The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan

        If you somehow don’t have enough to worry about, I offer you this: it is possible, apparently, to have sudden onset deafness for no discernible reason. Such was the case for author Eliza Barry Callahan and the character in her debut novel The Hearing Test. For a year of their lives, they have difficulty hearing and face the fear of never hearing properly again.

In one powerful section, fictional Eliza spends evenings listening to music she wants to remember if her hearing loss is permanent. She “believed that the more [she] listened to these songs, the more clearly [she] would be able to replay them for [herself] in a future when [she] could no longer hear them” (87). As someone who has allowed music to be such a significant part of my life—and someone likely to blow out his ears at loud concerts—the passage seemed so sad and resonant. Callahan continues, “I limited what I listened to, worrying there might be a limit to what I could retain with specificity” (87). I’ve had that thought myself: how well can songs live in the heart of my memory? How well would I be able to replicate them if I never heard them again? The fact is, it would not go well. The following paragraph of Callahan’s novel reads:

But soon I found myself bored by the slim selection and the repetition and feared that this process of sonic tattooing might ruin the music itself. I no longer associated the songs with memories but rather the songs themselves became memories. I stopped listening to music altogether. The highest fidelity sound is in the head. (87)

I’ll put the novelty of the phrase “sonic tattooing” on pause for now to focus on the pain of this moment. I’ve framed it as sad because it resonates with me personally, but it’s also worth noting that the narrator of the book is a composer whose livelihood is connected to her ability to hear.

Beyond the central premise of the book, the plot is pretty thin. It is not event-driven, but more so a referential collage. Much of the book offers philosophical considerations of sound and silence, linguistic and literary considerations, references to composers’ works, summaries of movies, and so on. One passage offers a reflection on how the word “silence” works linguistically: “simple and unremarkable patterns around the word, such as that seeing, staring, hanging, or watching are often coupled with silence. That the adverb completely often precedes silent. That the verb fall often precedes silent. That the architecture of silence is the gaze. That silence is without transition. That silence is dressed as an injury” (31-32). Sometimes, the referentiality of the novel is alienating—namely when I do not have the same frame of reference. When Roland Barthes, Deleuze and Guattari, John Cage, and Virginia Woolf get shout-outs, though, I have the satisfaction of saying to myself, “Hey! I know that allusion!”. When I don’t know the references, Callahan’s descriptions are inconsistent in the detail they offer to invite readers like me into the experience. Especially since there are few plot events, the assemblage of allusions comes across alternatingly as sloppy and too convenient or cutesy (a nearby store called John’s Cages, for instance).

I will say, though, that one of Callahan’s references in particular was thematically fitting and deeply engrossing. Fictional Eliza has been alerted to the presence of “The Petersburg Popper. The Soviet Sonata. The Commie Contana,” a perpetual radio broadcast from Moscow. I had to double-check to make sure, but it actually exists. Known as “The Buzzer,” the transmission is a continuous buzz that is sometimes sprinkled with voice messages, bits of song, coded transmissions, etc. The parallel of the intentional buzz and the ongoing buzz in Eliza’s hearing is a really nice connection to explore, and Eliza reviews posts in a forum about the station that documents what people heard through the buzz. I find her descriptions haunting and beautiful, especially because reading about what other people heard, and everyone searching this buzz for meaning together—regardless of their ability or inability to hear—offers a depressing and tenuous kind of community. Also, the significance of the sound is out of reach for all those involved as an equalizer.

In terms of the style, I admit that for much of the book I found it a little lacking. The sentence structures seemed repetitive and a bit bland. Huge revelations are presented with the same linguistic flare as tying your shoes. That said, some moments really pop. There’s a scene in the latter part of the book where Eliza seems to have phone sex with her ex boyfriend’s ex girlfriend and the sentence-structure deteriorates in a really interesting way leading towards the, er, climax. There are also some lovely visuals that pepper the text. In one scene, she’s looking at outer space and comments on comets: “A wet white star dragged across a black sheet? A mistake—touched before dried?” (121). She remembers Virginia Woolf saying that the “gigantic cinema” should not play to a “perpetually empty house” (121). She then aligns herself with the house and says, “I saw the comet—a weak flashlight. God searching the basement” (121). Moments like that help give voice to the visual artist in Callahan.

