The narration in Three Horses is written in first person. After all, the very first word is “I,” as in “I only read used books.” Is this narrator unreliable, that is to say, sometimes mistaken? A tricky question, because the entire book is written from this protagonist’s perspective. It’s hard to know if he’s sometimes mistaken—all the reader gets is him. Maybe he sometimes reads new books—we the readers don’t know. One of the characteristics of first-person narration is unreliability. The idea is that a narrator who is an “I” will invariably display some error in his narration because she/he cannot know all the inner workings of other characters, let alone the intentions of the implied author. (Heh, heh, heh—I immediately and cleverly slip in a reference to the implied author). So, what can we the readers do? One thing is to look at the other key characters for evidence the narrator is occasionally mistaken. Laila is the alluring woman whom the narrator meets in the book’s first scene. Despite being with another gent, she makes a point of meeting our narrator and slips him her phone number; even he wonders why. “What does a fine woman like her want from a fifty-year old gardener sitting in the corner of a tavern?…I’m here by accident…This is the first time she’s come by.” So, the narrator is approached by a younger woman who gives him her phone number, and he wonders briefly what it’s about, but apparently chalks it up to his charm and gives her a call. She says: “I want to see you again.” He says: “I’m fifty and I’m a gardener.” She says: “All right. When?” At this point, many readers might wonder, what’s going on here? Can we just believe the narrator is a charming guy, or must we be suspicious—perhaps more so than the trusting narrator? They make plans to have dinner at her place. The narrator muses: “What is Laila like. I try to imagine. She’s someone who looks me up and down, a general who from a thousand-soldier formation can pick out the men to raise through the ranks…Maybe she likes the kind of guy at a tavern who turns pages.” It’s apparent here that the narrator is trying to make sense of why she’s picked him. He believes she sees something desirable in him, that she’s attracted to a man who reads. When the narrator calls her, she enters quickly into a passionate affair with him—except when she’s engaged as an escort. When he asks her about her work, she says she makes a living from men: “I go out with men for money.” She says: “Men never fall in love with a working girl.” He responds: “Maybe her customers don’t, I say, but a ne’er-do-well gardener like me just might.” Again, the curious reader might wonder a little at this. An attractive woman who works as an escort falls head over heels for an older guy who works as a gardener. There’s no suggestion he’s wealthy. She likes him for who he is. Wait! Wait! He’s also an ex-soldier and adventurer who is not unfamiliar with violence. Later, falling asleep after lovemaking, the narrator talks elliptically about having been a soldier, having been violent. Laila apologizes. “She hugs me, repeats that she’s sorry. I don’t know what for. I don’t ask.” No, he doesn’t ask. The answer would no doubt be interesting, no? He gradually tells her several stories from his past, that he was a fighter against the junta in Argentina, that he killed people, was on the run. She is very accepting. “What do you think of my stories?” I ask. “I love them,” she says. “It’s my job to make men talk…With you, I listen freely, I listen and learn to love the life that is on your face.” (breaks into song: I don't want clever conversation I never want to work that hard, mmm I just want someone that I can talk to I want you just the way you are) (Loud crashes, glasses breaking. Shouting. Oh no, I’m sorry, best beloved. Can I have the microphone back? I promise—no more singing.) After an absence, Laila dramatically says she needs to speak to the protagonist. “I have something to tell you.” “Laila speaks of a man to kill or be killed.” “I can’t take anymore. He’s onto me, is watching me…This is not the kind of job you’re allowed to quit. When you can’t do it anymore, you either run away or die.” Laila continues: “Otherwise he’ll kill me. Because I don’t want to continue anymore and as a free woman he thinks I’m dangerous. And he knows about you and this is making things risky for you.” Last time, we looked at what happens next. The narrator resolves to kill the menacing man because the narrator has killed before and wants to spare Laila. She accepts this, telling him not to “mess things up.” Then Selim intervenes. The narrator has ignored Selim’s protestations over the narrator’s generosity. Again, as we looked at last week, he gives Selim flowers to sell and resists any attempt at payment. Eventually, Selim gets kind of solemn and grumpy and takes matters into his own hands. The narrator is stunned. A lot goes on in the story that the reader doesn’t know because everything is filtered through the narrator, and he is, best beloved, sometimes oblivious. He seems clear that he’s changed his life and entered his third “horse” alone, overlooking the fact that Laila knows where he lives and may track him down the way she has before. Unless of course, the point is that she’s done with him because he got rid of her nemesis. In that case, he really was tricked by her. We do not know. What a different story Three Horses would be if it were told from Selim’s perspective, or Laila’s. As I said, in Three Horses everything is told from the narrator’s perspective. He is the entity that sees, in Gerard Genette’s formulation. But who perceives? The implied author, my friends. It is the implied author who arranges the story so that the reader can understand that the guileless narrator doesn’t "get" everything about Laila and Selim. He sees but does not see all. The implied author perceives the difference. He does not tell the reader; he shows. But no, a reader objects. There is only the text. You cannot make up this entity called an implied author and attribute perception to it. Stop it! Tricky stuff, my friends—yes, even the reader who objected is my friend. Let’s look at this more next time. Till then, you happy few! #ThreeHorse #ErriDaLuca

Besides Laila, the other key character in Three Horses is Selim, a man whom the narrator befriends and helps, acts of kindness which have consequences. Like Laila, Selim is only seen through the narrator’s perspective. He first appears a quarter of the way into the book. The narrator has gone to work at the garden. “A tall man, African, older, calls to me from the gate…I let him in and invite him to the toolshed for a coffee.” The two men sit and talk, and finally the narrator asks if he can help with anything. Selim asks if he can have some of the flowers to sell in bouquets, and the narrator gives him “a good armful.” Selim wants to pay, but the narrator says no, adding: “So treat me to a bottle of wine when the blossoms are gone, we’ll drink it together.” The narrator does not note Selim’s reaction, apparently assuming he’s merely grateful. After several days, Selim comes to the garden to pick up more flowers. He wants to pay, he’s earned something. “Forget about it. Without you the blossoms would still be here, inside a closed garden. You, instead, do the wind’s work. You scatter them far, pin them to women’s breasts. It would be exploitation if I took a percentage from the wind. Pay for drinks one night.” ‘Kay. Despite his “flowery” rhetoric, the narrator is a generous dude. But he’s missing something that’s implied from the dialogue and scenes, something we will pick up later. I promise you. An important theme in the story is that there is a need to discharge obligation. After several days and nights of hanging out with Laila and remembering the traumatic past, the narrator is once again at work when Selim appears. They sit before a fire of laurel twigs and drink coffee. “With a remaining branch, he (Selim) pokes at a corner. ‘The ashes say that you have to leave.’” (Selim says). “…I look at the shifted embers that hum with a whispering of oak, like Laila’s voice, but rather than make me speak they want me to listen. I’m initially annoyed by this earthen horoscope from downcast black eyes. I swallow, saying only that I have no place I’m trying to reach. ‘Here no one is following me and no one is waiting for me elsewhere.” “You have to leave.” “I don’t leave anymore. Now my verb is to stay. There’s also a woman to love.” “You have to leave…The ashes are blood, including yours shed beside it. The ashes don’t