“Begin at the beginning," the King said , very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” This quote from Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland will get us started today. There are, my friends, a number of lenses through which one can regard Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo.  We’ll do as many as I can think of but today let’s consider style. “ Literary style refers to  the distinctive way an author uses language to express their ideas and tell a story .  It encompasses elements like word choice, sentence structure, and figurative language, creating a unique "voice" and tone for the writing. Essentially, it's how an author writes, rather than just what they write. ” So sayeth our friend, Generative AI. Of course, we the wise, know that AI is “implying” the role of the implied author, the entity that the reader perceives is creating the text—distinct from, in this case, Ms. Rooney herself. Part of the style of Intermezzo  is that it is written in the present tense, and makes use of a close third-person narration, although there is considerable movement towards first-person, in a stream-of-consciousness way. After the intriguing epigraph concerning grief and chess, mentioned last time, the story begins: “Didn’t seem fair on the young lad. That suit at the funeral. With the braces on his teeth, the supreme discomfort of the adolescent.” (This beginning links up nicely with the novel’s end, a feature we will return to). ‘Kay. This passage immediately cues the reader that the story is inside the mind of someone who thinks in a jagged and fragmented way—not that we all think in complete sentences. No? We learn within a page that the thinker is Peter, and that he is arriving at his girlfriend Naomi’s apartment (or flat, as the Irish say).We get movement from internal thought to third person, present tense here—still on page one: (Peter is thinking of comparisons made between he and his brother, Ivan): “Brains and beauty, an aunt once said. About them both. Or was it Ivan brains and Peter beauty. Thanks, I think. He crosses Watling Street towards an apartment…” The present tense in fiction has been popular for a number of years, before that, not at all, I think. It creates an immediate paradox. A text is written before the reader reads it, however, it’s written in such a way as to give the sense that it is written and read simultaneously—like speech (I know, there’s a lag there too). In the above example—which may have been written several years ago—we the readers are presented with a story about a man who is walking down a street thinking about his brother and their relationship. There is no shift to simple past tense in that phrase, “He crosses…” The story begins in a present time which is actually the past and moves forward. The implied author—not the characters—knows what will happen even though what will happen will occur in the story’s future. Of course, as if that’s all not enough, we have that intriguing “About them both,” which seems to be a comment by the narrator—not Peter, who would have said, “About us both.”   Rabbit hole time. We are pressing our noses against the difficult issue of how an author choose a stable point from which to tell a story. Simple past tense has the advantage of establishing a fixed point. “Peter was walking one evening to Naomi’s flat, thinking about his brother Ivan and how he appeared at their father’s recent funeral. That suit didn’t seem fair on the young lad, he thought. Present tense is harder, more complex. In fact, Ms. Rooney is doing something very creative here. She is shaping a particular narrative style for Peter that is distinct from Ivan and from Margaret, both of whom appear in the next chapter. Peter, a character who is shown as being troubled and abusing alcohol and other drugs, has this jagged, stream-of-consciousness style, consistently to the end when he transforms into a calmer presentation. Please compare how Ivan and Margaret are shown in Chapter Two: “Ivan is standing on his own in the corner, while the men from the chess club move the chairs and tables around…Alone Ivan is standing, wanting to sit down, but uncertain as to which of the chairs need to be rearranged still and which of them are in their correct places already.” Here’s Margaret: “By the time Margaret finishes dinner, it’s dark outside the window of the bistro, the glass blue like wet ink. Garret behind the till asks her what they have on tonight and she says the chess clubs are in.” And here’s the narrator’s voice: “Ivan’s brother Peter, who is thirty-two and has a graduate degree in philosophy, says this school of thought on the relations between body and mind has been refuted.” I believe last time, I related that I was put off by these different styles between the main characters but now see them as parts of a whole. Peter is anxious and depressed, and his style is ragged. Ivan and Margaret are shown as being calmer and more conventional. They are more clearly sited in time and space and are painted in rather elegant, flowing prose, complete with poetic similes—“like wet ink.” It should be noted that Ms. Rooney says that she was reading James Joyce while writing Intermezzo  and tried to incorporate his usage of stream-of-consciousness narration. There’s more to say about style in Intermezzo , best beloved. Let’s stop and resume next time. Till then. #Intermezzo #SallyRooney #AlanBray

This week, for your consideration, a discussion of Sally Rooney’s 2024 novel I ntermezzo . Long time readers of this blog will recall that at one time, I discussed Ms. Rooney’s Normal People . I first read the second chapter of I ntermezzo when it appeared as a stand-alone short story in The New Yorker,  and then eagerly bought the book. Intermezzo  came on the heels of Normal People the book, and the popular film adaptation. Ms. Rooney thinks of it as her pandemic book, as it was written in a period of quarantine during the COVID-19 years. Faber and Faber, the book’s publisher, released  Intermezzo  on 24 September 2024, in what it called its "biggest trade campaign ever" The novel achieved strong initial sales, becoming the fastest-selling book in Ireland in 2024, with 11,885 copies sold in its first five days. Several Irish bookshops opened early to meet anticipated demand. Critical reaction was mixed, with praise tempered by objections over the book’s length (450 pages). Sadly, while I had enjoyed the short story adaptation of the book’s second chapter, I didn’t care for the first chapter and set the book aside. But recently, I thought, dang it, I should give Intermezzo another chance (a go, as the Irish would say) and I’m glad I did. I discovered that the choppiness I found in the book’s first chapter and the way it clashed with the style of the second, was of course, quite intentional and an effort at distinguishing two different narrative perspectives. More on this to come. First, some thoughts about the design of the hardcover edition. On the front cover, we have the author’s name and the title, Intermezzo, set against a background of a chess grid, presented in attractive shades of yellow and gray. Five human silhouettes are on the grid, two male and three female, although they hang upside down and resemble shadows. This would suggest that the story is about chess players and/or that the game of chess is a metaphor of the story. It is true that one of the principal characters is a professional chess player. The title Intermezzo   references both musical interludes and chess terminology . In music, an intermezzo is an interlude occurring between two more significant movements; “in chess, an intermezzo, also known as a  zwischenzug , is  a move that occurs during a combination or sequence of moves .  It involves inserting a surprising move, often a check, capture, or attack, before the anticipated recapture. This unexpected move forces the opponent to respond, potentially disrupting their plans and creating new tactical opportunities.” TMI!  