There’s more than a touch of the philosophical of the book, too. Some of it really resonates with me, while other moments seem a little muddled or undercooked. For example, she gives a Heideggerian observation about how “the attempt to escape the frame only leads to the expansion of the frame. We end up drudging more of life back into the frame of art” (25). I also appreciated her commentary on misinterpretation: “I found clarity in misinterpretation. And I thought that our misinterpretations are perhaps the most individual and specific things we have” (54). I love the implications of that and I remember my own fair share of beloved misinterpretations. There’s a deep truth there that I hope Callahan opts to explore in other literary works. On the flip side of things, there are some more comments I’m more hesitant to praise. While I like them, when I pause to think about them I’m not entirely sure they work. For instance, the line I referenced earlier that “the architecture of silence is the gaze” has an appealing quality to it but if you try to think through the synesthesia doesn’t entirely land for me. There’s another part where a character philosophizes that “when you have no particular place to be, and you are in a foreign or unfamiliar place, you are actually moving around with the specific purpose of locating a place within yourself at which you may or may not arrive” (63). It feels true, but at the same time—is it too commonplace? And too clunky in its phrasing? I’m divided.

Overall, I think The Hearing Test is a good debut and Callahan is clearly learnèd in the discourse of sound and silence. The collage-like presentation of the book offers a snapshot of an experience more than a story. It’s a slice of life—essentially a year. Narratively, I feel like it would benefit from being a bit more constructed, which is weird for me to say because normally I love that unstructured stuff.

Happy reading!

Dare to Lead by Brené Brown

Brené Brown has established herself as a prominent figure in the realm of team leadership and building corporate work culture, but her work extends into and resonates deeply with teaching and education. It’s about time that I engage with her work, so here we are with Dare to Lead. I listened to the audiobook, read by Brown herself with some welcome tangents and clarifying remarks that add to the original text. Having finished this book, I can understand why her work is so broadly accepted. She offers clear, insightful, and manageable guidelines for engaging with others as a leader, whatever form that might take.

When it comes to nonfiction books, Dare to Lead is comparatively short but still offers a comprehensive guide for a few core concepts. One of the common threads is how emotional intelligence influences our work as leaders. Leaders require a level of vulnerability when engaging with others and making decisions. In one moment, Brown clarifies how to practice vulnerability in response to a misunderstanding with one of her workshop attendees. After discussing vulnerability and openness, the man came up to her and said he was going to start divulging all kinds of personal information and discuss his doubts in the work and so on and so forth. She clarifies that vulnerability and openness does not divulging everything—divulging everything, especially in a business meeting, could send people into a panic. Instead, it requires a fine balance and sharing only what is pertinent to help enable the team. There’s a closer affinity to accountability than oversharing.

Some moments were more resonant with me as an educator. Within systems, peoples’ values can often clash. We have different visions of how institutions should operate and what our outcomes could be. One section of the book outlines an exercise she does with her audiences where they have to select their core values. She talks about narrowing down to two core values to guide our actions. If we are not able to narrow our values down to two, our scope is too big and we don’t have the focus for our decision making. It’s a little bit cheezy, but there’s an administrator I work with who encourages us on the first day to choose one value to focus on and I’ve gained a new appreciation for that level of intention.

Teaching can often be contentious. Brown presents several ideas for better management and thoughtfulness. One of the practices she holds with her team is that everyone has the power to call a time out during meetings. It’s a smart idea to say “I need time to think about what I’m hearing” and not come to immediate decisions. As we know as teachers, building in “wait time” and giving students time to think increases the depth of thinking, so logically the same would apply for adults. She says that calling a time out gives reasonable thinking time and it cuts down on the “meeting after the meeting” and backchannels, ultimately leading to more transparency and better decision making. I love that.

I also appreciate the way that Brown establishes healthy boundaries while maintaining empathy. One of the passages that really resonated with me is when she writes, 

We can’t do our jobs when we own other peoples’ emotions or take responsibility for them as a way to control related behaviours for one simple reason: other peoples’ emotions are not our jobs. We can’t both serve people and try to control their feelings. Daring leadership is ultimately about serving other people, not ourselves. That’s why we choose courage.