say love.” The narrator does not remark on the connection with his initial description of the fellow menacing Laila (on the first page) “he wears “a hint of ash.” However, after this, the narrator puts Selim’s warning together with Laila’s saying that the man who is menacing her must die. Then the gardener seems to integrate much of the trauma he experienced in Argentina, and out of this healing he resolves to kill Laila’s foe. “I know the evil of killing before her so I can spare her the trouble. I’ll go. I have to be quick. There’s nothing to prepare. I’ll go and pull it off tonight, like Argentina.” As he prepares to leave the garden to find this man, Selim appears. “At noon I have to go somewhere, I’m not going to the tavern,” I tell him. “I’m coming with you,” he says. They go and see where the man lives, then return to the garden. Selim speaks: “You don’t want my money, you don’t want the wine for my debt. That’s how you keep someone tied to you, not set him free. You say no to a man and don’t give him the peace of repayment. I have to honor my pledge. You have to be friends with men and you have to be even.” He prepares to leave. It’s apparent to the reader—if not to the narrator—that Selim wants to be treated as an equal and not given stuff, even out of generosity. The narrator is oblivious. Selim says: “The time for wine is over, man. I’m taking away the last bundle of my debt. I will repay you all at once.” Selim leaves. After several hours, the narrator returns to the menacing man’s house, intending to kill him. But he’s disabled all of a sudden by a severe bloody nose. A doctor helps him and tells him—not knowing who he is—that the man he came to kill is already dead. An African man pulled the man from his car and cut his throat. So, the narrator realizes that Selim killed the man in order to repay a debt of gratitude. Of course, it’s…let’s say, ironic (homage to Jordan Catalano) that they both emit a lot of blood. (One of them too much). Selim’s prophecy is fulfilled. The narrator takes the train home. There, “in the darkness of the kitchen, my second horse dies…The people of a year migrate in a day, no more hold-me’s or olive pits…I stay behind. At least tonight I don’t touch the emptiness they have left.” Hold-me’s or olive pits refers to Laila and Selim—the people of the narrator’s last year who have moved on. (Laila makes no further appearance although we might wonder what happens next, as she knows where the narrator lives and has proven herself not to be shy). The narrator stays behind, entering the third horse, or period, of his life. He has apparently put closure on his life as a violent rebel. Someone running from his past. The narrator says: “I take the book stopped at a fold, deliver myself to its pace, to the breathing of the other storyteller. If I am someone else, it’s also because books move men more than journeys and years. “After many pages you end up learning a variant, a different move than the one taken and thought inevitable.” ‘Kay. A very good “meta” comment on reading and writing. The narrator is saying he believed his life would be different, specifically that he would kill Laila’s foe. Instead, because of his acts of generosity to Selim, another man has taken up the burden of being a killer. Not what he planned. He has been “moved” by the book he’s in, by the implied author, best beloved. In the final paragraph, the narrator puts the book he’s been reading inside his jacket pocket. “Where the gun used to be, now there is its opposite.” We can recall that the first line of the book also references books and reading. “I only read used books.” Even though I always speak in the present tense, I only exist in a story that has already been told. Whoa! Enigma. The theme of discharging obligation is picked up nicely in what transpires between the narrator and Laila. The narrator feels he failed Dvora in Argentine, failing to protect her from evil men. He owes her, he is “tied” to her, but she is dead, and there is no way to discharge the debt till he meets Laila and says, “Aha! Now I can discharge my obligation.” (He doesn’t really say that). Next week, now that we’ve discussed two of the main relationships in the book, let’s look more closely at the narrator’s style, and if he is, on occasion, fooled by the other characters. Till then. #ThreeHorses #ErriDeLuca

Usually, in this blog, I don’t want to merely describe the plots of the books I discuss in the manner of a book review. My purpose is to examine structures in fiction, particularly narrational strategies. But the plot in Three Horses really demands some explication before we can proceed. Because of the book’s style, the story is not immediately clear. An unnamed narrator, self-described as a fifty-year old gardener, encounters a younger woman named Laila in a restaurant. She gives him her phone number; he’s flattered by the attention and curious. He states he’s working as a gardener for a man he used to know, who has become quite successful. The narrator says: “…he asks about me, but I don’t dwell on my misadventures in Argentina, the unbridled wrongs, the search for life.” The reader knows from the book’s foreword that the story is about the dark period in Argentina’s history, its “immensity of places and events,” and how they’re “connected to the accidents that befell people in this story.” So, at this point, the careful reader (who has read the foreword) perceives that the narrator had misadventures in Argentina during the time of the rebellion against the junta. ‘Kay. The narrator calls Laila. They have dinner at her place. Then, the narrator says to her: “A woman comes to see me some time ago…She wants to hear some news about me, wants to see if two pieces of time match up…I tell her that what she has to do is bring to the boy from the old days the embrace she conceals inside…What I tell her, in other words, is: I’m not me. “…I tell this story and Laila asks why.” ‘Kay. Laila asks this guy to come over for dinner, and they…appreciate each other as a man and a woman. Then he’s telling her a story about a different woman he met. And Laila asks the narrator why he is telling her the story. Reasonable. He replies: “I see old poets receiving prizes for verses written in their youth. None of them says, ‘It’s not me.’ I can’t act like them. “The only thing I manage to say is, ‘It’s not me,’ and I drink the wine left in the woman’s glass.” There’s a paragraph break, and then: I place my hand over the glass in front of me, which is better than the hand from that earlier time.” One way for the reader to make sense of this passage is that the narrator is intentionally telling Laila in the form of a story that he has changed; he is no longer like his youthful self who was rebelling against the government and capable of violence. I’m not me, is what he says. The hand he has now is better than the hand from that earlier time. The only problem is that so far, he’s not told Laila anything about his past. If the narrator is trying to let her know he’s not the right guy to protect her from violence, it’s not because she’s asked him or even told him she’s in danger. In the book’s logic, he just “knows” these things. In any case, they make love, and after, he’s telling her about his days in Argentina. What were you doing there? she asks. “War.” “Her voice becomes rough, sandpaper rubbing against wood. I feel sleepy but I start talking…There’s something in me that you find in many men of the world: loves, gunshots, thorny sentences and no desire to talk…Living is what matters, looking at the palm of your hand at night and knowing that tomorrow it will be fresh again…” Then, Laila apologizes. “She hugs me, repeats that she’s sorry. I don’t know what for, I don’t ask.” So, it would seem that, somewhat out of synchronous time, the narrator does tell the “real” Laila that he was a soldier who killed. And then she apologizes—why? Because she believes she’s forced a sort of confession out of him? One she needs to know? She needs a man to help her; she is in danger from another man. The narrator can “rescue” her. She’s not helpless but needs an ally. That’s why she picked him. Quite possibly, best beloved. The narrator gradually makes a distinction between the “real’ Laila in the present and other women he’s been intimate with in the past. However, he repeatedly enters a trance state usually triggered by the “sandpaper” quality of Laila’s voice, and in this state, tends to mix the past up with the present in a PTSD kind of way. Memories break through the bonds that usually hold them locked