Books & Reviews Archive

The novel opens with a dream. The protagonist, Stefano, who is also the first-person narrator, is taken hunting by his friend Francesco among the hills of his native Piedmont. The woods are a composite of «cascades and pyramids of assembled nightingales», a paradise of happiness; and then, suddenly, the > treetops were mounds of tiny, corroded, greenish skulls, chiming sinisterly against one another by the millions . The dream foreshadows the overarching meaning of the novel, which unfolds between memory and present life, between violence experienced and imagined on the one hand and the «tangle of everyday things» on the other. > I must force myself to remember. I must try, because these memories lie buried, in bristling confusion and separated from me. I was fine, normal and cheerful and aggressive as long as I managed to live outside of myself . The country house is a significant touchstone for the protagonist, both for the nature surrounding it and for the terrible events that befell him in his youth: the death of his grandfather, the killing of a German soldier, his participation in the partisan resistance. Stefano now lives in Rome, a successful man, but a growing restlessness has prevented him from marrying, and he drags out a monotonous relationship with his now-former fiancée. The decision to visit the old country house together, where his stern father still lives, seems capable of rekindling their relationship, but the weight of memory is too overpowering. > I grew up among the dead, Lu, and I was able to put them aside, to place them far off, by dint of hoping for peace, for the shared and long-awaited victory... And today, it is only right that I return to scrutinize them at my side.... Don't be frightened, Lu, everything will carry on as before anyway, as it always has, even us! even through our own fault! . The return to the places of his youth is futile. «Perhaps, the author concludes, we shall have to submit to an eternal resignation». It is an illusion to hope that returning to the past might bring deliverance from the nightmares born of memory and the disillusionment of youthful hopes and desires: only living «in the humble dawn of each day», devoid of plans and dreams, can offer a measure of peace. It is a deeply pessimistic novel, wherein the writing achieves its finest expression precisely when it assumes lyrical and evocative tones, as in the depiction of the hills and the narration of dreams. In the background loom the momentous events of the post-war era (the bewilderment following the collapse of fascism, the Resistance, the failure to enact the anticipated changes), but what truly interests the author is conveying a sense of existential anguish, and he succeeds precisely through language, through a masterly command of adjectives and punctuation. When, conversely, he turns to sketching characters and constructing dialogue, one witnesses a faltering in the narrative rhythm, which turns monotonous and redundant. Why not read it? Certain passages are remarkably fine and address a highly topical theme: the disillusionment of contemporary Italy. On the whole, however, the novel proves tedious and prolix.

When walking the streets of a city > every decision, where to turn, how long to linger lost in thought before an abandoned building, was of no consequence, and for this reason was a sign of freedom. I traversed the city’s neighborhoods as though I had to measure them with my stride, and the subway stations served as recurring motifs of my unending wandering . The protagonist and narrator of this novel is a young psychiatrist of Nigerian descent, the child of a mixed couple: an African father and a European mother. He spends much of his free time wandering the streets of New York. > The walks fulfilled a need: they were an escape from the strictly regimented mental environment of work, and once I discovered them as therapy, they became normal, and I forgot what life had been like before I began walking . Wandering the city on foot is a grand metaphor. It is a toponymic itinerary, a geographical discovery, and as such “a regime of competence and perfection.” At the same time, it is a journey into the labyrinth of the mind. Like the urban plan of a city, the human mind is a network of logical intersections, a rational model within which, however, we move in leaps. An image, a snatch of conversation, a chance encounter is enough to carry us “far away,” to other images, to memories, to the depths of the unconscious toward an "I" > never fully explored and unlocked. The novel can be read on three levels. First and foremost, it is an account of the protagonist’s urban wanderings. Moving aimlessly, he encounters places meticulously described in their history and urban function; they are also, and above all, watersheds between neighborhoods and unpredictable turning points in his journey on foot. Walking allows one to upend the rational model, since one is not constrained to follow traffic arteries, inadvertently leading to unexpected quarters of the city—historically significant, yet long forgotten in the consciousness of its inhabitants. The improvisation and slowness of walking also allow for encounters with others. Many are casual encounters, while others involve habitual acquaintances, yet always met by chance. In any case, they offer the opportunity to hear others’ lives narrated: their memories, their aspirations, and the ideas that animate their existence. Our protagonist does not like to speak; he prefers to listen, yet he does so without curiosity, almost as if fulfilling his psychiatric vocation even outside of work. The city then yields unexpected discoveries that bring us to the novel’s second level of interpretation: the genocides perpetrated by Western man. It is incredible, but in Manhattan itself, at the very center of global capitalism, there are sites that recall the slaughter of indigenous peoples, just as entire neighborhoods of skyscrapers and apartment buildings were erected over a burial ground where slaves were interred—those who died during the crossings from Africa or perished just after arriving in America. For all its pomposity, the West does not even respect the veneration of the dead! The city thus expresses a cosmic wound, a universal sorrow, latent and concealed within the consciousness of contemporary man. Aimless roaming also stirs remembrances, ushering us to the narrative’s third level: childhood, with the brief and intense bond with his maternal grandmother, his father’s funeral, the military academy where the young protagonist completed his education before moving to the United States. It is Nigeria resurfacing, with its spiritualism so distant from Western culture. Yet above all, it is the unresolved relationship with his mother, who carries a deep wound: she is the product of a rape, for which she blames her own mother, the maternal grandmother, and her native land, Belgium. Pursuing the labyrinth of the mind, the protagonist has thus arrived at a dark juncture: his mother’s existential grief, which prevented her from truly loving her son. Have we reached the conclusion of this journey into the unconscious? Is there something else the protagonist refuses to acknowledge and accept? In his peregrinations along the city streets, the protagonist happens to meet the sister of a childhood friend. It is she who recognizes him and speaks to him. They exchange the customary pleasantries of people who have not seen each other in a long time, between individuals whose relationship was superficial and slight. The friend invites the protagonist to a party at her boyfriend’s home. While looking out from the terrace at the countless lights of Manhattan, the friend pulls the protagonist aside and reminds him that, when she was fifteen years old and I was a year younger..... I had forced myself into her... afterward, she said, in the weeks that followed, in the months and years that followed, I had acted as if I knew nothing, I had even forgotten her to the point of not recognizing her when we met again, and never tried to acknowledge what I had done... but it was not so for her, she said, the pleasure of denial had not been possible for her". > Each of us must, at some level, take oneself as the yardstick of normality, must assume that the mansion of one's own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him To myself, I am always the hero > and so, what does it mean when, in someone else's version, I am the villain? The novel concludes with a highly evocative metaphor. The Statue of Liberty is what all immigrants see upon arriving in New York. Yet against this great statue hundreds of birds crash, driven by the currents and the wind. A precise system of statistics records each death: species, number, date, and weather conditions. With scientific precision, an attempt is made to bring rationality to a cosmic and existential phenomenon that encapsulates the destiny of each of us: as an emigrant people and as an individual in search of himself. We are faced with a complex book, difficult in its content, intellectually rich yet lacking in vigor, in some ways cryptic and prolix. What sustains a nonexistent narrative plot and an equally fragile system of characters is the prose: an English that is elegant, delicate, sophisticated, and simple all at once. It is read with pleasure, yet one gets lost in the narrative dispersion and in the obsessive effort to give voice to too many topics and reflections. Why not read it? Too long and verbose. One loses oneself.

