The TIES that bind

Oh the exquisite variations of great fiction. I recently reviewed Paul Auster’s “4321” a sweeping 865 page saga of four parallel lives. Today, I recommend, the slight 150-page novel by the renowned Italian writer, Domenico Starnone, rumored to be the husband of the enigmatic writer Elena Ferrante, believed to be the journalist and translator, Anita Raja. As if to prove the point, this novel takes off from an earlier work by Ferrante, “Days of Abandonment.” A good place to start if you’ve not read. 

Domenico Starnone

But first, an added incentive to read “Ties.” The novel has been translated by Jhumpa Lahiri, Pulitzer Prize winning-writer of the story collection, “Interpreter of Maladies” and the novel “The Namesake,” among others. Lahiri, who has multiple advanced degrees and an unquenchable curiosity, in other words, intimidatingly brilliant, decided a few years ago she wanted to learn Italian. Not for a casual tourist conversation, rather to read and write and study the great Italian writers and thinkers. She even moved her family to Italy to do it right. Lahiri, whose mother’s native language was Bengali, a language she never heard growing up in America, has a special relationship with language. 

In an interview in The New Yorker, she said, "In graduate school, I decided to write my doctoral thesis on how Italian architecture influenced English playwrights of the seventeenth century. I wonder why certain playwrights decided to set their tragedies, written in English, in Italian palaces. The thesis will discuss another schism between language and environment. The subject gives me a second reason to study Italian." 

By the time she had conquered the language, she had also written a memoir of that experience entitled, "In Other Words," which is as much about the meaning of language as one's personal quest to speak in another tongue. The final achievement: she translated "Ties" for Europa Editions, which also publishes Elena Ferrante. Symmetry. One might say, the ties that bind. 

In "Ties," what might be called a tour de force, Starnone takes the voice of the husband who abandoned his wife and children in Ferrante's earlier novel. He begins at the beginning, reflecting on the husband's choices, the wife's despair, and hysteria, and the family debacle that ensues, and continues throughout their long lives. 

This novel centers around a break-in at the apartment where the now elderly couple resides after all these years and all their angst. Their children are grown and still largely estranged from their father, and everything in the apartment has been turned upside down, much like their lives long ago. Only one item of significance, to him, appears to be stolen, and the cat is missing; thus, a small mystery takes over the larger mystery of what keeps people together. At least, these, Napolitano people.

Starnone has crafted a deceptively simple novel about the fragile ties between loved ones, and lovers, and what it takes to repair the damage we do over time. Or not. I will not give anything away, but the ending is simply spectacular. Bravo to Starnone, and to Ferrante, for these characters, and to Lahiri who made it possible to share their secrets. 

BEFORE AND AFTER THE FALL

            I often take my toddler grandson on a walk from his home to a cafe where we have tea and milk and a snack. The path is bound by flowering and fruit trees, rocks to examine, pine cones to collect, and the ever present possibility of trucks barreling by or, even better, trucks at work. Ah, the joy of a cement truck.

            Indulge me please, I will arrive at a book review, promise.

Novelist Noah Hawley

The other day, at the cafe, a hipsterish young man admiredmy boy's collection of trucks [always in hand] and I enjoyed watching their repartee although, I confess, I felt myself on alert and moved closer to my grandson. The young man was pleasant enough and soon collected his coffee and moved on, and I was ashamed for my concern. I’m sure the grandmothers of my generation, at least here in the U.S., did not fear sex trades and pedophiles, which seems to me to have become part of the public consciousness when six-year-old Etan Patz disappeared from a NYC street in 1979. Although of course there were high profile kidnappings, like Lindbergh, but the general public considered that the preserve of the rich and famous. 

            By the time my children were in school, in the 80s, they were being taught "stranger danger." Every generation has something. In the fifties we hid under our desks to practice protection against an atomic bomb. [Seriously!?] We watched beloved leaders assassinated. We discovered children had been abused by their clergy. Too many generations of mothers and grandmothers in inner cities fear for their sons, and daughters, in urban warfare.

            Distrust of the “other” has taken an increasingly firmer hold, and 9/11 sealed the lid on that coffin. The current state of the world, and this administration in particular, seems to me a reckoning with the fallout of the bombing of the world trade center. We are known, or we are the “other,” and the others are to be feared.

            I want my grandchildren to be kind. I want them to enjoy meeting all sorts of people and ultimately engage in discourse with all sorts of people. I want them to be hopeful and to believe that humans are good at heart, albeit often misguided and self-serving. Yet here I am, on alert when a stranger gets too close and I imagine when my first grandson goes to school, he will be taught to honor an “uh oh” feeling and to recoil from the unfamiliar.

            So… I was on holiday, joyfully digging into the book pile, and caught up with a very popular novel published last May: a suspense novel in which characters take the lead, their mysteries meant to reveal the larger mystery. BEFORE THE FALL, by Noah Hawley, might have been entitled After the Fall, because in the opening pages, a private plane goes down, with only two survivors, and the fallout is the novel. One passenger, an artist on his way from Martha’s Vineyard to meet with a gallery in NYC, has hitched his ride with a rich neighbor, and he and a 4-year-old boy are the only survivors.

