In between two bouts of the plague, I inhaled Vladimir Sorokin’s “Day of the Oprichnik” (2006) and then – during the heat wave – “The Ice trilogy” (2002-6). No wonder he’s in exile. Science fiction that is not fiction about how people can make themselves into monsters. Post-Soviet Kurt Vonnegut?
Image: Nicholas Poussin, Summer: Ruth and Boaz (1664)
4/9. Finished Yevgenia Belorusets, “Lucky breaks” (translated by Eugene Ostashevsky). Brief portraits of women from Ukraine’s east. The tone varies from unsparingly acute reportage to droll absurdity. But no whimsey. Hurt, injustice and unease are never the topic, never in the foreground, but never out of sight in the background:
What is this story I am telling really about? Does it make any sense to continue? In fact, the story doesn’t exist, the narrative doesn’t continue, it breaks off. The florist disappeared. The house where she lived was destroyed. Her store was refitted into a warehouse of propaganda materials. Her regular customers left Donetsk long ago. Recently and purely by accident I bumped into one of the people who had often bought flowers from her, and he confessed to having heard something about the florist. He said that she went off into the fields and joined the partisans. That’s exactly what he said: “Went off into the fields.” But on what side her partisan unit was fighting and where those fields were, he had no idea. The florist, he reminded me, never had a nose for politics. She was a flowerworm of sorts; she even classified people into different kinds of flowers. She had never occupied herself with anything in life other than flowers, he lamented. “She must be fighting on the side of the hyacinths,” he suddenly declared, and broke into laughter. We fell silent as he stared at me and waited for me to give his sense of humor its due. “Time is passing, I’m growing smarter; I am beginning to understand which way the wind is blowing and where we’re heading,” he added. “I am not the person I was. You can’t fool me at one try! Kyiv has taught me a thing or two. This isn’t our naive Donetsk. But I still have my sense of humor; I don’t have to sift through my pockets for it.” And again he broke into laughter and then walked off with a triumphant gait, following his own business.
4/29. Heard Thomas Adès’ “Dante symphony” at Disney Hall.
Three summers ago I heard “Inferno” on the radio and then saw it performed with the Royal Ballet. Intensely disliked it. But this was different. I liked the “Inferno” more as an orchestral piece, without dancing. I liked watching the seven percussionists handling their beautiful instruments and making odd sounds – clappers, a giant freestanding drum skin in a frame. Also the bizarre sounds everybody else – double basses, contrabass clarinet, strings, tubas – was making. It was fun trying to figure out where a sound was coming from.
As an orchestral piece, it was possible to forget about the “Divine comedy” aspect entirely, and take it as a series of 13 colorful, varied tableaux.
I did not detect the voice of a prophet confronting us with the emptiness of our lives and our reprehensible sinfulness.
The mood was satirically grotesque rather than prophetic. Themes would start in an affirmative mode – jubilant, merry, serene, grand, tender – but would warp as they went on. Straightforward themes would merge and decay into polyphonic noise (Ligeti, Foss). The default mode was wrong-note neoclassicism (Prokofiev, Shostakovich), but also episodes of wrenching conflict (Ives, polyrhythm, conflicting tempi). Plus Adès integrates his basically tuneful, comprehensible material with free use of all the noisy, disruptive techniques of 20th century modernism (shrieking glissandi à la Xenakis, a bit more Ligeti).
Episode 12, “The Thieves – devoured by reptiles” is the high point. A boisterous romp by Offenbach distorted into a nightmare. Tremendous applause. But there’s one more section – “Satan – in a lake of ice” – that’s quiet and eerie.
The U.S. premieres were of the two other sections, “Purgatorio” and “Paradisio” (premiered in London, October 2021).
I immediately loved “Puragatorio” without any qualifications. The eerie, gripping recorded voice of a Khazan (cantor) singing a Baqashot prayer. The slightly tinny recording contrasting with the hyper-vivid droning of the double-basses and the bassoon.
“Paradiso” ended spectacularly – the ear-shattering kettle drum crescendo! – but the slow and steady revolving cycles went on past the stage of being mesmerizing to sleep-inducing.