away. In fact, Laila is a sort of magnetic force that draws out his past. The narrator lives his life in Italy, tending a garden, eating great food and doing good deeds but generally avoiding the traumatic past. Then he meets a woman who, fairly aggressively and lovingly, shakes the truth out of him. She may have ulterior motives for doing so, and she may also care for him. Since the story is told entirely from the narrator’s perspective, we must infer Laila’s motivations. (More on this to come). Eventually, Laila tells the narrator that she wants to leave the man she is involved with professionally (she’s an escort), and that the man senses this and will murder her. So, she says, she will become like the narrator—violent—and kill the man first. The narrator enters one of his delusional states (sorry, there’s no other way to describe it), and, believing Laila to be the same person as his lover Dvora, murdered by the Argentine junta, resolves that he will murder the man who is menacing Laila. The narrator says he failed her (Dvora) once before, now he has a chance to redeem himself by killing to protect her. Laila accepts this, but tells him: “Don’t mess things up.” (which I think is unintentionally—or maybe intentionally—funny). I realize this attempt at describing the story may make it seem ridiculous. If that’s so, I am truly sorry. It’s an exquisite book, but a little wacky too. The narrator sets out to assassinate Laila’s enemy but finds him already murdered by the narrator’s friend, Selim. Next time, let’s take a look at why Selim does this, entirely, of course, through the narrator’s perspective. #ThreeHorse #ErriDeLuca

As mentioned last week, Erri De Luca, the author of Three Horses, states he can only write about things he’s experienced, placing himself more in the camp of writers who admonish everyone to “write what you know.” The issue has become very partisan, with believers and dis-believers regarding each other with steely-eyed hatred over a middle ground of the undecided. It’s always good to mention Ernest Hemingway, so let’s do. “Papa” was a writer who embodied “write what you know,” although he was also highly skilled at self-promotion. (the two are not mutually exclusive). In any case, he promoted himself as the hyper-masculine author of fiction written about the hyper-masculine. Whether it was bullfighting or military combat, womanizing or drinking, he did as his protagonists did, aggressively trying to erasing the differences between his book’s narrators and their author. Were his protagonists copying him or was he copying his protagonists? Wow! At the opposite end of things, we have someone like Ann Patchett, who wants to learn about realities she’s unfamiliar with but interested in so as to write about them. Thus, in Bel Canto, Ms. Patchett wrote about an opera singer involved in a South American insurrection—neither of them experiences Ms. Patchett has had. Signore De Luca would, I think, not be amused. Hemingway would start a brawl. There are some similarities between Hemingway and De Luca, although I hasten to add De Luca is a more modern author and handles sexual/intimate relations in a multi-dimensional fashion. But, you ask, when the narrator and real author seem very close, what becomes of the implied author? It chugs along with as much swagger as it does in any book but is more elusive. Still there, but harder to detect. And this is true in Three Horses, my friends. Especially since the narrator is never named, it’s easy to think of him as Erri De Luca. He (the narrator) is a fifty-year old Italian man living in Italy in the late 1980s—roughly the same age as Signore De Luca was at that time. The narrator cares sincerely about injustice, the plight of migrants and refugees, the mis-treatment of women. About the trees and plants he tends in his job as a gardener, he talks to them, lays hands on them to help them thrive. He has a history of being—not only a member of the opposition in Argentina—but also a working man, a union man, with some knowledge of the dramatic strikes at the Fiat plant in Turin. Other men recognize his toughness, his authenticity, and aid him. When you read about the real Erri De Luca, there is nothing to make you think he is any different than this protagonist of his novel—except he was not in Argentina. However, we don’t know if the real man has the same character and feelings as the protagonist. It’s possible, it’s also possible that the protagonist is the person the real man dreams of becoming. But—and this a big but—could the real author be as relentlessly righteous as the protagonist? Does he think and speak like this? “Faces are writings.” (Laila is speaking: now comes the protagonist). “Hands are too,” I say, “and clouds, tiger pelts, peapods, and the leaping of tuna on the water’s surface are writings. We learn alphabets and don’t know how to read trees. Oaks are novels, pines are grammar books, grapevines psalms, ramblers proverbs, firs the closing remarks of a defense lawyer. Cypresses are accusations, rosemary a song, laurel a prophecy.” Well, Laila seems to like this. If I spoke this way to Dena, she’d probably interpret it accurately as joking and/or irony. Three Horses shows the protagonist speaking in this poetic/Biblical style throughout (more on this another time). He is never shown saying more mundane things like “How’s it going?” or “See ya later.” Is this realistic? No, it’s not supposed to be. It’s the style, the elusive implied author showing particular instants from a character’s life. Selected instants, best beloved. Idealized instants when the protagonist says and does the exact right thing to tell the story. This passage is a nice example of fictional discourse that does not really impart important information about what the characters are going to do or are doing, i.e. plot. Instead, (especially in a character-driven story) it gives the reader a sense of who the characters are, and of what the book’s style is like. In the reality of Three Horses, the characters speak this way to each other. In the reality of our lives, to have someone speak to you in this way would be maddening. Here’s a further example of how the protagonist and Laila speak: “I can’t imagine living without you, gardener, even if I wring my imagination out. I can think cool-headedly about ambushes, about moving quickly so that I get there before him…But what I can’t do is see beyond you.” “Laila, for you I am a steam-powered love, the force that moved the first trains, the first ships without sails.” “Steam powered love is good for one era.” “You go through many and now you’re in the early nineteen-hundreds. You have to wage your war and if you come back alive, then will come the electric loves, turbo-powered. You can’t see them from here.” “The love I bring you is the kind that burns slowly, like a good wood or coal-burning furnace. It’s good for departures.” “Your thirty years have been still for a while.” … “My steam-powered love, we’ll look at unclouded days, and if I manage to live, I’ll look for your rain-pipe island.” Hmmm. Curious, no? They are talking about something very serious, their planned murder of the man who is menacing Laila. But you almost wouldn’t know that from what they say. They seem to be talking more at each other, rather than to each other. It’s a bit like actors reading lines where each line is more intended for the audience than the other actor in the scene. Ooh. With apologies to Signore De Luca (and great respect), I think he’s overstating the case when he claims he only writes what he knows. I believe he wants to sound particularly authentic and righteous, qualities he seems to personally value. Yes, it’s believable that he’s experienced close approximations of many of the situations in Three Horses, but no, he did not somehow “live the story.” Three Horses belongs to a genre of novels that read like memoir but are not. In a sense, they are “disguised” so as to appear more authentic. I believe it is impossible to be a purist about “write what you know” and write fiction. If you only write what you yourself have experienced, you’re not writing fiction—which is by nature created, “made-up”—you’re writing memoir. #ThreeHorses #ErriDeLuca

