Nonsuch Book

succumbing to boredom july 3-5

Ready for more Moravia? Richard and Bellezza and I thought we might try another after our holiday weekend read of Contempt. In Richard's case, he could not put off indulging in more self-alienation a moment longer, and has already picked up a copy of The Conformist. But we will all come together again on the next holiday weekend, July 3-5, to discuss Boredom. And we would be thrilled if you are interested in joining the conversation.

And what will we find lurking in this next offering of spare but devastating prose?

The novels that the great Italian writer Alberto Moravia wrote in the years following World War II represent an extraordinary survey of the range of human behavior in a fragmented modern society. Boredom, the story of a failed artist and pampered son of a rich family who becomes dangerously attached to a young model, examines the complex relations between money, sex, and imperiled masculinity. This powerful and disturbing study in the pathology of modern life is one of the masterworks of a writer who, as Anthony Burgess once remarked, was “always trying to get to the bottom of the human imbroglio.” NYRB

Or even more compelling:

Boredom is Moravia’s most succinct exploration of the quiet desperation at the heart of the automated human…one of Moravia’s funniest explorations on the origins of middle-class funk. Bill Marx, Boston Review

The detailing of middle-class funk is a common and over-indulged exercise but an exploration of the origins? Well, this should be interesting.

Join us? 

contempt by alberto moravia

There is a passage midway through Contempt in which Battista, a movie producer intent upon producing a highly profitable film version of the Odyssey, rails against the neo-realistic film trend he presumably fears his writers will embrace.

"When I say that the neo-realistic film is not healthy, I mean that it is not a film that inspires people with courage to live, that increases their confidence in life. The neo-realistic film is depressing, pessimistic, gloomy. ...[I]t insists too much on the negative sides of life, on all that is ugliest, dirtiest, most abnormal in human existence. It is, in short, a pessimistic, unhealthy type of film, a film which reminds people of their difficulties instead of helping them to overcome them."

The protagonist, Riccardo, looks quickly at both the producer and the director, uncertain if the producer "really believed the things he was saying or only pretended to believe them." Battista has described Riccardo's life view. It is one of the darkly comical moments in the book in which optimism is equated with commercialism, inferiority in culture and breeding, and an obtuse level of self-deception. The greatest irony is that all three men in the room are outstanding practitioners of the arts of self-deception but recognize it only in each other, in individualized attachments to psychoanalytic tripe, false intellectualism and crass consumerism.

Riccardo's career as a professional script writer and the deterioration of his marriage coincide in the novel, the contempt he feels for his new profession and the contempt he feels inexplicably directed at him by his wife driving his "unhealthy" ruminations that form this first person narrative. He can't really say when his beautiful wife, Emilia, turned on him. He feels that he has given this uncultivated typist from the working classes everything she requires for happiness - his love and the flat for which he has taken script work to support, abandoning his beloved theatre career. He openly admits to forcibly handling her on multiple occasions, to choking her, to kissing his typist in her view and yet fails to link any of these occurrences to Emilia's disgust with him. Woman is simply "a bizarre creature, full of caprices and all sorts of unexpected things." He wonders why he does not receive the unqualified devotion he sees from the wife of a director with whom he works.

This is a brilliant but suffocating text. The reader does not feel the comfort of aligning one's sympathies with our unreliable narrator for even a moment. His brutality and inability to recognize that in himself is evident from the start. But there is the end when in two brilliant instances of hallucinatory happiness, we are brought closer to an unexamined, unquestioned hope. And yet this happens divorced from intentionality for the narrator. Ultimately, in this book, people have no control of emotions, of love no matter how closely observed. They do not even own their own actions at times [small spoiler] even in the ultimate sense of not knowing that they have died. Happiness is a construct woven like the producer's vision for his film. Alienation is inevitable. 

Others reading:

Richard at Caravana de Recuerdos

Ally at Snow Feathers

Bellezza at Dolce Bellezza

Grant at 1streading's Blog

Scott G.F. Bailey at Six Words for a Hat

the sunday miscellany 5/10/15: a cadence conundrum and blogroll assistance requested

Bellezza and Tom are discussing Little, Big by John Crowley this month. A little on the late side, I decided to join in as the title has been on my to-be-read radar for years. And years. But the oddest things is going on with me. Something that I don't ever remember happening before except with very poorly constructed novels. And this is not one of those by any stretch. I can't match my own reading rhythms with the cadence of the author's language here. My reading pace has picked up now at about the halfway point but it was slow-going at first. I can look at the passages and objectively see no reason for the disconnect.

“Like a sun: but a small sun, which she had within her, warming her from the inside out. She was conscious of a feeling she had had before, a sense that she was looking at him, and at all of them, from some far way off, or from a great height. There had been a time when she seemed to herself to be snug, and small, within the large house of Smokey, a safe inhabitant, room to run in yet never leave his encompassment. Now she oftener felt otherwise: over time it was he who seemed to have become a mouse within the house of her.” 

True that the book is a comma convention but shouldn't that actually dictate cadence, the pauses in thought, emphases? Are those pauses so frequent that the text is way out of sync with my personal preference in reading speed? Is this a deliberately paced novel that is pushing back against a greedy consumer? What do you think? Have you had this experience with this or other books?

And on a more practical note, a topic inspired by a love of spring cleaning and the current rash of blog renovations, I have realized that my blog rolls here are terribly out of date. They don't include everyone I now read, but do include some who are not blogging anymore or whom I have traveled away from down a different reading path. Emily and the valued Evening All Afternoon will remain for both sentimental and mind-blowing content reasons despite her long absence among us. The rest I will tidy. But I would appreciate your help too. Who am I missing? Do you read here and read like me but don't see yourself in the blog roll? Is there someone you know I would enjoy?

And Happy Mother's Day to all, mothers and motherers alike.

saved from ugliness

 

It was Bellezza that saved me from ugliness today. As excited as I am about this shared read, I was less than enthusiastic about the cover design on the right. But then this post popped up in my aggregator. Saved. Cover on left promised for delivery by May 6. The little things matter. I won't have to hold ugliness through what I am anticipating to be an enjoyable read. Do you have a preference in cover design here?