Written in Italian by her, and translated by her and a translator in English. Liking it. Stories where permanence meets transience. A smorgasboard of Rome of current times, different lives, local, immigrant. A kalidescope running through the current times so local in our history of refuge and host nation. Only after these definitive boundaries, and the definite written, documented world is such a world and kalidescope possible.
Sometimes I wonder if written word, any form of permanence is very much against the grain of life itself. Life is so transient, so ephemeral, the fog of memory, the local now takes care of much. With written word, even time takes its sweet time to heal. There's no respite. As if the ephemera has been pinned down and made to ascribe to the gridded network of a written, definite, organised world.
Anyway, such history, such stories are possible only in such a world. And perhaps it is a little redundant to add that such a blog, a writer and a reader is possible only in such a world. Written word for the everyday man and woman. We are at a sliver of history of everbefore. Only a few hundred years in millenia of human existence that we have such extensive records of being, of knowing, of striving. We are still figuring it out what it does to us. Everything is neither good nor bad or is both good and bad, so value judgements matter little, it is just that it does something to us, as long as we can figure it out, and still work our way such that we flow with the grain of life, of ephemera, of transience, of fogs and memories blinking in and out of fog, rather than this gridded organised, permanent definitive world. Hope we can save our souls from this imposed permanence and find oasis of ephemera and transience in our days, in activities, in losing ourselves away from this carved out one world, which is supposed to be many, as many as we are.
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Later - finished early November.
Later - finished early November.
On reading the final story, I realise it is not my usual reading fare. And perhaps why I stayed away from some of her other novels.
Sometimes you know what you like by encountering what you do not like. I think I am super glad when a book I’m reading turns out to be literature. Something that somehow even in the tragic affirms life, something that somehow makes life right because in the deep, somehow there is wholeness. While some other books they trample your shallow shores, you end up a little muddy, a little annoyed with yourself. But then again sometime some literature finds you and all wrongs are righted.
Just some thoughts on why to keep the quality of reading aspirational. I fill it up time and again with the available, and accessible. But to strive with aspirations, and to keep reading well. Because the other path is not lovely at all, just easy, say to mark a book closed.
Like all these modern books, too much of current times, and then the issues of current times without the requisite distance. Reminds me of Knausgaard, why I am drawn to it, but immediately wish to stay away. A personal thing. On to aspirations now.