This week, a new novel, Erri De Luca’s 1999 book Three Horses, translated from Italian to English by Michael Moore in 2005. I first read Three Horses ten years ago. I do not recall what led me to the book; no doubt, it was either because of reading some reference to it or perhaps just seeing the cover in a brick and mortar bookshop. The cover of the 2005 paperback edition shows an evocative image of a color photograph that has been changed in a painterly way by an overlay of diagonal scratches suggesting rain. It’s a wonderful symbol of a story that is overtly realist but on a deeper level, finely crafted and changed by creativity. I was immediately entranced with the characters and story, and with De Luca’s wonderful style which we will be getting into, I promise you. The story, which is very timely, is that the narrator, who’s never named, is a survivor of the revolt against the Argentine junta of the 1970s and 80s. He has escaped to 1980s Italy where he works as a gardener. He meets a younger woman, Laila, and there’s an immediate attraction between them. She’s a prostitute who is , apparently, involved with a man who has some connection from Argentina with the narrator and menaces him. A refugee from Africa who works for the narrator kills this man to protect the narrator. The title, Three Horses, is taken from an Italian nursery rhyme: In three years a hedge, three hedges a dog, three dogs a horse, three horses a man. A man’s life lasts as long as that of three horses, twenty-seven times three. In the story, the protagonist’s first life has been extinguished in Argentina, so he’s on his second. By the end of the story, the narrator’s second life will have been ended too, his third is undescribed in this book. A Foreword section concerns the revolt in Argentina and concludes with the statement: “The immensity of places and events is connected to the accidents that befell people in this story.” Who is speaking here, and why are the elements of the plot described as accidents? More on this later. Then there is an epigram: “Woe to those who do not practice their purity ferociously,” attributed to Mario Trejo - Argentina 1926. Again, let’s return to this epigram at a later point to see how it fits. ‘Kay. Erri De Luca has been quoted as saying he can only write about things he’s experienced, and that is why his fiction is always written in first person. He embodies the philosophy of "write what you know." Interesting. I don’t think De Luca is claiming that he experienced literally everything in Three Horses, for instance, he was not in Argentine during the desperate time of the junta. However, he was very active politically in Italy during a time of out-and out rebellion against the government. Older readers may recall the Red Brigades and some high-profile assassinations. In the book, De Luca describes a political assassination from the assassin’s point-of-view, as well as the feelings a killer has. However, I don’t want to speculate as to whether or not De Luca was an assassin. My sense is that he’s saying he’s had certain experiences, like being part of a political rebellion, like falling intensely in love with a woman, which appear in his writing—not as himself exactly, as the protagonist of Three Horses is not named Erri. However, this situation does muddy the waters a bit. This blog often focuses on the three entities who create a work of fiction—the narrator, the implied author/style, and the real flesh-and-blood author. (whiny voice—not this again!) If we apply this tool to Three Horses, we get the unnamed narrator; we get a highly literary style, and we get an author who actively tries to model the narrator on himself, so much so that the lines of demarcation become blurred. Blurred, but a heavy hand puts this plot and these characters through a strong style which shapes it and them. It is the hand of the implied author, my friends. Here is how the implied author shows the narrator’s first encounter with Laila, the woman whom he falls in love with: (He’s sitting in a bar, reading.) “…I tear my head away from the white of the paper and the tablecloth and follow the line formed by the upper edge of the wall tiles in its tour around the room, passing behind the two black pupils of a woman, which sits on the vector like two notes split apart by the lower line of the pentagram. They’re staring straight at me.” Huh, beautiful writing, but unusual, no? Maybe not if the protagonist were a mathematician, but he isn’t. This guy is sitting in a bar, and a beautiful woman is staring at him. Someone in this situation might experience a range of reactions—intense curiosity, self-consciousness (have I spilled soup on myself?). Lust. But the narrator only describes the situation in a somewhat distant fashion, and says nothing about his own reaction. My point is that this important plot point is presented in a very stylized way. I actually find what’s described in this passage a little hard to imagine happening, which is another way to say that its mimetic function is less strong than its style. ‘Kay. Enough for now. Till next week. #ThreeHorses #ErriDeLuca

The Sea is the story of a troubled man who, after great personal tragedy, returns obsessively to the site of an earlier tragedy and re-experiences it without exhibiting much relief. I don’t think this character changes much; it is more that the reader is invited to make an increasingly large emotional investment as he reveals himself. So, how is this story told? Last week, I suggested that the protagonist, Max, relies on The Sea’s literary style to tell the story, perhaps to tell more than he himself is able to. Literary style can be defined as how a writer decides to express whatever he wants to say; his choice of words, the sentence structure, syntax, language (figurative or metaphorical). It is the way a writer writes, and it is the implied author who polishes and edits this prose, creating the style. “Distinct from the author and the narrator, the term refers to the "authorial character" that a reader infers from a text based on the way a literary work is written.” ‘Kay. So the implied author creates a story’s style, and in The Sea, Max relies on the style to tell the story. He leans on the implied author, more than many characters do. In The Old Illusion of Belonging, Distinctive Style, Bad Faith, and John Banville’s The Sea, Monica Faccinello of the University of York, writes about how Max hides behind the style of the book, because without it, he fears he is nothing. As I wrote last week, Max feels he has no home, no career; he has no authenticity as a husband and a father. Faccinello discusses Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of “bad faith,” citing Max as a prime example. Bad faith, Sartre says, is a lie to oneself, the attempt at “hiding a displeasing truth or to show as truth a pleasing untruth”, made possible, Sartre explains, by the fact that we are not “in-ourselves” what we are “for-ourselves.” The French philosopher offers the example of the waiter in a café, a man who makes “the typical gestures” of the waiter in order to be one. But in having to play the role, to represent himself as a waiter, Sartre argues, this man confirms that he is not a waiter. I believe this is a rather harsh way to look at behavior that is fairly common. When people begin a new job, a new role, it’s normal to experience a sense of “pretending” to be what one has not yet become. In-authentic. Growing into something. But in Max, the author is showing someone who takes a degree program in pretending, and never graduates. “Yet I know that I exist, that I am here…Now when I say “I,” it seems hollow to me. I can’t manage to feel myself very well, I am so forgotten. The only real thing left in me is existence which feels it exists. I yawn, lengthily. No one. Antoine Roquentin exists for no one. That amuses me. And just what is Antoine Roquentin? An abstraction. A pale reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness. Antoine Roquentin…and suddenly the “I” pales, pales, and fades out.” (J.P. Sartre Nausea). Ow, a painful way to live, and Max is in pain. (which, actually, bestows authenticity). Now, it would seem that the whining gentleman is not with us this week, but if he were, he might object that Max is not real. He is a character in a novel, a creation of an author who remains behind the scenes. In The Sea, there is an illusion that the story represents Max writing a sort of diary or journal, in which he “confesses” shameful deeds and thoughts. Because of the poetic prose and frequent allusion to other great writers, the reader who is seduced by this illusion gets the sense that Max himself must be extraordinarily sensitive and literate, whereas actually it is the implied author (with Mr. Banville’s guidance) who is so. There is an illusion that Max Morden is at least a fine writer, if not also a basically good person wracked by grief and