So much of our work as educators requires navigating others’ emotions, at least it feels that way. Whether it’s a student being upset about not getting a grade, or a parent being angry because their child has been accused of cheating, or whether colleagues have different views on which pedagogies are most effective—it can get uncomfortable. Brown gives permission to separate other peoples’ feelings from our decision making. It really is about serving others, not necessarily about making others happy (although it’s a nice byproduct of being transparent, vulnerable, and collaborative). In that vein, Brown also gives advice to people who are trying to demonstrate empathy to others. She says that “empathy is not connecting to an experience. It’s connecting to the emotions that underpin an experience.” I liked that, because I think a lot of people say, “well I’ve never been through that thing” and try to exclude themselves from confronting those hard feelings. It’s well-intentioned, generally, but this gives us the power to maintain connection without imposing our own half-connected experiences. Brown illustrates the example with a personal anecdote involving high emotions in an airport and it was a beautiful demonstration of how to engage with others without owning their emotions or imposing your own experiences.

Overall, Dare to Lead gives a really nice framework for some foundational qualities. I hope it makes me a better leader and decision maker. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Happy reading!

The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard

        We live in a world of stuff. Not waste, necessarily, but certainly close to it. The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard is a book-length project that developed from a 20 minute animation about where our stuff comes from and the devastating environmental impact of rampant consumerism. Throughout the book, Leonard documents the life cycle of a number of consumer goods, including everything from plastics to books to electronics. In terms of breadth, it’s hard to think of another book that covers so much ground—even if the sections that truly shine are the ones that go into some more depth.

Because our society is structured such as it is, it will be hard to truly accept and live by the central tenet of the book: we need to consume less. You’ve likely heard of the despiriting statistics. I am particularly struck by things like “How Many Earths.” If everyone were to live as people do in Canada and the United States, we would need to have 5.1 Earths’ worth of resources. Meanwhile, Earth Overshoot Day is the day each year when we have consumed nature’s resources and start dipping into reserves. This year was July 24th, by the way—barely halfway through the year. The statistics are harrowing.

Leonard offers some resources to help to curb our consumption or to verify the ‘ethical’ production of various goods (including plastics, diamonds, and so on). Our everyday practices as individuals, though, are insufficient for the kind of change needed. Even our mantra of “reduce, reuse, recycle” only goes so far—and Leonard offers some compelling research about why recycling is actually the least effective and least important of the three. Recycling can be energy intensive and we need to get into distinctions between pre- and post-consumer recycling. Are the materials being used for the same kind of product? Are they being broken down and mixed into other forms for manufacture of other goods? At the end of the day, the only way out is to use less, but the existence of capitalism demands continually more production of goods.

Industries and policies need to change. It’s pretty disheartening that even when policies are brought into place by local or federal governments, they can still be superseded by global-level organizations like the WTO. The policies also demand enforcement that is not always forthcoming, though Leonard offers some wonderful examples of resistance. To that end, Leonard offered some really compelling commentary on the exploitation of Haiti, including the way the WTO’s regulations limit the viability of farming. Also, Philadelphia burned a bunch of waste in incinerators (don’t get Leonard started on incinerators!) and sent the ash to Haiti. This is not allowed, and the United States had to clean up the waste. Leonard documents going to the Mayor’s event in a kind of flash mob demanding action, and she followed a boat carrying waste to ensure they didn’t drop it anywhere it wasn’t meant to go. One port they stopped at mysteriously was ablaze and the waste had to continue its journey. Ultimately, they dumped it in the ocean—but they were brought to justice. Moments like that are inspirational, but we need continual pressure to ensure that polices are established and enforced.

The other two big ideas I think are worth exploring further are externalized costs and extended producer responsibility. As for externalized costs, those are all the resource costs that companies get away with using without paying for. For instance, the environmental costs or degradation to the natural world as a result of their manufacturing processes are not seen as something companies need to pay for. Essentially, the costs are externalized to communities that feel the impact while not impacting the company directly. As an aside, I appreciate that Leonard talks about economics and the GDP as an insufficient metric for measuring it. The GDP fails to account for resource loss and externalized costs and simplifies to the point of meaninglessness. The other key component that I think we need to advocate for is extended producer responsibility. This means that companies are responsible for the entire lifecycle of their goods. Environmental choices have often been displaced onto consumers (e.g. I could buy post-it notes or recycled post-it notes). EPR suggests that the company producing the goods needs to take responsibility for the post-consumer life of their products. Having EPR policies would be a complete gamechanger for how we create goods and distribute them.