            Is he a savior, a villain, an innocent victim? The FBI, the NTSA, the relatives, will decide. However, the narrative is commandeered by a conservative media talking head. Perhaps the artist is a foreign agent, or the secret lover of the plane’s owner. Perhaps he was the executor of a revenge killing by the partners of a billionaire on board. Police procedurals always look at all the cues and suspects, of course, but the paranoia that begins to dictate the story is not startling at all when taken in the context of our fear of the “other.”

            I’ll leave you with one of the more quotable comments. And, with the hope we find our way back to trust, which is the only way to find peace. Or, skip the news and read a good book.

            He thinks of Andy Warhol, who used to make up different stories for different journalists – I was born in Akron, I was born in Pittsburg – so when he spoke to people he would know which interviews they’d read. Warhol, who understood the idea that the self was just the story we told. Reinvention used to be a tool of the artist. He thinks of Duchamp’s urinal, of Claes Oldenburg’s giant ashtray. To take reality and repurpose it, bend it to an idea, this was the kingdom of make-believe. But journalism was something else, wasn’t it? It was meant to be objective reporting of facts, no matter how contradictory. You didn’t make the news fit the story. You simply reported the facts as they were. When had that stopped being true?

Freedom Is a Lot to Lose

Once again, I am taking a page from another blog rather than review. I'm immersed in reading short stories right now - the fantastic final selected works of E. L. Doctorow of special note - and Refugees, a new collection by the amazing Viet Nguyen, among others, so I will not have a novel to review for a while, but there are oh so many of the past worth revisiting, particularly those of political import.

Pulitzer Prize Winner Viet Nguyen

I've not read all of these. And I've only just read The Sympathizer, which is a hard read, dense and brilliant and with a protagonist difficult to relate to, but certainly worthy of the Pulitzer.  I will be reading those on the list I've not read because this is the time to revisit freedom in the words and stories of great novelists.

James Baldwin

Of special note is James Baldwin, whose poetry I've been rereading because of the amazing new documentary, I am Not Your Negro, a painful, profoundly troubling reminder that America has a shameful past that keep returning to haunt us. See the film, read his work, check in with your own racial pulse and consider what sort of world you want to live in. And when the Facebook posts and Twitter feed and broadcast news is just too hard to bear, read, read, read...

A great selection of important political books not 1984. Cheers.
http://lithub.com/10-great-novels-on-freedom-of-expression-that-arent-1984/

Paul Auster's Masterpiece: "4 3 2 1"

I have been reading Paul Auster for 30+ years. He fascinates with his meditative, metaphysical view of humanity. He is also one of the great fiction craftsmen – never an extraneous word. Rich descriptive language. And some of the quirkiest characters and plot lines you will ever encounter. Some have called him the abstract expressionist of the written word. Perhaps a Cubist.

In this masterpiece, and I don’t use the term loosely, Dickens meets Tolstoy meets Philip Roth. The intricate eccentric characterizations you find in Dickens, the grand scope of history and political intrigue in Tolstoy, and the neurotic loves and losses of the great Philip Roth, and all fall into the universal Homeric journey. Seriously fascinating, I was riveted.

If you haven’t read Auster, start with Moon Palace or The Music of Chance. I cherish my signed hardcover edition of New York Stories, which is what first put him on the map. His substantial collection – both fiction and memoir – tends to revolve around a set of themes. Coincidence versus destiny. The loss of a parent or important loved one. The inability to live up to expectations. And, the every present confluence of political history with personal trajectories.

In this very expansive novel – all 862 pages of it – we find all his themes expounded to the full and a cast of characters you will not soon forget. Michael Dirda, writing about Auster in the Washington Post years ago, said, "His plots - drawing on elements from suspense stories, existential recit and autobiography - keep readers during the pages, but sometimes end by leaving them uncertain what they've just been through."

Imagine this: One child born in 1947 [the same year Auster was born] but four lives lived, concurrently. Not a decision tree – the fork in the road approach – rather the unpredictable happenstance that alters destiny, and in this case, usually what happens to the parents. Thus, an examination of nature vs nurture. The life of this endearing boy, Archie Ferguson, whom we follow through his 21st year, plays out in different ways, despite the same DNA and the same starting line.

Auster brilliantly makes it possible for the reader to follow along by posting chapters of each boy’s life during the same time period, and marketing them 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, etc. And he also makes sure to drop reminders into the text so you know which version you are with. However, I recommend you read chapters in their entirety. I picked up one in the middle and had to go back to the beginning to be reminded which life I was in.

Auster is also often concerned with young men coming of age, trying to navigate the strange worlds of love and sex and an elusive sense of identity. I marked likely a hundred different passages to quote, but here’s just one that makes the point. Oh, and did I mention the novel also includes a love story with each of the Archie’s enamored in some way with one girl.

So there was Ferguson after Amy flew off to Madison, Wisconsin, a senior in high school with his whole life in front of him, as he was informed by his teachers, his relatives, and every adult he crossed paths with, but he had just lost the love of his life, and the word future had been erased from every dictionary in the world.

“4 3 2 1” has just published. A great big brilliant novel to cozy up with on these wet wintry nights.