guilt. Max the character is not likable, but the reader (I think) grows to feel sorry for him, to excuse his behavior. Illusion because the story’s prose is not Max’s; it’s how the implied author “packages” the story. “Max” isn’t writing anything. And this is, I believe, Ms. Faccinello’s point, that Max tries to claim the authenticity he does not feel he has by hiding behind the story’s style. The idea here is that a shady character can hide behind gorgeous prose and the legitimacy that’s gained by reference to other great works. However, if the reader pries beneath the beautiful style, she/he finds a hollow man. Of course Max Morden (Modern) is not “real;” he’s a character in a novel, and his situation is meant to show something—perhaps that certain people experience themselves as inauthentic, and that this is tragic. And that this self-experience of inauthenticity could have its origins in particular experiences in the past. I think it is taking it too concretely to say that the point of The Sea is that to erect an identity through style is to indulge in bad faith. Who’s being accused of bad faith here? Max? John Banville? This is rabbit hole stuff, best beloved. Things become murky pretty fast. Is it that the story itself is pretending to be a novel? Is John Banville—who is a masterful author—pretending to be one? I do not know, my friend. I do not know. But I love this book. Next week, a new story: Erri de Luca’s Three Horses. Till then. #TheSea #JohnBanville

The drowning of Chloe and Myles Grace, is alluded to mysteriously in The Sea’s first line: “They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide.” Here, Chloe and Myles are referred to as gods, and their deaths described as a departure. The actual event, shown close to the end, is in many ways the climax of the book. Let’s look at it more closely. At a deeper level of theme, the gods depart to death in the sea after one of them, Chloe Grace, has a sexual experience. This echoes ancient Greek myth where maidens die after experiencing sex. A move from childhood innocence to adulthood, with death as a transition. I’m thinking here of several mythic stories, the one about Persephone is a good example. A young girl, a child, is at play when she is spotted by Hades, the god of the underworld. He desires her and carries her off—permanently—to his realm. In The Sea, after an incident of sexual contact involving Chloe, Max, and Chloe’s brother Myles, (yikes!) where Chloe is shown having an orgasm, the young people are discovered by Rose (who is Miss Vavasour) and Chloe runs off toward the sea, Myles following. “Then calmly they stood up and waded into the sea, the water smooth as oil hardly breaking around them, and leaned forward in unison and swam out slowly, their two heads bobbing on the whitish swell, out, and out. We watched them, Rose and I…I do not know what I was thinking, I do not remember thinking anything…They were far out now, the two of them, so far as to be pale dots between pale sky and paler sea, and then one of the dots disappeared…A splash, a little white water, whiter than all that around, then nothing, an indifferent world closing. “Rose cried out, a sort of sob, and shook her head rapidly from side to side.” Max begins running along the beach, headed to tell Chloe’s parents what’s occurred. “I was running, trying to run, along the beach…Often in my dreams I am back there again, wading through that sand that grows ever more resistant, so that it seems that my feet themselves are made of some massy, crumbling stuff. What did I feel? Most strongly, I think, a sense of awe, awe of myself, that is, who had known two living creatures that were suddenly, astoundingly, dead.” Well. Here we are presented with an account of a drowning/possible suicide where the witnesses—Max and Rose make no effort to intervene. The adult Max writes: “I would like to ask her (Rose) if she blames herself for Chloe’s death.” But he does not and never questions his own responsibility—either for the sexual act or for passively watching the drownings. Does he blame himself? In many ways, this is the primary act of cowardice and betrayal that Max commits, the act he cannot forgive himself for. Then the line: “Was’t well done?” What does this Shakespearean quote signify? In Act 5 of The Tempest, it is Prospero’s sprite Ariel who says this to Prospero after she, at his bidding, brings the mariners to him, which leads to the end of the play. It was Ariel, I believe, who created the tempest, the storm that gives the play its name. (Wait—could there be other connections between The Sea and The Tempest? Both focus on the boundary between sea and shore, both involve a protagonist who has a daughter. Whoa! I think we should let the academics tackle this one). (whiny voice—isn’t sprite a soft drink? How come Prospero’s soft drink can talk?) But the implication here is that some other-worldly creature has somehow arranged the drowning of Chloe and Myles along with Max and Rose’s reactions, and is presenting the memory to the adult Max. It comes off as a sort of cruel joke, suggesting that these tragic events were a sort of theater. Or perhaps that the book’s recounting of them is a well-done and self-conscious piece of theater. Either way, it seems remarkably cold and empty. Perhaps that’s how Max feels. After this, a paragraph break, and the adult Max addresses Anna, his dead wife, as “you.” “Why have you not come back to haunt me?…Send back your ghost. Torment me, if you like. Rattle your chains, drag your cerements across the floor, keen like a banshee, anything. I would have a ghost.” So, Max seems to believe he is deserving of being haunted by his wife’s ghost, deserving because of self-judged crimes. Perhaps the implication is that Max hungers for authenticity through condemnation, but never gets it. It’s almost as if he’s pre-judged himself as lacking, that the narratee’s judgement is already assumed to be given. At the end, Max passively accepts his daughter taking over his life. He’s to return to Dublin, stop drinking, in general behave himself. His freedom is at an end, as is almost his life. “Nor did she stop there, but, flushed with that initial triumph, and seizing the advantage offered by my temporary infirmity, went on to direct, a figurative hand cocked on her hip, that I must pack up and leave the Cedars forthwith and let her take me home—home, she says!—where she will care for me, which care will include, I am given to understand, the withholding of all alcoholic stimulants, or soporifics, until such time as the Doctor, him again, declares me fit for something or other, life, I suppose. What am I to do? How am I to resist? She says it is time I got seriously down to work…I suppose I shall not be allowed to sell the house, either.” The book concludes with his final admission that he was not at his wife’s bedside when she died but had gone outside the hospice for a moment of fresh air. There’s a beautiful connection with the sea, and then a nurse summons Max back inside the hospital. Max, I think it’s fair to say, experiences himself as inauthentic, as not a real person. He feels he has no home, no career. He lacks authenticity as a husband and father. He lives more in the past than the present. And he relies on The Sea’s literary style to tell his story—more on this next week. Till then. #TheSea #JohnBanville