We’ll have to explore this. It would be a clever idea that a novelist is like someone playing chess, that is, someone who controls the characters as if they were “pawns.” And that unexpected actions of the characters occur—this is a challenging issue. A novelist has the story all thought out, right? She/he “knows” the story. Well, I’m not sure this is always true. Surprises do happen when one is writing. Characters that are being written sometimes seem to become real agents who “take over” a story, acting in accordance with their desires and motives, so that the writer has no choice but to go along. Now, of course this is an illusion, a beautiful one to be sure, but a writer slaving away at a keyboard is the only one who can guide plot. It does get at the issue though of where stories come from: the writer’s unconscious? A wise editor who assembles scattered parts? Another aspect of how this chess metaphor might be expressed in the story is that the main characters (there are, arguably, five) could be seen as having different agendas, rather like people playing chess against each other. Both want to win but both can’t. Actually, there’s not a lot of direct mention of chess in the story, but the fact that the cover design and title refer to chess seems to imply the game has some meaning here. Intermezzo  is about two Irish brothers, Peter and Ivan, whose father has just died after a long illness. Peter is involved with two women, Sylvia and Naomi, and Ivan, just one, Margaret. The story may be seen as being about the effect of grief on people’s lives and relationships, although I’d have to say there’s not a lot of direct content about this. There’s some, particularly at the end, but it doesn’t dominate things. Ms. Rooney shows the reader what it’s like to be Peter and Ivan, and part of that is that their father has just died. As one might imagine, male-female relationships are explored in depth, and there’s a healthy dollop of sex! Hurrah! Another thing to consider: There is an epigraph before the story begins, and Ms. Rooney mentions it in an afterword, saying she translated it herself. It’s a quote from philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: But don’t you feel grief now ? (But aren’t you now playing chess?)   This epigraph suggests that, indeed, the story is about grief and chess. A connection is made between feeling grief and playing chess. Something about playing chess should allow the player to feel grief, presumably from some prior loss that hasn’t before been felt. Hmmm. Let’s pause here and resume next time. Till then. #Intermezzo #SallyRooney #AlanBray

Good day. We have been exploring Frederick’s Busch’s short story Domicile , and last time, I stated that I was putting off discussing a critical part. The time has come. There must be no further delay. Domicile  concerns a young man, recently graduated from college, who is living in a primitive trailer on the property of an old motel. My theory is that the story is about the protagonist’s being caught between childhood and adulthood, caught and reluctant to move forward. The title, Domicile , seems to raise a distinction between where one lives permanently vs. temporarily. On the property, there are a number of structures, other trailers, run-down cottages, and a main house where Mrs. Peete, the landlady, and her daughter, Rebecca, live. Here is the (long) first line: “It made me think of fairy tales—stories of children who drop from the sky or roll from the cupped petals of a silky flower—because he simply appeared one morning and was picked up by a yellow van, a small school bus, which meant that an actual adult had made arrangements for him, and that school authorities acknowledged his existence, and that he was an authentic child, not a product of my second-rate education, or of what I considered then, with what I’ll now call theatrics, as my third-rate mind.” On a first reading, the reader might be puzzled. What, in a story called Domicile, the heck is going on? Apparently, the narrator is seeing a child leave a cottage to be picked up by a school bus. However, the narrator takes his largely visual impression and runs with it, making poetic meaning (or, yes, the implied author does this). The sight of the boy makes him think of “fairy tales” where children suddenly appear. The child is “authentic,” not the product of the narrator’s “a second-rate education,” or of what the narrator calls “theatrics” at some vantage point in the future. ‘Kay. Is there any clue here that this is a story about a young man living in a ramshackle trailer, lacking ambition and spinning his wheels? There is, best beloved. Of course, this is a story meant to be read more than once. The first time through, the reader may be enchanted but, not knowing the whole thing, will have difficulty understanding. There is the evocation of fairy tales—stories of children. The narrator yearns for a loving childhood which he apparently did not have. Amidst his tenure at the trailer—a sort of staging area for the future—he sees a boy who may seem like himself, although this is out of his awareness. He worries about this child, seeing no adults around to offer care, and this must remind us of the way he describes his own childhood where his parents are lost in compartments of feeling. He tries to imagine what life is like for this solitary child whose main activity is going to school. Is there an adult who comes to the cabin to make sure he eats? The protagonist wanders the grounds, anticipating the discovery of the corpses of the boy’s parents, but never finds them. One morning, he encounters the boy: “He looked like a miniature man who indicated that fate would have its say.” “Kay, this is a pretty mighty clue. The boy looks like a miniature man who indicated that fate would have its say. This is a near encapsulation of the whole story. A miniature man—that is the protagonist, a human who relies on fate to guide him. Fate as opposed to adult decision and resolve. However, the boy, who says his name is Artie Arthur, tells the protagonist that school is his (Artie’s) responsibility. “Sometimes, you just soldier on,” he says. This is just the kind of advice the protagonist might give himself, an argument to other parts of his personality that speak about how school lacks value. And, in this scene, Artie refers to the story’s title. “’Domicile’, he called, sweeping his arm around him.” (He is at the door of his house). As we have discussed, the word domicile means one’s permanent residence. Here, I believe Artie is saying to the narrator, “This dump is my permanent home because I’m a child. You are here temporarily. The protagonist (I’ll start calling him David again) asks Mrs. Peete about Artie: “Could I ask you something about the neighborhood?” … Mrs. Peete replies: “…The motel people lived in this house. One of them’s a ghost. I have seen him, but never mind. I don’t argue about ghosts.” “A little boy?” … “A man,” she said.” She refuses to say anymore. Is David seeing a ghost? A ghost of himself? Whoa! “I looked at Artie’s cabin: still no car. When, I wondered, would someone come to rescue us?” In the climax, David breaks into Arties’s deserted cabin. There’s a smell inside that reminds him of getting his hair cut as a boy.  The cabin looks as if it was inhabited some time ago; there’s rotting food, old toothpaste rolls. Mice droppings. Artie is “there, but no place else.” David, fearing he’s dead, goes to look for his body but doesn’t find it. Artie has disappeared. This leads to the final scene that I described last time. David goes to Mrs. Peete and borrows money so that he can move on. And we know from the narration that he will survive and look back on these events from a vantage point many years in the future. I don’t think Artie is a ghost in any literal spirits of the dead sort of way. I do think Artie is from David’s imagination and that he teaches David about surviving on your own, that he must break the unfortunate bonds with his childhood. David tries to care for the child that he was and transforms. This beautiful story refuses to explain itself, forcing the reader to search for meaning. The clock on the clubhouse wall says it’s time to go. Next week, a new story, Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo . Till then. #Domicile #FrederickBusch #AlanBray