Overall, The Story of Stuff serves as a great primer for key issues in consumption and environmentalism. The sheer number of topics Leonard covers—and the statistics themselves—are overwhelming. It’s unfortunate because on the one hand I want to really focus in on one aspect of waste and try to advocate for improvements, but the book also shows how interconnected all these policies are. It’s as though we need to take responsibility for everything because, really, we do. My hope is that having these conversations leads to direct action and I hope you’ll join.

Happy reading and advocating!

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

[Caution: Full of spoilers]

The climax of the Spike Jonze film Adaptation, written by Charlie Kaufman, sees twin Nicolas Cages in conversation. One Cage, Charlie Kaufman, confesses his admiration for his brother Donald, whose seeming obliviousness protects him from harm. Charlie remembers a moment from their younger years when Donald was in love with a girl who, along with her friends, ridiculed him behind his back. Donald says he was not oblivious, but rather that his love was his and her response was her business. The emotional climax of the speech is when Donald tells his brother, “You are what you love, not what loves you.” I can’t help but feel that Greek Love by Katherine Dunn serves as a significant precedent to Adaptation and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, though Dunn’s work so disturbs me that it will linger in my memory for, I’m sure, decades to come.

At its core, Geek Love is a family chronicle that documents the Binewskis, who tour their Fabulon circus across the United States. The father, Al, and the mother, Crystal Lil, use chemical and medical experimentation to create freakish progeny to attract audiences to their show. Of the surviving children, there are four or five for most of the book. From eldest to youngest, there is Arturo, “Aqua Boy”, who has fins and flippers where most people have limbs, conjoined piano-playing twins Iphigenia and Elektra, albino hunchback Olympia (the narrator for most of the text), and Fortunato (Chick), a seeming “norm” who has telekinetic abilities. The novel also runs parallel along two timelines; in the present, Oly has a daughter with a tail, Miranda, who was adopted at an early age and who, working at a strip club, has been approached by a wealthy benefactor with the offer to remove her tail. The past more thoroughly details the family’s growth and decline as a family carnival.

What begins reasonably innocuously—Al calls his children “dreamlets” since he and Lil dreamed them up, which I find so endearing—quickly becomes haunting. The more you reflect, the more you realize how awful these characters are. The most obviously evil is Arty, who I would argue is one of fiction’s most horrific villains, but Oly and Chick engage in their fair share of immorality. Love twists the family. Arturo becomes a cultish figure because he has an insatiable desire to be loved. Meanwhile, Chick and Oly do his bidding because they love him. Despite Arty seeing his siblings as disposable, they define themselves by their love of him and tend to him, and it gives the adage from Adaptation a haunting, ominous quality.

Katherine Dunn’s gift in this novel is creating such twisted figures—their physical deformities are irrelevant: what is truly twisted is the logic of love throughout the book. The family engages in a kind of race to the bottom. Early on, the family is attacked by a man who shoots each of them, but none of them fatally. Oly narrates her conversation with Arturo: “Arty narrowed his long eyelids and said I was flattering myself and there was nothing about me special enough to make anybody want to kill me. Arty was the master deflater, but his reaction convinced me only that he didn’t want to kill me. Funny how target potential became a status symbol among us” (85). The characters strive to be freakish; Katherine Dunn inverts society’s general perspective: being ‘normal’ is seen as the worst thing to be. (As an aside, I would also point to Katherine Dunn’s mastery of the craft, which reveals itself upon rereading. In this passage, Dunn refers to Arty as the “master deflater.” Later, he does something horrific to the twins and Elly is described two hundred pages later as being “reduced [...] to a permanent state resembling the liquid droop of decayed zucchini” (272), as if her head has deflated. Brilliant, subtle touch.)

Two contradictory impulses turn Arturo into a sinister, horrific character. On the one hand, he refuses to be anything but the most exemplary “freak.” Any time someone starts to seem more freakish than him, he prevents their success. Most obviously and dramatically, Arturo attempts to suffocate his younger brother Chick when he realizes the implications of Chick having telekinetic powers. He also places anonymous calls to ensure that Chick’s pickpocketing and gambling fixing rackets are stopped and that his and his father’s life are threatened. It’s implied that he also previously murdered a younger sibling that was born crocodile-like and threatened to impinge on his Aqua Boy show. The other side of this exceptionalism, though, is that Arturo and their audience buy into an ethos of wanting to be most strange, most freakish. In fact, Arty turns his circus act into a gospel where he targets a miserable woman and tells her she wants to be like him—he essentially hypnotizes her and tells her that if you are deformed, you are liberated from the complete banality of ‘norm’ existence. You become elevated by distinguishing yourself from others. Arturo establishes a cult, making the carnival more and more of his personal recruitment tool. His adherents, wanting to be just like him and not like the normals slowly and sequentially have their limbs amputated: novices remove their fingers and toes and the Elevated have hacked away at their bodies so thoroughly that they are heads and torsos, wrapped in bandages in retirement homes. It’s revolting seeing how persuasive Arturo is and the willingness of his followers to remove their limbs on purpose.