A central question (not the only one) in The Sea is to whom is the narrator, Max, addressing his narration? Max’s narrative has the feel of a diary, a private, often unedited document meant solely for the author’s use. However, given this definition, trouble lies ahead. Oh, no! The Sea is but a facsimile of a private document—facsimile because it is not a private document at all, it is a public work of fiction. Also, although we have every reason to accept that Max would narrate a story in a very sophisticated and polished manner—after all, he is a sort of academic and highly educated—this text is highly, highly refined, this prose has been polished, best beloved. And who is responsible, who is the polisher? Max, you say? Mr. Banville? If you say this, I am saddened. Saddened because we have spent much blood and treasure going over and over the distinctions and the relationships between the implied author, the real author, and the narrator of a text. Wait—maybe you haven’t read every post in this blog the way I have. I shouldn’t be saddened, but happy that you’re interested. (Pollyanna reference). ‘Kay. It is the implied author who has polished and edited this prose. “Distinct from the author and the narrator, the term refers to the "authorial character" that a reader infers from a text based on the way a literary work is written.” But I digress. To whom is the narration addressed? Max is not, in my opinion, telling a story in the way that Mr. Stevens, the narrator of The Remains of the Day, seems to be telling the story to an imaginary peer, a “you” whom he believes will understand him. Yet, is it possible that The Sea is written as a kind of plea for understanding, forgiveness, even? Max describes letting his wife and his daughter down, perhaps even letting Chloe Grace down long ago. He is guilt- ridden over his adult insensitivity. Perhaps it’s not a stretch to say The Sea may be addressed to an imaginary self whom Max believes is capable of offering grace and forgiveness. Whoa. Grace is the family name of very prominent characters in The Sea. We may be onto something here, my friends. So, under Mr. Banville’s supervision, the implied author of The Sea presents a story about Max, the narrator, who presents a story from his particular perspective. This leads to the following possibility: A deep collusion between the implied author and the reader goes on behind the narrator’s back. The reader infers a great deal more from the narration than the narrator is aware he is communicating. (Thanks to James Phelan for this idea). (whiny voice—that makes it sound like you know James Phelan, Mr. Big Shot). Let’s stay on course, my friends. The more brilliant you are, the more criticism you receive. One of the central features of The Remains of the Day is that Mr. Stevens is, to put it mildly, often kidding himself. He reviews his past conduct and doesn’t find it lacking. However, the implied author lets the reader see the tragedy and failings of Mr. Stevens’ past, and so, there is collusion—a lot goes over Mr. Stevens’ head, or behind his back. Or—wherever. The Sea is arguably a different beastie, although it also features a first-person narrator who presents his past behavior for judgement. But Max doesn’t spare himself. He shows the reader in relentless detail that he’s been not only a jerk, but in essence, criminally negligent in the deaths of Chloe and Myles Grace. (More on this next time). Indeed, the implied author allows Max to plead his case to the reader, but does not allow Max any delusion. He describes himself as arrogant and self-centered and offers plenty of examples. “Claire, my daughter, has written to ask how I am faring…What age is she now, twenty-something, I am not sure. She is very bright…Not beautiful, however…She is too tall and stark, her rusty hair is coarse and untameable and stands out around her freckled face in an unbecoming manner, and when she smiles she shows her upper gums, glistening and whitely pink. With those spindly legs and big bum, that hair, the long neck especially…she always makes me think of Tenniel’s drawing of Alice when she has taken a nibble from the magic mushroom.” Beautifully written prose, but not a terribly endearing description of one’s daughter. Other examples abound. Max abuses alcohol—a lot. He ridicules other people, putting them down, making fun of their vulnerabilities. And he ridicules himself. It’s clear that he judges himself as lacking in the care he gave his wife, punishing himself for any negative thoughts he had about her. And there’s the whole thing about Chloe and Myles Grace—next week, I said, so settle down. In short, Max is not likable. We the readers have no contradictory data. Max does report some interactions with other characters but—unlike in Remains—we don’t get dis-confirmation of Max’s story from them. However, his saving “grace” is that he is aware of being a jerk and regrets it. In a sense, The Sea is a confessional that lays out Max’s imagined sins. The reader is not asked directly to pronounce judgement, but by inference, and in this sense, the implied author does collude with the reader. There is irony in the use of such a poetic style to show such a story. In other words, the story of The Sea could be presented in a much plainer style without the allusions to classical mythology and Shakespeare. Max could be a much simpler man with little insight. The story of someone confessing imagined sins, too proud perhaps to ask for forgiveness, could be narrated by a sort of Stanley Kowalski-type. But it is not, and this is part of the implied author’s contribution. A question for contemplation: Do we the readers forgive Max? Are we moved enough by his human failings to excuse him? #TheSea #JohnBanville

The premise of The Sea is that, after the death of his wife, a man is grieving, trying to go on but struggling, not only with the loss, but also his own mortality. He is living in the house he and his wife shared, the house their daughter grew up in, but feels estranged from it and is ready to sell. He journeys to a place he stayed at as a child, choosing to take a room in a hotel, The Cedars, which had been the residence of an eccentric family that had captured his attention long ago. A tragedy occurred at this place and time, a tragedy that is gradually foreshadowed and finally revealed. While he is staying at the hotel, great swaths of memory occupy him. He dwells on his childhood, the tragedy, and on the circumstances of his marriage and his wife’s death. So how does he decide to go to The Cedars? The answer involves the story or plot. Max, the protagonist, has a dream. In it, he is walking in a wintry wood. “A dream it was that drew me here. In it, I was walking along a country road, that was all. It was in winter, at dusk, or else it was a strange sort of dimly radiant night, the sort of night that there is only in dreams, and a wet snow was falling. I was determinedly on my way somewhere, going home, it seemed, although I did not know what or where home might be…Something had broken down, a car, no, a bicycle, a boy’s bicycle, for as well as being the age I am now I was a boy as well, a big awkward boy, yes, and on my way home, it must have been home, or somewhere that had been home, once, and that I would recognize again, when I got there. I had hours of walking to do but I did not mind that, for this was a journey of surpassing but inexplicable importance, one that I must make and was bound to complete…I was alone on the road. The snow which had been slowly drifting down all day was unmarked by tracks of any kind, tyre, boot, or hoof, for no one had passed this way and no one would…I felt compassion for myself being dreamed, this poor lummox going along dauntlessly in the snow at fall of day with only the road ahead of him and no promise of homecoming…This was all there was in the dream…I woke into the murk of dawn not as I usually do these days, with the sense of having been flayed of yet another layer of protective skin during the night, but with the conviction that something had been achieved, or at least initiated.” Then he thinks of the Graces and Chloe Grace, the family and the girl who had occupied his attention as a child. “I cannot think why, and it was as if I had stepped suddenly out of the dark into a splash of pale, salt-washed sunlight. It endured only a minute, less than a minute, that happy lightsomeness, but it told me what to do, and where I must go.” A great description of a dream, the feeling state of the self being dreamed. Nothing “happens” seemingly, but it is life-changing. After this, Max reports he and his adult daughter, Claire, drive from Dublin to Bayless, the town where he stayed as a child. He identifies various places remembered from his youth and finally encounters the possible granddaughter of someone he knew long ago—a stranger. To her, he blurts out: “It is just, you see,” I said, “that my wife died.” With Claire, he visits The Cedars, an evocative place the Grace family had lived in. He returns to Dublin and immediately calls the current owner of The Cedars, Miss Vavasour, and arranges to stay at The Cedars for an indefinite time. Although increasingly foreshadowed, the story does not reveal Miss Vavasour’s significance till late. However, clues abound. “I asked her if she remembered me. “Oh yes,” she said without inflexion. “Yes, of course I remember you.” The Cedars is the central locus of the book in that it is from there that Max is telling the story. Claire, who knows her father’s history, says of his staying there: “You’re mad.” His new residence was the scene of an enormous trauma, one that he appears drawn to re-experience, perhaps in order to gain closure, even over his wife’s death, even over mortality, although he never says this directly. It is something that may be inferred by the reader. So, tragedy and an intense dream impel the protagonist to return, later in life, to the place by the sea where he experienced a profound change, a transition from childhood to adulthood. More on this next week, my dear ones. #TheSea #JohnBanville