Frederick Busch’s short story  Domicile  was published in 2000. It is written in first person and simple past tense; the tone (as in much of Busch’s writing) is comic and sarcastic. The word domicile has a legal meaning referring to a person’s permanent home, as opposed to residence which may be more temporary. Domicile (a Latin word) also may mean, simply, a dwelling place. Both meanings are relevant to this story. But why, you say, is it important to mention that the word has a Latin origin? Is this not pretentious? I guess if you want to look at it that way, my bro. But I think the word Domicile conveys something important in the story, something about the protagonist believing his meager existence is romantic and means more than mere self-neglect and laziness. Let’s think about the story and return to this. We’re going to leave out an extremely important aspect of things till next time, which I hope will make sense. I hope so too. A protagonist narrator, David, is in his early twenties, and after graduating from college (an arts major) lives in a primitive trailer located on the property of an old motel—somewhere on the East Coast. The trailer has no heat, no plumbing, and primitive food preparation equipment. He wears dirty clothes, bathes infrequently, doesn’t trim his hair and beard. In short, he is living a marginal existence. Despite his father’s exhortations (or maybe because of them) he resists the idea of longer-term life planning and focuses on building a rock wall on the property for his landlady, Mrs. Peete. He is, as they say, “spinning his wheels.” There is no explanation of how he arrived there or knows Mrs. Peete, with whom he has an antagonistic relationship—in contrast to her daughter Rebecca, with whom David has sex—not exactly antagonistic sex. Her character creates change in the story and confronts David with his wheel-spinning. A critical nuance to Domicile  is that it shows the protagonist looking back from a future time. Please note the use of “that year” and “as I remember it” in the passage below. This usage tells the reader that the protagonist survives the situation shown in the story. It injects some hope for a character whom one would worry about. The reader is assured that, despite the narrator’s desperate life, he survives. “I was in a good deal of trouble that year, and I knew it, though I didn’t worry. I think that I did not…I had decided, as I remember it, to think a couple of hours ahead—the next few pages of a book I tried to read, the next few lines of a sketch I tried to make, the next meal of the day.” Is this lassitude due to some trauma? As mentioned, the thing that occupies the narrator, David, is building a rock wall. He makes the connection that he built a play fortress when he was a child. “My mother reported on it when she and my father came to see me…she had just told me about how my fort still stood when she began to cry…I sat back at the little fold-up table and let her pretend not to cry while she, down at the refrigerator, pretended not to know that I observed her weeping. Giving that kind of privacy to each other can be almost as good as a set of walls, or a door you can close behind you.” There’s a sense here, not only that his mother is unhappy, but that David (and his parents) pretend not to notice each other’s pain. And there’s a nice metaphor of building walls and a fortress to protect oneself. Something about building a stone wall pleases David; it sets boundaries and isolates things that on the other side. David works on the wall, has sex with Rebecca, and generally mopes around in a darkly humorous and ironic way. Things bump up on a climax when Rebecca, who’s been living with her mother, announces she can’t handle her life there any longer and will be moving out. She’s rented an apartment and invites David to come with her and live a more civilized existence. “’Look,’ she said, and her face was full of sorrow for me, ‘nobody’s forcing you to live inside that terrible trailer. Or my apartment. Or anyplace else.’ Her voice was thick with feeling. ‘It’s pretty much you, David. Whatever place you’re inside of, you’re the one who turned the lock.’” Please note how Rebecca’s voice is described as being “thick with feeling,” an un-ironic state that is something new in the story thus far and is not ridiculed. Previously, Rebecca has been archly ironic and playful, as has David. Here, Rebecca, a lost soul herself, shows she is transforming into adulthood. She encourages David to make an adult decision and move to a new home. There is a strong sense here of David’s “domicile” still being his troubled childhood home, a home he hasn’t been able to let go of up to now. After a transitional period in college, he had failed to launch himself into adulthood, remaining in a marginal and unsustainable situation. He builds s a somewhat arbitrary and poetic outdoor structure just as he did as a child. The story may well be about his transition from life at Mrs. Peete’s to Rebecca giving him a way to leave, while pointing out that he himself has the key to move into his own more permanent domicile. The story ends with Rebecca’s mother, Mrs. Peete, being honest with him, after she provides him with a loan that will allow him to leave the motel, a loan he requested. She says that Rebecca predicted that he would do this, and he expresses surprise. “Oh,” she said. “David. You are not as much of a mystery as you would like to think.” Kay, next time, I will reveal a crucial piece so far left out, a piece that supports my thinking. Ooh! Till then. #Domicile #FrederickBusch #AlanBray

Good day. We ended up last time in our exploration of Frederick Busch’s short story Are We Pleasing You Tonight?  with a question as we hung with white knuckles on a narrative precipice: Are you embarrassed by who and what you’ve chosen to have around you or are you embarrassed by yourself? The table of three or four dinner guests present the protagonist, Peter, with a mirror that shows him how he is not pleased with his current life, a life where he stays busy and tries not to think of his losses. The story, however, does not show what new actions he takes as a result of this realization, it ends at the point of confrontation. The precipice was built by having two situations combined. Peter is drawn to a table of three customers who celebrate the birthday of a deceased fourth member of their party. One of the party strongly resembles a photo Peter saw in the morning paper of the daughter of his ex-wife, who resembled the great love of his life. The climax of the story occurs when Peter hovers at the table and overhears the widow saying: “And, every time, in spite of my best efforts, I remember the dishonesty and disloyalty. How can I forgive them? And I try. You compartmentalize your life, and soon you get locked in one of the compartments. And I was locked in another. And guess who kept the key? …Still.” “Kay. Apparently, the widow of the absent birthday honoree has gone from idealizing him to denigration. She maintains a veneer of remembering him as a wonderful and loving spouse but after a few drinks, speaks of him as being dishonest and disloyal. She speaks too of being aware of her coping mechanism, compartmentalization. In other words, she gets through her life post marriage by keeping all the good memories separate from the bad ones. Peter’s response is that, in the midst of being concerned about a waiter’s condition (on drugs), he asks all of the party—including the dead man—if they are pleased. “Are we pleasing you tonight?” he asks, echoing the story’s title. “The old lady’s lips were pursed. It was as if she fought a pain. She looked at her son and then at the photographs. She shook her head.” Peter notes the son regarding the photo of his dead father and looks at Linda, the son’s wife. “Though the rest of them couldn’t see who sat in Linda’s place, I knew, and I didn’t want to know, and I stood in silence…” Unfortunately, at this point, the drugged waiter brings a special slice of birthday cake to the table and enlists other staff members in singing Happy Birthday, not realizing that the birthday honoree is dead and only present in a photograph and memory. It’s awkward and darkly funny. “I’m so sorry,” Peter tells the widow. “For she had been betrayed again. ‘It was a misunderstanding.’” “The son cleared his throat. He held the photographs. He looked at them with a sorrow I found familiar. The daughter-in-law’s expression was only a little puzzled…She said to me, ‘Misunderstanding?’ “Yes,’ the old woman said. ‘It always is.’” Structurally, this story occurs in one running scene with one digression in time that shows Peter’s memory of the morning’s New York Times reading. In that sense, except for the digression, the story could be a play, although there is considerable internal thought—a hallmark of fiction writing. The narration is very close to Peter and no one else. This is a tale of memory (painful memory) breaking into the present because of random reminders that crop up, in this case two photographs. Despite his efforts at denial, Peter is confronted by two painful episodes in his life, his failed love affair with Tamara, and his failed marriage. A photograph in the paper confronts this denial but he apparently shuts it up again until, later in the day, he is again forced to face it when a woman who strongly resembles both lost loves appears at the restaurant. In the second instance, the widow is confronted with two photographs of her dead husband, and this breaks through her usual denial. She remembers that he was disloyal and difficult. A misunderstanding in both cases, leads to the re-emergence of tragedy, which cannot be denied. No one is pleased. Peter has received a jarring reminder that he’s lost the woman he loved, the woman he tried to replace her with lost to divorce and death. And the dinner party? The widow and the son have been reminded that the husband/father was not such a great guy, despite their attempts to pretend otherwise. All of them are embarrassed first by the people and things they’ve surrounded themselves with, and second by themselves. Different compartments, if you will. Interlocking compartments. So, as in Ralph the Duck , Busch writes about matters of life and death but after the fact. They are both stories about how humans deal with tragedy. Next time, a third story by Busch, Domicile . Till then. #AreWePleasingYouTonight? #FrederickBusch #AlanBray

Frederick Busch’s short story Are We Pleasing You Tonight? concerns the owner or manager (it’s never clear which) of an upscale restaurant who is working on a particular night as the restaurant’s Maître-D. He is the story’s narrator. Like Ralph the Duck , it is also written in the first person and uses the simple past tense, implying the story is being looked back on. In the course of the evening, this narrator, Peter, seats an elderly woman, her son and the son’s wife. Two things out of the ordinary almost immediately create a story. First, the elderly woman announces that her family is having the dinner to mark the birthdate of her deceased husband. She would like to have a fourth-place set in his honor, a request Peter agrees to. Second, the woman’s daughter-in-law looks exactly like the photo Peter saw that morning in the Wedding Announcement section of the New York Times (the story was set and written in the days of print newspapers, the year 2000). The photo he saw was of the daughter of his ex-wife—not his daughter, someone else’s—and she looked just like her mother, now deceased, and her mother looked just like a woman whom Peter had loved before getting married. Whoa! As was true in Ralph the Duck , either one of these conditions would be auspicious set-ups for a dramatic story. A dinner party being a celebration for a dead person, whom the living pretend is present, a man coincidentally seeing a woman who resembles his ex-wife’s daughter, his ex-wife, and a former love, a ghost of a ghost, as Peter says. They are good dramatic situations, yet they require a story. What happens when the two set-up situations are combined? The first thing is to consider the beginning. The title itself, Are We Pleasing You Tonight ? begs several related questions. Who is being or not being pleased? Is the widow’s family pleased—is she? Is Peter pleased? If they are pleased, or not, why is this? Don’t worry, we’ll start answering these questions soon. How? Why? Stop it. The story’s first line is: “We were very busy, and the rooms were loud.” There follows a paragraph that establishes the narrator as part of the staff of a busy restaurant on a particular night when a party with reservations comes in “early.” This is the elderly widow, her son and his wife. “I looked away from the wife because she was the same bad news I’d been receiving all day.” So we have a narrator whom we get a sense of as being immersed in chaotic work and under pressure. And the enigmatic observation that he can’t look at a customer because she’s “the same bad news” he’d been receiving all day. So his day has been full of bad news, but we don’t know about what or about the connection with the woman. Does he know her? He also notes “The son walked with his head down, as if she embarrassed him (his mother), or as if he embarrassed himself. That’s a choice right there, isn’t it? How you call it is who you are.”  The narrator could see the son as embarrassed by his mother or as embarrassing himself. Interesting. I think we have our old friend the implied author speaking here, no? You are defined by your choices, he tells us. The way you look at things says something about you. But Peter doesn’t choose yet. Another wrinkle—Peter reveals that he is a military veteran who was in charge of a unit unloading war dead. (presumably from Vietnam). “I had supervised the unloading of cargo planes filled with the horribly dead, the routinely dead, the accidently dead, and the dead who’d been murdered by people under their command. Service is service.” Here, it would seem the narrator, Peter, is equating the handling of the war dead with “handling” the restaurant’s patrons. Thus, as he is used to such things, he has no problem with the request to set a fourth-place for a dead person. But he is “having a bad night and…a bad day” another clear statement of the state he must transform from. A portion of this malaise is due to problems in the restaurant, a waiter getting high, a new kid making salads. But another portion is due to his having seen the wedding announcement of his ex-wife’s daughter, which reminds him of Tamara, his long-lost love. While he is seeing the wedding announcement—that morning—there is apparently another woman with him who misunderstands his disturbed state, thinking he is saying good morning to her. The narrator thinks: “It wasn’t you, Dottie. It was the one I loved. It was the daughter of the one I loved. It was dead people. That’s my job: meet ‘em and greet ‘em.” Of course, this suggests a less than solid connection with Dottie—a casual fling perhaps? Again, this speaks to his “bad day,” best B. Here, he again equates his experience handling the dead with something else—handling his feelings about past loves and a failed marriage. In the story’s present, he insists on serving the party of three (or four) himself. He could have avoided them but is drawn to more contact. The widow and her son and daughter-in-law have placed two photographs of the deceased at the empty table setting—another disturbing connection with the narrator seeing the Wedding Announcement photo that reminds him of the dead. He notes that the daughter-in-law isn’t exactly the same as the other women: “Nevertheless, how is that for extracorporeal life? Most nights, you sell food and drink and it’s deposited in verifiable flesh. Here, in twelve hours, I had seen two ghosts, and one of them ate a steak of swordfish…at a table one quarter of which was occupied by somebody dead.” We are hurtling toward a climax. All the pieces are in place, all the particular circumstances that make this evening and this party of four remarkable. Let’s stop there and continue next time, trying to answer those questions we began with. What does Peter choose? Are you embarrassed by who and what you’ve chosen to be around you or are you embarrassed by yourself? Till next time! #AreWePleasingYouTonight? #FrederickBusch #AlanBray

