Drama, tension, incident: these are the elements which typically suspend fiction, the excrescences of which shape the action of a story, which contendDrama, tension, incident: these are the elements which typically suspend fiction, the excrescences of which shape the action of a story, which contend opposing forces. In Mild Vertigo, the story of Natsumi, there is an eerie tension which is bourne out of an absence of tension. The life of Natsumi is a "happy" one, by which her mother would mean that to be happy, to be content, is to live a life without the incursions of negative events - no poor health, no financial trouble. Her life revolves around housework, maintenance of her family, meagre attempts at the culinary arts, occasional nights with friends, and frequent gossip with the neighbors.
The story of Natsumi reveals itself slowly, episodically, and the narrative - which is bookended by two nearly identical trips to the grocery store - is an exploration of the ant hills of domestic drama, rather than the alpestrine landscape of adventure. Periodically Natsumi is overcome by this hollow and distant feeling, a mild vertigo, amidst the sprawl of her domestic life; momentary vortices in the calm waters of her life. She has moments which just fall short of revelation, of resolve, of resolution, which keep her life suspended in the sense of an ever-almost collapse. Her relationship with her husband is fashioned more on kinship and partnership than a "fabulous romance", her time is spent in the service of others and she finds expenditure on herself a bit clumsy and embarrassing. Her friends who pursued careers rather than domesticity give her a sense of not quite envy, but almost remove - the feeling of spending time with friends who have all just embarked on an adventure without you, and from which you are left out of all the crannies of co-experience.
Mild Vertigo is, despite everything - its plains of mundane events, its domestic sphere, its lack of episodic continuity - a thrilling novel. It asks of us - what do we want from life? What kind of life creates joy, and is the middle-class life of contentment one that can make you feel truly happy? Or is the will-to-live dependent on the threat of some danger? on variety? on the promiscuity of experience? What standards should we hold ourselves and our lives to? And maybe most importantly what do we owe to others once we have embarked down one road of life?...more
My recollections are not illusions. They are not the past. My memories are my present.
As it happens, over the last year I have read a number of bo
My recollections are not illusions. They are not the past. My memories are my present.
As it happens, over the last year I have read a number of books which audit personal history amidst world history - the invisible hand of the latter on the former, and the transparency of one or the other, given different perspectives and positions in relation to time. Contemporaneous history, often sluggish and diffuse, appears to many as invisible, particularly the narrator of Trieste whose myopia disavows history to focus entirely on her family's dislocated position within it. For much of Haya Tedeschi's life, history has been the pale set dressing of her life, that which did not affect her did not materialize for her, despite the nearness of the the theatre on which history was so bloodily playing out its act.
Now she sits alone in her house in Gorizia, awaiting the arrival of her lost son. Her son by a brutal S.S. officer whom she loved and lost, and bore no significance for in life nor in death. Until her search for her son began, she was quite ignorant of the brutality of that period of history - not totally ignorant of course, but emotionally remote (though physically and literally quite immediate). Through the search for her son, she collects images, documents, testimonies at the Nuremburg trials; her search for her son ultimately is her search for herself as positioned in History, it is the reconciliation of life lived and the vast theatre in which one has played her part.
In History by Elsa Morante, we have a similar story - a Jewish woman who is impregnated by an S.S. officer (in this case, brutally, by rape, this time the child is kept). Both women, Haya and Ida (in Morante's novel), are occupied with their own existence: for Haya that is living a petit bourgeois life in Gorizia during the war, for Ida it is her and her sons' survivals. In Morante's story of history, we follow Ida who is locally aware of the implacable brutality of her time in History, who loves and feels pain in its totality - this is the heroine we expect of history. In Drndic's novel we have Haya, who is emblematic of the dark truth of history - which is that as it is roiling around us, taking lives, sending entire peoples into the air in a chuff of putrid smoke, many people pay it no attention. For Haya, history is that which is other. It is not until History becomes personal - her own child tossed on the waves of it, that the gravity of Events seem to come to light for her....more
1 There was a time only certainty gave me any joy. Imagine — certainty, a dead thing.
2 And then the world, the experiment. The obscene mouth famisheRipe Peach
1 There was a time only certainty gave me any joy. Imagine — certainty, a dead thing.
2 And then the world, the experiment. The obscene mouth famished with love — it is like love: the abrupt, hard certainty of the end —
3 In the center of the mind, the hard pit, the conclusion. As though the fruit itself never existed, only the end, the point midway between anticipation and nostalgia —
4 So much fear. So much terror of the physical world. The mind frantic guarding the body from the passing, the temporary, the body straining against it —
5 A peach on the kitchen table. A replica. It is the earth, the same disappearing sweetness surrounding the stone end, and like the earth available —
6 An opportunity for happiness: earth we cannot possess only experience — And now sensation: the mind silenced by fruit —
7 They are not reconciled. The body here, the mind separate, not merely a warden: it has separate joys. It is the night sky, the fiercest stars are its immaculate distinctions–
8 Can it survive? Is there light that survives the end in which the mind’s enterprise continues to live: though darting about the room, above the bowl of fruit–
9 Fifty years. the night sky filled with shooting stars. Light, music from far away — I must be nearly gone. I must be stone, since the earth surrounds me —
10 There was a peach in a wicker basket. There was a bowl of fruit. Fifty years. Such a long walk from the door to the table....more
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