This week, a new novel: John Banville’s The Sea, published in 2005 and the winner of that year’s Man Booker Prize. It begins: “They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide.” I believe this is the fourth time I’ve read the book, the first time six years ago. Back in 2005, (ten years before that) I’d read a review of it, a review that really stuck with me. Why do we read particular books at particular times? We’re reminded of something, perhaps, or it’s has been sitting unread on our bookshelf for months, years. Anyway, I recall I was initially reluctant to buy The Sea because I understood that it concerned an older man grieving the death of his wife. I thought, huh, death—don’t know if I’m down for a sad story. But I was immediately seduced by the beautiful, poetic prose and the mysterious structure of a story that moves effortlessly through time. (whiny voice. Excuse me, I read The Sea too, I thought it was going to be about ships, but there weren’t any ships in it, no sailors. Not even fish). Muffled voice—call security please. The title is, I believe, a metaphoric expression of the protagonist’s experience of life, unpredictable, dramatic, a powerful symbol of nature’s mindless destructive impact on fragile human existence. (whiny voice recedes. No it’s not! Let go of me! Bullies!) The Sea follows a structure we have seen before, an implied author showing a first-person narrator who tells the story. It has been said by certain clever people that a first person narrator is always unreliable, in that she/he exhibits a particular perspective on a story. More on that to come. Broadly, The Sea concerns a man named Max Morden who is staying at The Cedars, a sort of Bed and Breakfast on the Irish coast, a place familiar from his childhood. Banville says in an interview that the place is based on the town of Rosslare on the southeastern coast, a place he himself spent summers at as a boy. Max is Irish and the setting is contemporary. Max decided to go to The Cedars after having a dream that reminded him of a childhood tragedy that occurred there. He is recently widowed, his wife Anna having died from cancer within the past year. As mentioned, Max narrates the story from the book’s present while staying at The Cedars, and his narration focuses on three times/places: first, the present where he interacts with his landlady, Miss Vavasour, another guest, Colonel Blunden, and his adult daughter, Claire. Second, the recent past spent with his wife Anna, coping with her demise. And third, one more remote, that same Cedars, but fifty years before when Max was a boy of eleven encountering the Grace family, particularly the children Chloe Grace and her brother Myles. The style of the book is poetic, a pleasure, and I find myself slowing the pace of my reading in order to savor the language. “It was a sumptuous, oh, truly a sumptuous autumn day, all Byzantine coppers and golds under a Tiepolo sky of enamelled blue. The countryside all fixed and glassy, seeming not so much itself as its reflection in the still surface of a lake. It was the kind of day on which, latterly, the sun for me is the world’s fat eye looking on in rich enjoyment as I writhe in my misery.” A beautiful passage of prose and also one that contains some cues as to the book’s style. Tiepolo, for instance. The implied author assumes the reader knows who Giovanni B. Tiepolo was and has some concept of how a sky could be described as “Tiepolo.” This might be a turn-off to some readers, a damning example of snobbery. Others might feel heartened that they, the happy few, know who the heck Tiepolo was. "Byzantine coppers and golds" is another example that calls for a certain level of sophistication on the reader’s part. Of course, the reader’s busy eye might also just elide such words as unknowns. The use of “sumptuous, oh truly sumptuous” also cues the reader that not only will longer words be found in the text (compare with the tone of “nice, real nice”) but also that the narrator’s voice is dramatic and emotional, speaking directly to the reader (or to someone, more on that too). Can words capture human experience? Or do they shape human experience? Probably both, but the narrator is very assured of the former, making use of deliberate prose and precious little equivocation. The words “perhaps” or “maybe” rarely occur. There is Max, the protagonist, who tells the story in first person, there is a hidden implied author who organizes Max’s entries and language. And there is the real author John Banville who seems curiously separate from Max—to me, at least. Perhaps because Max is named, almost like a character, rather than being an “I.” Perhaps too because Max has had particular experiences—the death of his wife, the interactions with the Grace family, that seem strongly unique and also dramatized. So there is a sense of a storyteller showing Max as he tells his story and of the Graces. After all, my friends, who puts in the paragraph breaks? Huh? The novel is organized into two sections, with internal paragraph breaks within. It suggests a kind of reflective diary, with shifts occurring due to the writer’s whim or preoccupation. The paragraph breaks generally set off changes in time. Next week, let’s look at how the story develops, it’s themes, and that all important question: what’s the point? “Kay. Till then. #TheSea #JohnBanville

One of the ways Olive K. is novel-like is the development throughout the book of the main character, Olive Kitteridge. The first chapter, “Pharmacy,” is, as we know, told from Olive’s husband Henry’s perspective. Here’s the first glimpse of Olive herself. “Mousy,” his wife said, when he hired the new girl. “Looks just like a mouse.” Olive is only seen through Henry’s eyes, and the story is largely about Henry’s yearning for the young woman who works for him, a woman who needs his help. Olive, by contrast, is to Henry, mercurial, dissatisfied, and desirable—what Henry (via the narrator) refers to as “her outer Olive-ness,” which implies he’s aware of more inside her, although he offers no elaboration. He observes how she had outwardly changed with age—“She is not as tall as she used to be, and is broader across the back.” Olive is unfaithful; Henry “understood long ago—after Jim O’Casey’s car went off the road, and Olive spent weeks going straight to bed after supper, sobbing harshly into a pillow—Henry understood then that Olive had loved Jim O’Casey, had possibly been loved by him…” We have an initial sense of Olive being kind of mean, at least to Henry, unfaithful, arrogant and resentful. The next story, “Incoming Tide” presents a different side, still from someone else’s perspective, in this case, Kevin Coulson’s. It is more sympathetic. Olive interrupts, intentionally or not, Kevin’s plans for suicide and shares personal information. “My father…was depressed. And he never talked. Maybe they could have helped him today.” She tells Kevin her father suicided. “Shot himself…No note.” She says her son Christopher is depressed. “I wish I hadn’t passed those genes on to him.” So now against the story of Olive being a difficult and angry wife, there is another, a story of someone who’s aware of being depressed, and communicates guilt over her son. “A Little Burst” is the first story told from Olive’s perspective. “All afternoon, Olive had been fighting the sensation of moving underwater—a panicky, dismal feeling, since she had somehow never managed to learn to swim.” We learn that Olive suffered a heart attack and thinks about her mortality. “Weeping would not have come close to what she felt. She felt fear…Fear that her heart would squeeze shut again, would stop, the way it did once before, a fist punched through her back.” There’s more: “Olive herself has been worried about Christopher’s being lonely. She was especially haunted this past winter by the thought of her son’s becoming an old man, returning home from work in the darkness, after she and Henry were gone.” “Oh, it hurts—actually makes Olive groan as she sits on the bed. What does Suzanne (daughter-in-law) know about a heart that aches so badly at times that a few months ago it almost gave out…?