Last time, I stopped in the midst of discussing Frederick Busch’s short story Ralph the Duck , writing in particular about how Busch doesn’t explain everything in the story. He leaves certain points to the reader to make meaning of, and, I argued, this enhances the experience, making it more respectful and collaborative. This time, let’s examine in particular best beloved, pacing. What does Mr. AI say? “In literature, pacing refers to  the speed at which a story unfolds, essentially how quickly or slowly the events and information are presented to the reader .  It's a crucial element that influences reader engagement, tension, and overall enjoyment. Effective pacing creates a rhythm that keeps readers turning the pages, while poor pacing can lead to disengagement or frustration.”  In the first part of the story, Busch uses a combination of dramatic scenes and narrative summary to establish the characters, who then, in the second half, are put into a situation. One of the differences between the two halves is how time is handled, or pacing. The story begins with a dramatic scene that lasts less than an hour. The narrator wakes at 5:25, gets up, goes back to bed, and things end just after the alarm goes off at 6:00. The period between 5:29 and 6:00 is collapsed; there’s no moment-to-moment narration. The next section is a combination of summary and scene.  The narrator explains his job and that he takes a class every term. The character of his professor is introduced, and the section moves into a dramatic scene that shows the narrator jump starting the professor’s car, and the professor asking mocking questions about the narrator having been in Vietnam. The summary part isn’t “in-time” the way a scene would be; the scene has a slightly imperfect feel, meaning it seems like a situation chosen as an example of the kinds of interactions with the professor that might occur repeatedly. The narrator says, “One time…when I jumped his Buick from my Bronco…” and, describing the professor, “He was always talking to the female students with the brightest hair and best builds.” Here, the use of the expression “One time,” and the word “always,” are tip offs as to the presence of imperfect time. Then we have a scene that involves the narrator falling asleep, waking, and having a memory which is shown in a dramatic scene. Except for the sleep interval, the scene occurs quickly, maybe showing a half hour. But a lot is collapsed here, meaning sentences jump ahead in time. There’s no moment-to moment accounting. Fanny leaves the narrator some food, the dog watches him eat it and make himself a drink. In real time, that sequence might take 20-30 minutes; in the story, it’s two sentences. There follows several dramatic scenes, including the one in which the narrator describes Ralph the Duck, which is a description; it’s not expressed in scene and/or dialogue. Considerable time is not shown between these scenes. The implied author selects what seems important to drive the story along. In this sequence of scenes showing the narrator writing and submitting Ralph the Duck and receiving a D from the professor, there’s nothing about meals he ate, other people he talked to, other memories he had. This brings us to the section beginning, “It was the worst of the winter’s storms…” Here we have a dramatic scene that unfolds in nearly real time, i.e. with few unnarrated gaps. The narrator is called on an emergency to find a young woman who has left her dorm after taking many pills. He finds her on a rocky ledge, about to suicide, and tries to persuade her to come with him to safety, eventually picking her up and carrying her to his truck. He then drives her through the storm to the hospital. “We passed the cemetery. I told her that was a good sign. She didn’t respond.” He calls ahead to the hospital. “I made myself slow down some, and I said we’d need stomach pumping, and to get the names of the pills from her friends in the dorm and I’d be there in less than five or we were crumpled up someplace and dead.  ‘Roger,’ the radio said. ‘Roger all that.’ My throat tightened and tears came into my eyes. They were helping us. They’d told me: Roger.” The pacing changes here. There’s plenty of room in this section for time to be collapsed, but it isn’t. Moment-to-moment narration, and this continues till they arrive at the hospital. The story ends with a scene occurring on the following (probably) day and it reverts to the previous pacing—time gets collapsed. The narrator is at home and talking about saving the young woman with Fanny, who is somewhat annoyed that her husband risked his life. Things end with Fanny telling the narrator to get the professor to “jack up” the grade on Ralph the Duck, as the professor is obligated to him for saving the young woman who was his lover. There’s more to this great story. The narrator tells the young woman about the loss of his daughter and maybe acknowledges his Vietnam experiences—that part is another aspect of the story left open to the reader. And for me, there’s that curious mention of how it “would have” taken the narrator fifteen years to graduate, as if he never does. But that’s not addressed. It’s clear that the narrator is placed into a dramatic situation where his past experience resonates strongly. He is determined to save the young woman because he could not save his daughter. He and Fanny have been stuck in grief but maybe there's hope. What’s the point, Walter? (Big Lebowski reference). The point is that Busch uses varied pacing in this story as another way to heighten drama and create a dense narrative web. It’s another way to not show everything that occurs, and this idea connects to Umberto Eco who wrote that it’s only in pornographic films (I wouldn’t know), that moment-to-moment time is consistently presented. If a character in such a film gets a soda from the refrigerator, you see her or him walking to the refrigerator, grasping the handle, etc. You see it all. Not in Ralph the Duck . Till next time, Walter. #RalphTheDuck #FrederickBusch #AlanBray

This week, I want to look at three short stories by Frederick Busch: Ralph the Duck, Are We Pleasing You Tonight, and Domicile . Busch, a prolific writer of novels and short stories, was an acclaimed American author and teacher who died in 2006. Ralph the Duck , published in his 1985 story collection Absent Friends , is included in the 2014 edition of The Stories of Frederick Busch , edited by Elizabeth Strout—as are the other two. Busch once said that fiction that means something must be about serious matters—life and death. Ralph is about an unnamed narrator who is employed as a security guard by an also unnamed Northeastern university. It is told in first person and uses the simple past tense. The tone is ironic and comic, and then sharply intense. The main action occurs in a scene in which the narrator is called upon to get a suicidal young woman to safety during a major winter storm. He must convince her to accompany him, despite her having taken an overdose of pills, and then has to drive her through the dangerous storm to a hospital. Certainly, this is a dramatic enough premise. However, the scene begins more than halfway through Ralph, with the line: “It was the worst of the winter’s storms, and one of the worst in years.” This placement certainly suggests that Ralph  is about more than the rescue. And then there’s the title. In any case, some writers might organize this story differently, beginning with the dramatic rescue. One of Busch’s many strengths is the way he writes action sequences, and the drive through the blizzard with the girl vomiting out the window is excellent. But (and maybe I’m beating a dead horse here—neigh!) he begins Ralph at an earlier point, thereby privileging the character of the narrator over the plot. The story’s first paragraph begins: “I woke up at 5:25 because the dog was vomiting.” In a nice piece of foreshadowing, the narrator carries “seventy-five pounds of heaving golden retriever to the door and poured him unto the silver, moonlit snow.” (The narrator carries the nauseous young woman through the storm to his truck). This first line poses the question: why did he wake up because the dog was vomiting? As a dog owner, I can report that the sound of vomiting does tend to get one’s attention—but not if the dog is in a different room. Something about the dog vomiting wakes the narrator—what is it? The story does not ask will he or won’t he wake up because the dog was vomiting. The first line also answers who is speaking? —“I,” and when? —at “5:25.” The story quickly establishes the character of the unnamed narrator and the dog, and a woman who is named Fanny, whom we realize is the narrator’s wife. In this first scene, she has slept on the couch because the couple had a fight the previous night. (Did the dog wake her?) The narrator says, “I would apologize because I always did, and then she would forgive me if I