The entire storyline of Arturo’s cult is disturbing in its own right, but isn’t without its real world parallels. The cult of personality he inspires in others as he commands their subservience and his Machiavellian machinations draws clear parallels with fascist figures past and present. At one point, there’s a journalist following Arturo and his notes replicate their lively conversations. In one point, Arturo expounds a Nietszchian slave mentality that feels a little too real:

Only a lunatic would want to be president. These lunatics are created deliberately by those who wish to be presided over. You’ve seen it a thousand times. We create a leader by locating one in the crowd who is standing up. This may well be because there are no chairs or because his knees are fused by arthritis. It doesn’t matter. We designate this victim as a ‘stand-up guy’ by the simple expedient of sitting down around him. (227)

But Arturo gets worse. Dunn crafts the story masterfully, where there are just enough moments of foreshadowing to anticipate what will happen, but giving enough freedom to titillate readers with possibilities. The man who tried to murder the Binewskis later murders his wife and attempts to take his own life, accidentally rendering his face into an unrecognizable mush. He gets a job with the carnival to serve as a security guard to Arty. The Bag Man, so called, demonstrates the same devotion as the others but also loves the twins. To spite them for their success, Arty arranges for the Bag Man to marry the twins against their will. When they protest, he sends a threat disguised to sound conciliatory. There’s a Chekhov’s gun moment where I felt the anticipatory thrill of speculation—who is going to get shot? How is it going to happen? I’ll spare you the details of my own theories.

Long story short, the Bag Man impregnates the twins, who do not agree on whether they want the child. Arturo makes arrangements under the guise of providing them with an abortion, but behind the scenes has been asking the doctor about whether it would be possible to separate them. She tells him it isn’t so he asks whether it would be possible to just get rid of one of them. When she asks which one, he says it doesn’t matter. I find his callousness so haunting. Elly is lobotomized and Iphy carries the deflated head on her shoulder, having to manually move the limbs that Elly used to control. It gets even more disturbing when Elly tries to ‘come back’ from her lobotomy, assisted by Chick’s telekinesis. I won’t ruin the climax of the book, but it made me want to throw up with how uncomfortable it was.

On the topic of Chick’s telekinesis, I thought it was a really compelling account of the power. He describes reality like water. It wants to move but is held in containers: “Water always wants to move but it can’t unless we give it a hole, a pipe to go through. We can make it go any direction” (109). He describes himself as “the plumbing that lets it flow through [...] But the wanting to move is in the thing itself” (109). I liked how Dunn inverts how I typically think of telekinesis. Rather than telekinesis forcing objects to move, it’s more like permitting things to do what they would want to do. This essentially gives Chick godlike powers—even over life and death, as we see in several parts of the book. Yet, it’s tastefully understated; Chick truly has the powers but it’s Arturo whose influence wins out—mainly because Fortunato is so empathetic and feels the pain of things doing what they would prefer not to.

If I have one complaint about the structure of the book, it’s that the climax happens a little too suddenly. There’s such a glorious build-up but the final ‘event’ happens with minimal explanation. It’s the one place where the breadcrumbs could have been planted a little more thoroughly. That being said, there’s still an incredible haunting moment where many people are killed, among whom is Al. Crystal Lil has thoroughly declined into dementia and she

runs to where he’s lying and rips off her blouse---pulls her skirt down---hikes her underpants tight against her crotch. She’s saying, ‘Al … broken … just completely broken … we’ll have to start over.’ She crouches over Al’s body, straddling his thighs, fumbling his belt, opening his zipper, yanking those white jodhpurs down to his hips and talking softly. She settles herself over his limp penis and she rocks, rubbing her crotch against him, stroking his chest, not noticing the half of his face that isn’t there anymore---not noticing the handless stump of his arm smoldering, but rubbing herself slowly like a cat against and running her hands inside his shirt against his chest hair and saying, ‘Broken … Al … after all our work … we’ll start again … Al … you and me … Al.’” (320-321)

Like so many others in the text, this moment inspires equal parts empathy and revulsion. It gives the ending a more tragic quality, where otherwise it might have been more appropriate to cheer for fictional villains being stopped. I feel badly for Lil, who has been lost to herself through such frequent drug use.