…Her son came to her last Christmastime…and told her what he sometimes thought about. Sometimes I think about just ending it all—…An uncanny echo of Olive’s father, thirty-nine years before.” We have inter-chapter development here, my friends. These are not separate stories but the developing tale of a complex person. However, so far, what the reader experiences is different perspectives on Olive—her husband, friends, neighbors, the narrator. It could be that what we see is the difference between a public crustiness and private, unrevealed suffering. Olive is different than we first thought, then Henry thought. But perhaps she hasn’t really changed. Then in “Security,” Olive faces a severe crisis. Not only has Henry suffered a stroke and must live in a nursing home, mute and largely paralyzed, but her adult son Christopher confronts her about her abusive behavior. She is reduced to sputtering rage by his maturity and resoluteness. She must confront her love for Jim O’Casey, as well as her maltreatment of her husband and son. She must confront the loss of all three men—four, including her father. This is something new; up to this point, she’s managed to keep herself together by denial and icy sarcasm. “But Christopher shook his head. “I’m not going to be ruled by my fear of you, Mom.” Fear of her? How could anyone be afraid of her? She was the one afraid!…Why are you torturing me? she had cried. What are you talking about? All your life I have loved you. And this is what you feel?” At the beginning of the final chapter “River,” Henry has died, and Olive contemplates death. “Let it be quick, she thought now, meaning her death—a thought she had several times a day.” However, by the end, after she meets Jack, we finally get a changed Olive. “And so, if this man next to her now was not a man she would have chosen before this time, what did it matter?…Her eyes were closed, and throughout her tired self swept waves of gratitude—and regret. She pictured the sunny room, the sun-washed wall, the bayberry outside. It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.” A progression has occurred, of confronting and dealing with loss and moving beyond to a sense of the beauty and meaningfulness of the living world—not a place to rush away from. A significant change in someone always so close to suicide. Can we then argue for the thirteen stories in Olive K. producing a synergy, a sense of the whole being greater than the parts? (which were pretty great on their own). I think so, best beloved. #OliveKitteridge #ElizabethStrout

Is Olive K. a dis-continuous narrative in the manner of such modernist works as Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury? So says the Wikipedia entry for the book. (whiny voice: Shameless name-dropping). Discontinuous narrative -- a narrative style in which the narrative moves back and forth through time. A process that is discontinuous happens in stages with intervals between them, rather than continuously. Huh. First, long-time readers will recognize that the title of this post is similar to one from over a year ago—Where and When. A failure of creativity? A lapse of caring? No, best beloved, they're different. Where or When vs. Where and When. Texts handle continuity in different ways. Film critics talk about establishing shots that visually cue the viewer as to what she/he is seeing. Texts make similar use of written cues, often to establish when and where. Thus in Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy (a delight) you have chapter two beginning: “It was nearly midnight on the eve of St. Thomas’s, the shortest day of the year. A desolating wind wandered from the north over the hill whereon Oak had watched the yellow wagon and its occupant in the sunshine of a few days earlier.” Well, only the inattentive reader would be lost here. Straight out, the text tells you it’s midnight on the eve of St. Thomas (of course, everyone knows when that is), and that the setting is a place referenced in the previous chapter. Eezy-peezy, as they say. What about The Sound and the Fury?” “Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.” The reader is left with more questions than answers, no? Where is this taking place? Who is hitting? Hitting what? When does it take place? You have to read on, ya big ape. And it should be said that the reader often brings assumptions to reading a text that provide cues of orientation. If you read Far From the Madding Crowd, you begin by knowing (probably) that it was written in the late 1800s, that it’s set in England, and that it’s highly acclaimed, so that if you don’t like it, you’re a clod. Similarly, with The Sound and the Fury, the reader probably knows it’s a very famous book, set in the American South in the twenties, and a challenging novel that can make its readers feel intelligent and self-congratulatory. It’s quite possible that you’ve had someone, say a whiny voice, “explain” the book, giving you all sorts of preconceptions that, right or wrong, must be worked through. Texts have different styles to cue the reader as to the where and when of what they’re reading. You can have a lot of continuity, you can have dis-continuity. ‘Kay. What about Olive Kitteridge? One story ends and another begins with no explanation. At the conclusion of “Pharmacy” Henry says they should have Daisy and her “fellow” over for dinner soon—what we don’t find is some kind of explanation about how we get to the next story, “Incoming Tide.” Like “The next day, Olive bought a bag of donuts and went to the waterfront where she saw her old student Kevin Coulson sitting in a car watching the water. She thought: oh, oh, he’s in trouble. I’ll help.” The idea is clumsy and laughable, but my point is that in Olive, there is no explanation, no siting of these stories in time. I believe a close reading reveals that most of the present times of the stories occur in a period after Olive and Henry have retired, still an indeterminate stretch of several years. Time meanders, goes back and forth between the perspectives of several different characters. Then, with Henry’s stroke and death, time lurches ahead, as Olive copes with her loss and the re-marriage of her son, Christopher. Finally, she confronts a new relationship with Jack, and in a moving conclusion, realizes she’s not ready to leave life just yet. However, I don’t believe the stories ever go back and forth in time; they generally go forward; it’s just that they don’t spell out the exact interval of time. There are forays into the past, however these are generally handled not as “flashbacks” but as present time memories the characters have of the past. Flashback is a literary device wherein the author depicts the occurrence of specific events to the reader, which have taken place before the present time the narration is following, or events that have happened before the events that are currently unfolding in the story. Here’s an intentionally awkward example: “The backfiring of the bus sent the older man spiraling back to his youth.” The distinction here is an important one. In Olive, what we are often shown is the characters’ experience of the past—not the author’s. Thus, in “Security,” we have Olive remembering Jim O’Casey. “She had first seen him at a town meeting held in the high school gym…There were nights she didn’t fall asleep until morning: when the sky lightened and the birds sang, and her body lay on the bed loosened, and she could not—for all the fear and dread that filled her—stop the foolish happiness.” This is the past mediated through Olive’s consciousness. Here’s a contrast in “A Different Road:” “An awful thing happened to the Kitteridges on a chilly night in June. At the time, Henry was sixty-eight, Olive sixty-nine and while they were not an especially youthful couple, there was nothing about them that gave the appearance of being old, or ill.” This is the narrator’s voice telling the story, and does fit the above definition of flashback, although we often think of flashback as occurring within a story, rather than as a separate chapter. In any case, the usual beastie in Olive is that the past is shown—not by the narrator—but by the narrator showing a memory of one of the characters. “Kay. It seems we’ve once again painted ourselves into a corner. (whiny voice. What do you mean “we,” Mr. Pretentious Bully?) Olive is not a continuous narrative, but it is neither a text-book dis-continuous narrative. Does the use of flashbacks and/or the showing of characters’ memories make a narrative dis-continuous? No. (whiny voice. Isn’t Flashback the name of the movie where the woman dances and gets the water dumped on her?) No. #OliveKitteridge #ElizabethStrout