hadn’t been too awful…and then we would stagger through the day, exhausted but pretty sure we were all right.” There’s a sense here of a couple who care about each other but who are often in conflict, and we don’t know why. It develops other questions—what is this conflict about? What exhausts them? Then, after a line break, we get several paragraphs of explanation about the narrator. Because of his job working for the university, he can take a course for free each semester. He makes the interesting statement, “I was getting educated, in a kind of slow-motion way—it would have taken me something like fifteen or sixteen years to graduate.” This use of the conditional tense—easy to miss at first reading—implies that he is telling the story from the future, a future in which he did not complete his degree. This is not followed up on but seems pretty significant. Also, he explains that in the time of the story, he was taking an American Literature course from an unnamed professor who writes on one of the narrator’s papers: “You are not an unintelligent writer.” The narrator finds him patronizing and absurd. The professor decides the narrator must have served in the military in Vietnam and killed people, for him, an exciting and romantic idea. The narrator humors him and never clarifies whether or not he was a veteran. Then, after another line break, the story presents a scene of the narrator at home after work and remembering a young woman threatening suicide whom he convinced to live. (actually the same woman previously mentioned but an earlier incident). Within this scene, we get the first mention of the child he and Fanny had. He thinks of the young woman as “someone’s child. Which made me think, of course, of ours.” There’s no mention of this child’s fate, except that we know she hasn’t appeared.   Here, the story is asking we the readers to make meaning. We know the couple at the heart of the story are struggling with a painful issue, and we now know that they had, or have, a child. Next, we have several scenes that show more about the nature of the narrator’s marriage to Fanny—caring, close, and the nature of the narrator—independent, passionate, resentful of being patronized by his professor. And we learn more about Ralph the Duck . The narrator writes an essay for the class entitled Ralph the Duck . “Once upon a time there was a duck named Ralph who didn’t have any feathers on either wing. So when the cold wind blew, Ralph said Brrr and shivered and shook…Oh, the mommy said. Here. I’ll keep you warm. So she spread her big feathery wings and hugged Ralph tight, and when the cold wind blew, Ralph was warm and snuggly and fell fast asleep.” Unfortunately, the professor gives the narrator a “D,” although there’s a sense that the narrator was being provocative in submitting it. When he tells Fanny the situation, she is extremely touched—there is hugging. Again, we don’t receive other information about the meaning of the Ralph the Duck  story but must make it ourselves. It seems likely that this was a children’s story the narrator read to his daughter, now deceased. Or perhaps a story he wanted to tell her about protecting her from the cold when she has no feathers. I think I should stop here. My point is about how good writing includes the reader in a process of meaning-making. It’s a delicate balance of how much to show and how much to leave out or hint at. Without enough clues, a story can just be too mysterious; too many, and a story can insult a reader’s intelligence by explaining everything. Ralph  is a finely balanced beastie. Till next time. #RalphTheDuck #FrederickBusch #AlanBray

As I wrote last time, we’ve been looking at largely content and meaning issues in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,  and last time, we examined some of the structural or process issues of how the story is told. Let’s continue with this today, focusing on the penultimate chapter, occurring before the Epilogue. In the previous chapter, the narrator’s father has asked him not to go to the Finzi-Continis house again and, by implication, not to pursue Micol Finzi-Contini anymore. The narrator agrees. Chapter X begins with a reference to this, “That was how I gave up Micol.” What’s going on here? It’s a simple statement and a simple maneuver in writing, so basic, we probably take it for granted, i.e. our eyes absorb it rapidly and do not dally. In speech, it would be called a summary comment, wrapping up what came before, and, at first blush, that’s what it accomplishes here. The narrator is saying, “okay, the previous chapter shows how I gave the lady up.” It’s a done deal—in his mind, he’s ended things. Well, sort of. Continuing in a narrative summary mode, describing what he did, as opposed to showing it in dialogue, the narrator relates that ten days went by during which he “strictly maintained the promise I had made to my father.” Then, he receives a call from Malnate, the friend with whom he’s been spending time with, the friend whom he met playing tennis at the Finzi-Continis. The narrator has been dining with Malnate in order to get news of Micol. Now we have a scene of dialogue with quoted speech. I believe that first sentence, “That was how I gave up Micol,” relates more to the new chapter than to the old one. It could be seen as simple narrative summary, but it also can be taken literally: The narrator writes, “This is how I gave up Micol,” and then goes on to show how he did it—very ambivalently. How did I give up Micol? By avoiding her for a difficult ten days and then agreeing to see her friend in order to get news of her. So Chapter X begins with narrative summary that marks time and place —the narrator’s residence—shows something of his internal state—he’s made a promise to his father but is ambivalent about it in that he avoids Micol but says, “Luckily nobody sought me during all this time…otherwise I probably wouldn’t have held out.” Then it goes into a scene. Malnate calls the narrator, accuses him of avoiding him (Malnate) and proposes they get together. The narrator agrees, and the scene ends with, “And he hung up.” “The following evening,” the narrator goes to the restaurant where he’s agreed to meet Malnate, but instead of joining him, he hangs back in the shadows and observes Malnate (who’s sitting outside) having dinner. The narrator never makes contact. He spends the next several evenings listlessly riding his bicycle around the city and then goes to an arcade where a woman works who was attracted to Malnate. A scene of dialogue ensues when the woman notices the narrator. She exhorts him to, “Go on home, run along, or your Dad will give you a licking. It’s way past your bedtime!” These two scenes seem to further establish the narrator’s ambivalence—he approaches the man who could give him information on Micol but hangs back. He is ridiculed by a woman for being young and under the domination of his father. Then in a long scene occurring on the next night, “near midnight,” the narrator goes to the house of the Finzi-Continis. On the way, he passes many amorously entwined couples: “I felt, and was, a kind of strange, passing phantom: full of life and death at once; of passion, and of detached pity.” This speaks to his mood; he is detached from love; he only observes. When he reaches the house, it is dark. He decides to scale the wall, just as he had many years before. On the other side, he walks in the garden around the silent house and goes to the tennis courts where there is a small changing room. Here, he stops and has the (apparently false) impression that all this time, Malnate has been having an affair with Micol. “Yes, yes—I went on calmly reasoning, in a kind of rapid, inner whisper—of course. How could I have been so blind? He (Malnate) roamed around with me only in order to kill time until it was late enough, and them after having tucked me in, so to speak, off he rode, full tilt, to her, who, naturally, was waiting for him in the garden.” “But then, as if in replay, a faint sound, heartsick, almost human suddenly arrived…I recognized it at once: it was the old, beloved voice of the clock in the square, striking the hours…It was saying that, once again, it had grown very late, that it was foolish and wicked, on my part, to continue torturing my father in this way…finally it was time for me to resign myself. Truly. Forever. “’What a fine novel,’ I sneered, shaking my head.” (an ironic comment). What we might say straight off about this passage is that it has everything to do with the novel’s theme of unsuccessful love and less to do with the Holocaust. This kind of tragic realization that a love is over could happen in any historical period. Indeed, we have time—the narrator experiences it as a human sound—resuming, breaking the narrator’s melancholic reverie and (apparently) helping him to accept what already seems clear to the reader (the reader knows more than the narrator). However, this kind of loss could happen at any time, but in this case, it doesn’t. The next page opens onto the Epilogue and this first line: “My story with Micol Finzi-Contini ends here.” (please note the shift in verb tense). Then the narrator repeats the information he wrote at the book’s beginning. He never saw Micol again; she died with her family in Germany four years later. The War and the Holocaust put a decisive end to “a fine novel.” Next time, best beloved, we’re going to look at several short stories by Frederick Busch. Till then. #TheGardenOfTheFinzi-Continis #GiorgioBassani #AlanBray

