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CAMOUFLAGE

There is the stark landscape of the stark field. Starkfield it is.

Then slowly, through third party eyes, with all the distance that this implies, we begin to discern a shape that slowly acquires its own entity against its background. No, not even third party eyes, but third parties of the third party. Even further removed. For the book begins thus: I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

And thus, in this remoteness, emerges a figure, and the third party is discarded and we get a lot closer, sitting or, or reading, or looking from the first row.

But still. Hardly discernible, even if the title helps to focus on the developing shape.

He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface..

.

Veiled are also the rest of the characters. They all live a discoverable and outward, but their feelings are hidden: to the others and to themselves. Again, as one tunes in one’s eye, one’s senses, one begins to discern those covered, those concealed and unformed emotions. Feelings are so clouded that it takes them years, for people living under the same roof, to identify them, to let them free. Actions and speech of the people in Starkfield are all concealments. They do not perceive what they are, or identify what think; they interact without discovering the other person. Appearances delude.

But then there is all that snow, cold, brisk and bleak: paralyzing.

This is so until disaster strikes � and then the characters continue to live, or die, secluded in their eclipsed-away house, as if they were already living, or not living, in their graves. And their physical appearances take on the abandoned, disgruntled, nature of their settings.

Even the author has camouflaged. The writer of the upper echelon of social classes of the New England is here transporting us to poverty and to rural and snowy settings. Unrecognizable. After reading The Reef, I had to rub my eyes and squint if I were to accept that this was Wharton’s world, and that I was not reading something akin to Growth of the Soil. Wharton has donned a Norwegian cloak.

But her words...., her words lead you.

And, eventually, one can see the cat... (view spoiler)[It was on the first photo too. (hide spoiler)]