Overall, the book is exemplary in its characterization, its plot, and its thematic developments. The children’s secret lives create the perfect context for engaging betrayals. There’s a great comment early on when Oly says, “it is [...] the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality” (105). Lil and Al are increasingly disconnected from the goings-on at the carnival and are oblivious to the downward spiral of the family. Oly notes, “it is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood” (105). The aphorism seems to speak to Oly as a character, as well. She has the level of awareness that what she’s doing is wrong and deigns to hide it, but continues to do Arty’s bidding. In the closing pages of the book, she expresses some of her conflicted feelings about Arturo:

I won’t try to call my feeling for Arty love. Call it focus. My focus on Arty was an ailment, noncommunicable, and, even to me all these years later, incomprehensible. Now I despise myself. But even so I remember, in hot floods, the way he slept, still as death, with his face washed flat, stony as a carved tomb and exquisite. His weakness and his ravening bitter needs were terrible, and beautiful, and irresistible as an earthquake. He scalded or smothered anyone he needed, but his needing and the hurt that it caused me were the most life I have ever had. Remember what a poor thing I have always been and forgive me. (315)

If we are what we love, not what loves us, then Oly is a megalomaniacal sociopath and Arturo is nothing. He seems to express some guilt over what he did to Elly—but I don’t buy it. I think even his guilt is a tactic. Oly is drawn into loving Arturo’s weakness but her empathy for him leaves a string of bodies in their wake. In a number of ways, empathy for one another is what destroys the family. Arturo cannot stop being nothing because he loves nothing—he relies on the love of others and can only define himself as the leader that demands devotion and never provides it.

Even in the frame narrative, Olympia’s morality is complex and twisted. As OI mentioned, the book is framed by Oly secretly monitoring the daughter she gave up for adoption now that her daughter is in art school. A wealthy woman offers to pay Miranda money to remove her tail—it seems to be a win-win: she can make $10k and she can be a ‘normal’ woman. Oly takes it upon herself to ensure that the surgery never happens. On the one hand, it is redemption for preventing Miranda the trauma that Arturo imbued to so many others. On the other hand, he is taking away Miranda’s choice, imposing freakishness onto her when she would prefer to just be ‘normal’. The questions of autonomy, manipulation, and choice are complex, making the ending just as uncomfortable as the rest of the book.

Despite the discomfort Dunn inspires, there are a number of reflections that are so poignant that it’s hard to deny the deeply human quality of the book. It’s weird and subversive but it reads like capital-L Literature. Towards the end of the book Olympia reflects on her upbringing. She tells Miranda

I was full-grown before I ever set foot in a house without wheels. Of course I had been in stores, offices, fuel stations, barns, and warehouses. But I had never walked through the door of a place where people slept and ate and bathed and picked their noses, and, as the saying goes, ‘lived,’ unless the place was three times longer than it was wide and came equipped with road shocks and tires. (321)

The passage comes towards the end of the book, but reads like the opening reflections to a Victorian Bildungsroman. It also makes me more empathetic to Oly, putting her trauma in perspective. Of course she would do what Arty wants—it was the surest way to ensure herself a place in the family and a home. She elaborates on how uncomfortable it is to be inside a home. It gives her a kind of self-consciousness hitherto unknown: “This mystery appeared when I first stood in a rooted house. I hadn’t understood before that anything about me needed explaining. It’s all very well to read about houses, and see houses from the road, and to tell yourself, That’s where folks live. But it’s another thing entirely to walk inside and stand there” (322).

Geek Love is a house that let me walk inside and stand there. It inspired the same discomfort. The same uncertainty. It’s a book that made me question my values and morals, the limits of my empathy. It’s a book that disturbs me not only because the characters are so malicious and sadistic towards each other, but because it makes me confront the full implications of my values and ethics, the boundaries of what love entails. Geek Love is truly a one of a kind work, a work of freakish originality. I am so grateful it was recommended to me.

Happy reading!

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

    I was meant to have read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall approximately fifteen years ago for my Victorian Literature seminar about women and animals. With apologies to Professor Berg, I never got around to it at the time and, still unable to grapple with re-attempting to read Wuthering Heights, I picked the book before it on my unread shelf. So, here we are with Anne Brontë’s book about insufferable men and the supposed responsibilities of wives towards their reform.

