The Sleep of Reason

Ferrante again: "Troubling Love" and, briefly, Anthony Marra

     Yes--Ferrante again--her first novel, "Troubling Love," which was also made into a film. The novel exhibits all the characteristics of the Neapolitan novels except one: it is only about 130 pages in a fairly small format--two or three sessions and you are through. There is a first-person narrator and considerable introspection, and the locale is down-market Naples, dirty and crumbling.
     The narrator is Delia, whose mother, Amalia, has drowned in strange circumstances. Delia returns to Naples, her childhood home, to attend the funeral, and she sets off on an investigation of the mysterious days preceding her mother's death This becomes a re-living of her childhood and her relationship, in particular, with her mother, who was physically abused by her father. And did Delia, as child, contribute to that abuse by reporting on Amalia's possible contacts with another man?
     Delia discovers that Amalia seems to have had a late-life romance with a elderly suitor, a fetishist who has collected all the drowned woman's underwear in a suitcase.
      And in this quest to reconstruct her mother's final days, Delia not only revisits her childhood, but also in the words of one reviewer "disentangles the knot of lies, passions, and memories that bind mother and daughter."
     I enjoyed it.
     Flash forward: I am nearly halfway through a fascinating book with the long title--"A Constellation of Vital Phenomena," by Anthony Marra, a writer I had never heard of. The book is a great achievement of writing and research, and so far (half-way) it has kept me fascinated. It is set in Chechnya, and you will be helped by googling 'Chechnya' and reading the history. Marra has also published another book, which I will get hold of--"The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories, Music, Culture and Travel."  Marra went to Landon School, here in Washington.

The Slough of Despond

No getting away from it--the Trump victory has cast a deep depression over the Cutler/Powers household. A very deep depression...
The initial reaching for comfort ("maybe, he won't turn out too badly") has very quickly given way to utmost pessimism. The names of potential cabinet members are enough to evoke a shudder at their extremist views, and the same goes for the list of potential Supreme Court nominees.
No--there is absolutely no reason to have the slightest glimmer of optimism about the future of this country...and yet, there is some comfort in the fact that more voters voted against him than voted for him: could this at least give him some pause as he considers actual policies? I doubt it. Will facts that he has twisted or distorted in his campaign lead him to modify any actions he had advocated--the wall, abolishing NAFTA, restoring the coal industry, getting out of NATO or the UN, carpet-bombing ISIS, locking up Hilary, abolishing Obamacare, making abortion illegal...and so on. Again, I doubt it.
We see here a central problem with democracy that was also exemplified in the Brexit vote. Does a vote in which one side wins by a small percentage provide a genuine mandate to ignore and ride rough-shod over the views of just a little less than half the population? With Brexit, the referendum was ill-conceived--with a question of a major shift in the status quo there should surely have been a requirement for a qualified majority. In the United States, perhaps the best one might hope for would be some willingness to compromise on policies, recognizing the strength of opposing forces. But that is not going to happen. Winner take all will prevail.
So we are definitely in the Slough of Despond.
                                              
And who will lift us out?

Can The leopard Change His Spots?

The answer is no, especially when the leopard is already in his 'seventies and gives every indication that his character failings are not going to be transformed into those of a sane, sensible, well-balanced, diplomatic statesman and politician of presidential caliber. It just ain't going to happen..so prepare for the worst.

"The Nix"....addendum

One thing I forgot to mention when I wrote about the various locales visited by Nathan Hill in "The Nix" was an unforgettable visit to deaths on the battle front in Iraq (Bush Two's war: not Bush One's). There are fourteen pages or so of brilliant writing that seem to sum up the absurdities and the human tragedies of that war.

"The Nix" by Nathan Hill

    "The Nix" is a big novel in more ways than one. It weighs in at a pound and a half, with over 600 pages in quite a large page format.
John Irving has compared the author to Dickens--others have compared him to John Irving. There are also many shades of David Foster-Wallace (think of the thousand odd pages of "Infinite Jest") and of Thomas Pynchon. I quail at the task of outlining the plot: the various threads are so intertwined, and some of the minor characters have long chapters devoted to them. Examples--a long digression from the main story line by an undergraduate who has cheated in almost every academic endeavor she has undertaken, and an eleven page chapter in one continuous sentence (I estimate about 5,500 words) inside the warped mind of an obsessive gamer playing a fantasy game called Elfscape on his computer.
     The locales and time periods give you some idea of the scope of the narrative: we are in 2011 at a small college outside Chicago, in 1968 at the Chicago Democratic Convention with all the tear gas and police beatings of hippies, inside the minds of Hubert Humphrey and Walter Cronkite at the Convention, at a high school in the 'sixties in a small town in Iowa, we take a brief visit to Norway, and we watch from a window the Occupy Wall Street crowd in New York. And, of course, we are very much in the minds of all the characters, with their various personality disorders (from the acknowledgements, the psychology has been carefully researched) and their interactions with each other. Central to the novel is the relationship between Samuel and his mother, Faye, who abandoned him and his father when he was a child--already subject to weeping jags with intensities of one through five. What kicks the story off in 2011 is Faye getting arrested for throwing a stone at an extreme right-wing governor with Trump-like presidential aspirations. This brings Samuel into contact with his mother for the first time since she left home, and off we go...
    Here is a quote from a very good review in the New York Times:
"First, the good news: Hill has so much talent to burn that he can pull off just about any style, imagine himself into any person and convincingly portray any place or time. “The Nix” is hugely entertaining and unfailingly smart, and the author seems incapable of writing a pedestrian sentence or spinning a boring story.

One gets the sense that Hill wanted to include every anecdote, observation and turn of phrase he ever conjured up or heard, and was loath to prune any from the finished product. Maybe he was also disinclined to write a straightforward, quieter novel for fear — as Periwinkle, a publisher who plays a key role in the story, says critically of the beginning of Faye’s story that Samuel sends him — of slipping “into some familiar coming-of-age conventions.” "

The book is funny, it is satirical, and it points towards the Trump frenzy we are now experiencing. It varies enormously in style, from second person narration, to total stream of consciousness, and to straightforward narrative written with a wonderful sense of the right word and of the emotional measure of the characters.

Thoroughly recommended--but you may at times begin to lose patience, and in the end I am not sure that we do reach satisfactory resolution of the emotional conflicts. I hung in there, and I am an impatient reader. I think the end is a bit gimmicky but it is certainly enjoyable getting there.

Not surprisingly, the book took the author ten years to write.