Over the past several weeks, we’ve been looking at The Garden of the Finzi-Continis  through the lens of content and meaning, pondering the nature of the relationship between the novel’s unnamed narrator and Micol Finzi-Contini. Today, let’s consider structure. Ahh! Structure. Bassani uses a common framing technique to present the story. I quoted its beginning in the Prologue two weeks ago. I’m going to do it again: “For many years I wanted to write about the Finzi-Continis—about Micol and Alberto, about Professor Ermano and Signora Olga…” So far, this is ambiguous. It could mean the narrator wanted to write about people who are still alive, or it could be that they’re dead. The narrator, writing in first-person, simple past tense, continues to describe, in this Prologue, going on a Sunday excursion in the year 1957 with some friends who have a young daughter. They go to a group of Etruscan tombs outside of Ferrara. Tellingly, the daughter asks her father, “Tell me, Papa, who do you think were more ancient, the Etruscans or the Jews?” The father laughs and replies: “Ask that gentleman back there,” indicating the narrator who is in the car’s back seat.   This suggests that the narrator is Jewish, that the family with the daughter is not, and it introduces an important theme in the book, that Italian society is constructed from many ethno-religious groups, who co-exist. It also picks out another theme of ancient peoples leaving behind artifacts as records of their existence. Then the group visits the tombs, which reminds the narrator of the nearby Finzi-Contini tomb, mostly empty. At the end of the Prologue, the narrator thinks of Micol and her parents who were deported to and murdered in a German concentration camp. “Who could say,” he concludes, “ if they found any sort of burial at all?” This establishes the tragedy of the story but also tells us the fate of the book’s central character; straight off, the reader knows that Micol dies and that the narrator wants to write the book about her. It eliminates the pesky question which bedevils many a lessor book: Will the narrator and Micol get together or won’t they?  The reader knows before the story begins that Micol doesn’t survive WWII. The reader will read the whole novel knowing that Micol doesn’t survive. There may be tension about what sort of relationship she and the narrator have but it is clear that the relationship ends (actually, it doesn’t end because the narrator, who does survive—the reader knows that too—continues to think about her after her death). This is a huge issue, and I want to clarify. From the beginning, the reader knows that the story is about a narrator looking back at people who have died. As things progress, and as I have been discussing, the story centers on the narrator’s feelings looking back on his relationship with one of these deceased, Micol. Because the reader knows she is dead, the whole story must be about understanding this loss and not whether or not the couple lived “happily ever after.” The central dramatic question becomes, not will they or won’t they get together, but how did the events in the story happen? If the “will they or won’t they” question were used, it would imply that the author, Bassani, knows the answer and is perhaps rather condescendingly telling the reader a story he already knows the answer to and suspending the “news” till the end. The question of “how” is more respectful to the reader; it includes she/he in an investigation of how, that pushes forward to a known ending. Timewise, the story begins in 1957, then goes back to the 1920s, I believe, and moves ahead to 1939, and ultimately back to 1957. There is mention made, midway, that the narrator was imprisoned in 1943, but, again, because of the beginning, we know he survived this ordeal and was writing in a present time of 1957. The story ends with an Epilogue that briefly describes how Micol and her family were arrested and deported because of being Jewish and killed by the Nazis. In many ways, the whole book is a tribute, a tomb, if you will, to her. A different approach would be to start the story without the Prologue, just have the story of how the narrator and Micol met and developed their friendship, building to a climax where Micol and the narrator “break up” and then an afterword that says that she died. A different sort of story, less satisfying, I think. The knowledge that Micol eventually dies provides much depth and tragedy, an intensity that would be missing otherwise. Till next time. #TheGardenoftheFinzi-Continis #GiorgioBassani #AlanBray

There are several interesting literary references in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis  that enrich the story. Certainly, it begins with a quote from the seminal 19th century Italian novel I Promessi Sposi : “The heart, to be sure, always has something to say about what is to come, to him who heeds it. But what does the heart know? Only a little of what has already happened.” This quote is given prominence in its position at the very beginning so it must be pretty relevant, right? What’s going on here? The heart—one’s emotions—knows only a little of what has occurred. This suggests an unreliable narrator, I think. The unnamed narrator of the story is looking back at events that have “already happened” That which is to come in the quote also, I believe, refers to the past, the past that unfolds in the story. The heart/narrator formed many theories about what was to occur in his relationship with Micol but is mistaken. He was forever trying to establish an intimate relationship with her (perhaps ambivalently), assuming he just needed to do more to unlock her heart. But, looking back, he realizes his efforts were in vain. The second reference begins on page 135 when the narrator, deep in his torment over Micol, picks up a book “at random” to distract himself, but cannot “concentrate.” The book is The Red and the Black  by Stendahl, a story of an idealistic young man, whose ambition for success is finally derailed by his passion for a woman. It does not present a completely positive view of the effects of love on a young man, and so, we can grasp why the narrator might have trouble concentrating on it. Then on page 154, the narrator, visiting Grenoble in France—Stendahl’s birthplace, is heartened by reading a phrase in Stendahl’s notebooks, “all lost, nothing lost.” He writes, “Suddenly, as if by miracle, I felt myself free, healed.” (from his pain over Micol). My reading here is that Stendahl comforts the narrator by communicating that “all” may be lost, in the sense of his relationship with Micol, but that this is not the end of the world. It is “nothing” in a bigger picture. A third writer referenced (of course, we must remember Micol’s dissertation on Emily Dickinson and the prescient quote cited last time), occurs on page 143. At the onset of the scene where the narrator visits Micol’s bedroom and attempts to seduce her, she offers him something to drink, and he replies, “I would prefer not to.” (drink something). Micol, a pretty savvy lady, bursts out laughing and says that the narrator has just quoted