Huge enthusiastic ovation for Adès, Dudamel and the orchestra.
Image: Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with St. John on Patmos, 1640
I love that Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels ended in bitterness. Elena is pleased her daughters seem to be better off than she was, but her books, her literary career, suddenly seems empty. Her works seem merely symptoms of the times and places she—and we, the readers—lived through. Among other things it’s a rebuke to Proust, who ended his epic so pleased with himself for writing it. And her friend, Lina, whose different destiny has generated their mutual story, has disappeared. In part because of Elena's writing.
I don’t understand the blurbists when they call it great and unprecedented. Doesn’t anybody read Natalia Ginzburg anymore? Didn’t anybody else watch La meglio gioventù (2003)?
But that’s not Ferrante’s fault. The cycle is tremendous. It’s also entertaining. The third volume, Those who leave and those who stay, is a permanent accomplishment. It creates an atmosphere of chaos, meaning both danger and the possibility of escape.
It begins with Elena’s encounter with the student revolutionaries. This is presented as a stupid misunderstanding. Seems accurate. Certainly it isn’t sentimental. First we follow Elena’s bewilderment among her new intellectual friends. Then we follow Lina’s path, dealing with conditions at the factory. Lina and Enzo’s comrade Pasquale, and the Dr. Galiani’s daughter Nadia—the chic woman Elena envies so—remain in the background. But in a sense they become the central characters. By the end of the volume it seems established that they were the terrorists who attacked Lina’s factory. But it’s not certain. Organizing, the conflict becomes Lina’s excuse for leaving the factory, and returning to the old neighborhood. All the threads come together. Gino from the old neighborhood becomes the leader of the neofascists. In the end, everyone—the anarchists, the neofascists, the thugs, the intellectuals, the stupid idealist Pietro—all revert to their original idiotic awfulness as neighborhood characters.
Perhaps the best thing in the last volume is the horrible epilogue of this thread, when Nadia emerges from hiding to tell lies to the police, and make everybody’s life miserable.
What does it mean that the Neapolitan novels are not the only multi-volume literary Bildungsroman of the moment—the most prominent being Eward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose cycle (2011-4), and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (2009-11)?
Ferrante’s novels were published later (2011-4), and start further back in time—the Fifties rather than the Sixties.
All three cycles detail desperate struggles to escape (family, home, dialect, fate). Their protagonists engage in idiotic behavior, we share all their varies modes of shame and remorse. All are intensely specific about places. The action is always defined by the scene. Ferrante’s whole epic emerges from the fact that Elena leaves the old neighborhood, while Lina stays. In Ferrante, venturing just a few blocks away is as significant as Patrick Melrose’s expulsion from Saint-Nazaire. Knausgaard begins a new life with each new apartment.
Ferrante’s Elena and Knausgaard aspire to write, though both are acutely aware that the desire for money, fame, and escape complicates the picture. St. Aubyn’s Patrick just wants to avoid madness and monsterhood, which turns out to be much more ambitious. Patrick and Knausgaard have substance abuse issues, to put it mildly. Ferrante’s women are spared that, but they have their own problems. Knausgaard’s terrified of his father, Ferrante of her mother, Patrick of both.
Sylistically, the cycles couldn’t be more different: St. Aubyn’s books are tidy and compact IEDs. Knausgaard transforms embarrassing over-sharing into art. Ferrante’s style is not so idiosyncratic. Her pace is brisk and she takes care to balance bitter and sweet. And so HBO & Rai have teamed up to turn the Neapolitan novels into a miniseries.
I look forward to it. It might be what the books are meant to be. Ferrante’s best moments are all cinematic: Lina having a tantrum about Marcello’s shoes at her wedding, the neighbors discovering that Giuseppina Peluso hung herself mid-pedicure, Mariarosa breastfeeding Mirko at the student meeting, Manuela’s blue fan fluttering at Elisa’s awful banquet, Elena and Lina watching their neighbors flee a earthquake from inside a car, ….