In the first canto of the *Paradiso*, Dante uses the word “trasumanar” to denote that transcending of human limits without which it would be impossible to contemplate God in all His power; then, as we read this cantica, we discover that the journey through the various Heavens will be a transformation of sight and hearing, so as to endure the light and sounds of the Empyrean. But what if, instead, reconciliation with oneself and with others took place along an inverse path, through silence and blindness? Since childhood, for the protagonist of this novel > the most mundane sentence revealed, with the transparency of crystal, perfections and imperfections, truth and deceit, beauty and ugliness. She felt ashamed of those sentences, which unraveled white as spiderwebs from her hands and her tongue. Divorce and the loss of custody of her son fling her into silence: > it is a cold, rarefied silence, like a shadow deprived of its own body, like the hollow trunk of a dead tree, like the dark space between one meteor and the next. The male protagonist, on the other hand, grew up in Germany and was diagnosed with the gradual, inexorable loss of his sight; he has returned to Korea, where he teaches Ancient Greek to a handful of students, among whom is our protagonist. Through the Greek language, the author seems to invoke Plato's Allegory of the Cave: in this famous allegory, the prisoners see nothing but shadows cast by the fire onto the wall of the cave facing them, believing these visions to be real objects, just as they take the echoes from passersby outside the prison to be real. Were these prisoners to leave the cave, they would discover that those objects and voices were mere illusions; we are condemned to an eternal obfuscation by our senses, philosophy will not save us, and reconciliation will not be attained through sight and hearing, through Dante's noble senses. The encounter will occur only when we entrust ourselves to the other senses, just as our protagonists seem to do: > with eyes closed, he brushes his cheek against her face, (...) kisses her mouth. The wet hair behind her ears, the eyebrows. Like a faint response coming from afar, the cold fingers brush his eyebrows and vanish. (...) Hearts and lips touching, united and eternally separate.  How often have I thought that our enormous, complex brain is a superstructure weighing down on human relationships like a boulder; that animals are happier in their naive immediacy. Perhaps this is what this novel means to say, placing Plato’s language at its core and recounting the strange story of a woman and a man who will ultimately love each other without speaking or seeing one another. Or perhaps it is simply too difficult for us Westerners to understand a novel from a culture and language so distant from our own. It is probable that the author intended to say something else, but this is what I seemed to grasp. Han Kang has enjoyed massive editorial promotion since winning the Nobel Prize. Reading this short novel, one cannot help but wonder whether this fame is due to actual literary quality or rather to an exotic taste, to the desire to discover an as yet unfamiliar country such as Korea. This question arises naturally in light of the lack of distribution of the novels of László Krasznahorkai**, of far greater depth and quality. (see the review of *The Melancholy of Resistance* on this site).** **Why not read it? Extremely difficult to understand.**