Herman Melville’s story, Bartleby the Scrivener . She explains the story to the narrator, how the character Bartleby sticks to doing his assigned job as copyist of legal documents but whenever asked to do something in addition, like running an errand, says, “I would prefer not to,” much to the consternation of his employer. The narrator argues that Bartleby is wrong for being so obstinate, and Micol “reproached me, saying I didn’t understand, that I was banal, the same inveterate conformist.” She exalts Bartleby’s “unalienable right, which is every human being’s, to noncollaboration, that is to freedom.” ‘Kay. With this reference, the story “fleshes out” the conflict between the narrator and Micol, just as the Stendahl references develop the narrator’s predicament. Micol is, indeed, the one who is saying “I would prefer not to” become more intimate with the narrator. She keeps to the limits of their relationship as defined—a close friendship, not expanding into physical intimacy. And so, she defends Bartleby. A cynic might say (perhaps to get a laugh), why is Bassani including these literary references in his novel? Manzoni, Stendahl, Melville, and Dickinson? He’s just showing off, trying to show how cool he is for knowing this stuff (Bassani also references Morandi and Montale, which is pretty cool too. And I know who all these people are, so I’m pretty cool, right?). (Silence) Right? My point, of course, is that all these references deepen the story. They also, speak to characterization, in that, we get a sense that the characters are educated and literate. Literary allusion is a useful tool, no? Till next time. #TheGardenoftheFinzi-Continis #Bassani #AlanBray

‘Kay, this is supposed to be part two of a discussion on whether The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is primarily a love story or a story about the Holocaust. Of course, as is true with most such distinctions, both are true. However, I think it’s reasonable to say that, in contrast to other writings by Bassani, Finzi-Continis  centers on a male/female relationship. The way the story is presented suggests that the unnamed narrator is, after a confused adolescent relationship with Micol which culminates in the scene in the carriage, certain but awkward about his feelings for her. She is the one who endlessly bats his overtures aside, who flirts and banters, leaving him in frustration and self-doubt. Of course, this is the narrator’s experience; we never have direct access to Micol’s perspective. But that’s all we have to work with, my friends. It must be said that the narrator himself is no romantic dynamo. In his pursuit of Micol, he is hesitant and easily discouraged. In fact, what is the reason for his attraction to her? As my late father often said, there are lots of girls in Ferrara (well, he didn’t say in Ferrara). But in a realist sense, it’s true; out of many possible paramours, the narrator picks someone who is elusive. The psychologists among us might wonder if he does this to avoid adult intimacy. Let’s just say again that this is a fiction; it’s written to show a certain aspect of human existence. So, why would the narrator and Micol consistently flirt and talk about their feelings for one another without taking things to the next level? The overt reason is clear. The narrator’s feelings for Micol develop out of a pre-adolescent, pre-adult “crush” that involves considerable yearning and confusion. The young people are attracted to one another without having the adult conceptual frameworks of love to explain how they feel. And this yearning does develop into the adult version. However, as we saw in the quote cited last time when the narrator questions his shyness years after the fact, he, at least, struggles to identify his feelings, let alone to act on them. He dreams about her: “I dreamed also that we spoke, and finally without pretense, finally with our cards on the table…Micol insisting that the thing between us had begun on the first day, when she and I, both of us still filled with the surprise of meeting again and recognizing each other, had run off to see the park.” (they banter a bit) “You could come out after all.” (meaning with him). “Me? Out?” she exclaimed, her eyes wide. “And just tell me, cher ami, where would we go?” “I…don’t know,” I answered, stammering. “…if you’re afraid of being compromised, to Piero Della Certosa, on the Via Borso side. That’s where they all go to be alone, you know that…And after all, what’s wrong with being together a bit. It’s not the same as making love! You’re on the first step, on the edge of an abyss. But from there to touching the bottom of the abyss, it’s a long descent!” This scene shows the narrator openly suggesting that he and Micol move things along—however, he’s reporting a dream he had. At one point while he’s awake, the narrator kisses Micol when she returns from a long absence in Venice, but she is shown as shocked and non-responsive. Is it possible she just isn’t interested in the narrator? Yes, it is, however, we are told she has no other paramours and certainly seems to otherwise encourage the narrator’s attentions in an enigmatic way. She encourages him but remains resolutely un-sexual. (Please note that in this respect, the film version is different. Micol becomes sexually involved with Malnate—this does not occur in the book, and the film's presentation of sexuality negates a key theme in the story). Her undergraduate dissertation is on Emily Dickinson, that famously single poet. Micol sends the narrator her translation of a Dickinson poem: “I died for beauty, but was scarce Adjusted in the tomb, When one who died for truth was lain In an adjoining room.   He questioned softly why I had failed? “For beauty,” I replied. “And I for truth,—the two are one; We brethren are,” he said.   And so, as kinsmen met a night, We talked between the rooms, Until the moss had reached our lips, And covered up our names.   Micol adds a postscript: “Alas, poor Emily. This is the kind of compensation vile spinsterhood is forced to hope for!”   ‘Kay. Micol’s translation (as well as her choice of dissertation topics) says a lot about her. Apparently, she hopes for “vile spinsterhood.” She will die—for beauty and for truth but will be lost to time. Her premature death will be an act of beauty. This is another nicely done encapsulation of the whole story and also touches on our question: Why does Micol not act on an adult relationship with the narrator? Because she wishes to remain forever young—normal sexual relationships mean being a mortal adult, and she wishes to die young while she’s still tragically beautiful. But wait; does she know she will die in the Holocaust? Of course not. But she is aware of the increasingly dangerous environment for Jewish people in Italy, and this awareness surely affects her view of life. Life is unfair and cruel; it doesn’t matter what you do or how virtuous you are, others will judge you as belonging to a group you have small allegiance to. Micol and her family respond to the restrictive laws by withdrawing from the world behind the walls of their estate. They are self-contained, being wealthy enough not to have to work or rely on others for basic needs. But a fundamental condition remains. Is the reason Micol avoids the narrator’s awkward attentions due to a limitation within her, something beyond the condition of being Jewish? I believe Bassani presents a story of the narrator being in love with someone who fears love and life itself. To Micol and her family, life is dangerous. The narrator is dangerous as he represents the outside pressing in and disrupting all efforts to stay the same. There is a clue early on in the story: Micol’s parents had a son who died of illness before Micol was born. The parents decided that their son died because of contamination with the outside world and that they must not expose Micol and her brother to the same risk. They keep their children home and educate them with private tutors. The growing hostility of Italian society confirms their desire for isolation. This the environment Micol grows up in. A great irony is that, despite all their efforts to remain safe and to escape time, all the Finzi-Continis, including Micol, will perish in the Holocaust. Till next time. #TheGardenoftheFinzi-Continis #GiorgioBassani #AlanBray