frank was supposed to find himself:
“What happened? You get cold feet, or what? You decide you like it here after all? You figure it’s more comfy here in the old Hopeless Emptiness after all…”
I think Kurt Vonnegut’s comparison of this novel to Fitzgerald’s masterpiece (“…The Great Gatsby of my time…”) is brilliantly appropriate. Here you have the perfect American family, beautiful people, living in beautiful houses, spending their time with trustful friends, in a word, living the American Dream. And like in the other novel, the American Dream is only a beautiful phrase, a label hiding the sense of failure, the dissatisfaction with yourself and the world. The question is: Is the Wheeler’s tragedy (and any other heroes’ crushed by modern civilization) generated by society or by an overinflated opinion of themselves? In other words, is the society that does not live up to their expectations or is the other around?
Like in the dialogues Frank has with his wife in his mind and which are often different from the real ones, or like in Howard Givings’ habit to silent his wife by turning off his hearing aid, maybe, in the end, the real tragedy of the characters is the failure to communicate, both ways that is, to hear and be heard.
Anyway, after all is said and done, there remains a certitude: the street and its surroundings with mocking name, perennial proof of the lasting power of mediocrity, the boring but oh-so orderly reassuring mediocrity, which does not have place for sublime, it is true, but neither does it have for tragic:
The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. Even at night, as if on purpose, the development held no looming shadows and no gaunt silhouettes. It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves. Proud floodlights were trained on some of the lawns, on some of the neat front doors and on the hips of some of the berthed, ice-cream colored automobiles.
There are two constructivist principles that, although, mainly used in education, could quite easily apply to all dynamics of the society, especially There are two constructivist principles that, although, mainly used in education, could quite easily apply to all dynamics of the society, especially immigration. I’m talking about assimilation and accommodation, the first acting one way (from host to guest, so to say) the other both ways (but also mainly to the host benefit). In the end, however, to borrow an image from Piaget (and to remain thus in the same constructivist field), the goat may be fatter and healthier after eating the cabbage, but there is little of the cabbage itself left.
Do I think this to be a bad thing? Not necessarily. On one hand, the foreign intake to a culture enriches it in unimaginable ways – think of Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Emil Cioran, Irène Némirovsky – to remember only some foreign writers and what they did for the English and French cultures. On the other hand, immigration is usually a question of choice, that is, the cabbage consciously takes the risk of being chewed up by the goat. So the pain of mastication and digestion process (to take a little too far and a little too cynically Piaget’s allegory) can also create memorable works.
And from this point of view, Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club is an interesting enough book, describing the struggle between the need to conserve their identity in the assimilation process and the desire to accommodate to the American culture for the benefit of their children of four immigrant Chinese families over two generations. There are many interesting stories about customs, traditions, social and family relationships and prejudices in pre-communist China, some very alien to the Western and American mentality, other not so much.
The most touching parts of the book stress daughter-mother relationships, that is, the way in which daughters, who fought all their lives for independence, come slowly and inexorably to understand the truth of the phrase: “Your mother is in your bones”, and the implications of this truth, which are not only genetic, but also historical, social and ethical:
Her wisdom is like a bottomless pond. You throw stones in and they sink into the darkness and dissolve. Her eyes looking back do not reflect anything. I think this to myself even though I love my daughter. She and I have shared the same body... But when she was born, she sprang from me like a slippery fish, and has been swimming away ever since. All her life, I have watched her as though from another shore. And now I must tell her everything about my past. It is the only way to... pull her to where she can be saved.
However, with all its poignant meanings and beautiful, sensible writing, The Joy Luck Club did not strike a chord with me. on the contrary, and I tried, all along my reading, to put a finger on this persistent feeling of dissatisfaction. At first I thought it was because of the overused technique to loosely hook different narratives in order to create an almost novel, instead of a more appropriate collection of eight short-stories (I frankly prefer the other way around, stories that seem to preserve the echo of others, while remaining frustratingly ambiguous, like Alice Munro’s Runaway or Margaret Atwood’s Moral Disorder). It was not even the pestering symmetry (the order of the stories 4-4-4-4, the 4 mother-daughter pairs, the decision to go to China in the first story and the going to China in the last, and so on), even though I think they contributed also to my refusal to consider this book a great book. It is a good one, no doubt, but its biggest flaw, which prevents it to become a masterpiece, is its predictability. I mean, I perfectly understand why Frank Chin accused it of promoting stereotypies – all you could expect from the prose of an American-born Chinese writer is there. And when I say “all” I literally mean it, as in nothing less and, unfortunately, nothing more.
To conclude, I am not sorry I have read it, it is a readable, even though slightly overrated book. At least, in my humble opinion, to quote the favourite expression of a friend of mine. ...more
This is my first encounter with John Irving and it had to be such a disappointing one! And I was so looking forward to reading A Prayer for Owen MeanyThis is my first encounter with John Irving and it had to be such a disappointing one! And I was so looking forward to reading A Prayer for Owen Meany - which I will, in the end, but not immediately, for I must recover from this reading, first :D.
The best of this book is its title (although Martin Amis beat him with his Pregnant Widow), the rest of it looks like an overgrown parody of the omniscient narrator of the 19th century, with his endless foreshadowings, forewarnings and forebodings (quite tiring after a while). Even the narrative is too dry and almost too clean, if I can say so.
The story itself is so symmetric and predictable that it loses on the way its tragicomical intent and becomes simply boring - for me at least.
It is only because I caught glimpses of a true writer behind this somehow wanting novel I will try another book by him. ...more
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