March 25th is the day believed to be the start of Dante’s journey through the celestial realms of hell, purgatory, and heaven. Here are some pictures of my Divina Commedia with illustrations by Gustave Doré. Happy Dante’s day everyone!
On the docket for December are new translations of Guido Morselli’s eerily prescient tale of the last man standing after humanity disappears without a trace and André Gide’s pioneering metafiction classic, Marshlands.
From the author of The Communist comes this postapocalyptic novel about a man who drives down to the capital from his retreat in the mountains only to find he’s the last person left on earth. As he travels around searching for provisions and any sign of humanity, he finds that the rest of nature is flourishing.
This metafictional masterpiece and send-up of writerly pretension packs a punch in its ninety-six pages. Its narrator, a social butterfly of the Parisian literati, needs everyone to know about his new novel, Marshlands, about a recluse living in a stone tower. His literary friends aren’t too impressed—and their feedback becomes as much a part of Marshlands as the novel itself.
Our September preview showcases stories of familial dysfunction from the brilliant Natalia Ginzburg and Susan Taubes. The beloved Italian author considers the strained relationships between parents, children, and siblings, while Taubes’s Divorcing, out of print for over fifty years, takes up the collapse of a marriage and a sense of self.
Sophie Blind is divorced—and not merely from her husband but from herself, as her own memories and emotions seem increasingly remote. In luminous fragments, the narrative flits from New York to her childhood home of Budapest, considering her parents’ divorce alongside her own. Fans of Renata Adler and Elizabeth Hardwick, take note: this dreamlike novel from 1969 is a forgotten precursor to their lyrical work in the ’70s. Taubes, a close friend of Susan Sontag, committed suicide at forty-one soon after its publication.
From the celebrated author of Family Lexicon comes these two novellas of dysfunctional family life. In Valentino, a sister tells the story of her doted-upon brother, who upends his family’s expectations when he suddenly marries an ugly but wealthy older woman and begins a secret affair with her male cousin. In Sagittarius, a daughter and her hypercritical mother move to the suburbs, where she becomes obsessed with impossible dreams of opening an art gallery.
“The great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.”
— Niccolò Machiavelli, from “The Prince", originally published c. 1532.
“Nothing makes a prince so much esteemed as great enterprises and setting a fine example. We have in our time Ferdinand of Aragon, the present King of Spain. He can almost be called a new prince, because he has risen, by fame and glory, from being an insignificant king to be the foremost king in Christendom; and if you will consider his deeds you will find them all great and some of them extraordinary. In the beginning of his reign he attacked Granada, and this enterprise was the foundation of his dominions. He did this quietly at first and without any fear of hindrance, for he held the minds of the barons of Castile occupied in thinking of the war and not anticipating any innovations; thus they did not perceive that by these means he was acquiring power and authority over them. He was able with the money of the Church and of the people to sustain his armies, and by that long war to lay the foundation for the military skill which has since distinguished him. Further, always using religion as a plea, so as to undertake greater schemes, he devoted himself with pious cruelty to driving out and clearing his kingdom of the Moors; nor could there be a more admirable example, nor one more rare. Under this same cloak he assailed Africa, he came down on Italy, he has finally attacked France; and thus his achievements and designs have always been great, and have kept the minds of his people in suspense and admiration and occupied with the issue of them. And his actions have arisen in such a way, one out of the other, that men have never been given time to work steadily against him.”
— Niccolò Machiavelli, from “The Prince", originally published c. 1532.
Natalia Ginzburg, Family Lexicon (1963) translated by Jenny McPhee (2017)
The postwar period was a time when everyone believed himself to be a poet and a politician. Everyone thought that he could, or rather should, write poetry about any and all subjects since for so many years the world had been silenced and paralyzed, reality being something stuck behind glass—vitreous, crystalline, mute, and immobile. Novelists and poets had been starved of words during the fascist years. So many had been forbidden to use words, and the few who’d been able to to use them were forced to choose them very carefully from the slim pickings that remained. During fascism, poets found themselves expressing only an arid, shut-off, cryptic dream world. Now, once more, many words were in circulation and reality appeared to be at everyone’s fingertips. So those who had been starved dedicated themselves to harvesting the words with delight. And the harvest was ubiquitous because everyone wanted to take part in it. The result was a confused mixing up of the languages of poetry and politics. Reality revealed itself to be complex and enigmatic, as indecipherable and obscure as the world of dreams. And it revealed itself to still be behind glass—the illusion that the glass had been broken, ephemeral. Dejected and disheartened, many soon retreated, sank back into a bitter starvation and profound silence. The postwar period, then, was very sad and full of dejection after the joyful harvest of its early days. Many pulled away and isolated themselves again, either within their dream worlds or in whatever random job they’d taken in a hurry in order to earn a living, jobs that seemed insignificant and dreary after so much hullabaloo. In any case, everyone soon forgot that brief, illusory moment of shared existence. Certainly, for many years, no one worked at the job he’d planned on and trained for, everyone believing that they could and must do a thousand jobs at once. And much time passed before everyone took back upon his shoulders his profession and accepted the burden, the exhaustion, and the loneliness of the daily grind, which is the only way we have of participating in each other’s lives, each of us lost and trapped in our own parallel solitude.
Natalia Ginzburg, Happiness, as Such (1973) translated from the Italian by Minna Zallman Proctor (2019)
Visiting this house, I feel like I’m drowning in endless melancholy. Now I’m back in my room at the boardinghouse and can see the city of Leeds through the window, one of the last cities Michele walked through. I’m having dinner with Ermanno Giustiniani tonight and he’s a nice boy but he can’t tell me much about Michele because he didn’t know him for that long and doesn’t remember much, or perhaps it makes him too sad to talk about it with me. He’s a boy. Boys today don’t have big memories, and more importantly, they don’t cultivate them. You and your mother have a stronger inclination to preserve memories. This life now has nothing to equal to the places and moments we passed through to get here. I’ve lived things and observed things, knowing all the while that each moment had extraordinary splendor. I had to make myself remember. It was always so painful to me that Michele didn’t want to, or couldn’t, understand such splendor, that he moved forward without ever turning back. But I believe he sensed my splendor. A number of times I have thought that maybe while he was dying he had a flash of understanding and he traveled all the paths of his memory and I am consoled by this thought because nothing brings consolation when there is nothing left, and even seeing that dusty undershirt in that kitchen, and then leaving it behind, was a strange, icy, lonely consolation.