    The basic premise is this: a mysterious widow and her child arrive at Wildfell Hall (as tenants, no less!). The surrounding community, and Gilbert Markham in particular, take an interest in her and it is only after much cajoling that he gains access to Helen’s private diary, which becomes the central narrative of Brontë’s text for about two hundred pages. The first part of the book is Markham writing a letter to a man he has offended for not being more forthcoming with his own story; within the letter, he reproduces the pages of Helen’s diary—she, also, is not very forthcoming with her own story. Her tale is unraveled as a more traditional novel, documenting her marriage prospects in respectable society. She rejects her first suitor, the one her family encourages, because he is a boorish bore and she does not have any genuine affection for him. Instead, she marries Mr. Huntingdon, only for things to quickly turn sour—he is an incorrigible sinner and Helen is a woman of immeasurable patience striving to bring him back to God. That said, he is exposed as an adulterer and Helen tries to build a new life for herself without him, which returns us to Markham’s narration and the culmination of their love story. The book reads similarly to Pamela by Samuel Richardson—also epistolary in nature, also about an abusive and domineering husband, with some information missing to give it a gothic kind of quality.

    Literary theorist Irving Howe makes the claim that it is a challenge to engage with literary works from the past; the more time that passes, the more inaccessible works become. While I’d say that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is pretty good, there’s definitely some unavoidable presentism in my reading. Helen’s story reads as pretty repetitive, bludgeoning the reader with how vile Mr. Huntingdon is to justify Helen’s respectable remarriage. There are any number of moments that I would deem to be the ‘last straw,’ but given the religious and societal mores of the time, it seems that Brontë really needs to convince the audience that Helen deserves to be free of her husband.

    Truly, though, the men in the book are insufferable. Mr. Huntingdon and his friends drink, gamble, and hunt for months at a time. He takes prolonged vacations to the city, leaving Helen alone and pining for him. In one conversation, he asks her why she does not worship him (or at least his body) and hold him in higher esteem than God (the blasphemer!) and Helen tries to convince him to be more pious, less tempted by fleshly delights. Later, as I mentioned, he is exposed as being a long-term adulterer with his friend’s wife. Later still, he destroys Helen’s art and studio tools. Later still, he reads her journal while she tries to reclaim it from him and then tries to prevent her escape by limiting her finances to a set allowance, the expenditures of which she is forced to report. Any one of these things would be sufficient grounds for a dissolution of their bond, but Helen continually thinks she can bring him back to God. (There’s a footnote in my edition that comments on the trope of women in literature reforming their husbands and implies Brontë is taking a swipe at the convention—why is the responsibility on the eternally suffering woman?). The other historical factor is that Huntingdon refuses to allow Helen to leave because people will talk. Despite the open secret that is his relationship with Lady Lowborough, he will not suffer people to talk about his failed marriage. The notion that it would be worse to be seen as not having a good marriage than to actually have a bad marriage is pretty firmly rooted in the Victorian era.

    Even the “good” men of the book are awful and in this Brontë is prescient of the “nice guys” that are secret misogynists. When Helen’s marriage is in decline, Mr. Hargrave steps in, wanting to save Helen and steal her away because he loves her so. She asks him over and over again (the book is repetitious, after all) not to comment any further on his love for her. If he truly loves her for her own sake, she says, he would be willing to hold that love in silence and not attempt to bring her further from God. The dweeb sure is persistent, though. The central narrator and new prospect for Helen, Gilbert Markham, while seemingly the protagonist of the novel, demonstrates the same toxic masculinity as all the others. He insists on seeing her paintings, which she does not want to show him. If you think about it, the very novel is a huge betrayal to her—he is exposing all of her secrets and experiences to a friend of his and a stranger, presumably, to her. Even when the journal cuts off and Markham returns to his own letter, he admits that he finds it more painful to read the parts of the journal where Helen is in love with Huntingdon than the parts which follow. He’s a selfish brat that betrays Helen’s confidence, which makes the climax of the novel where he rushes to interrupt what he believes to be her wedding fall a bit flat—why would I root for this guy?

    All things told, the book is pretty good, if overlong. The writing style is not as far removed from current conventions as you might expect, making the novel pretty accessible. As unlikely as it seems, I would actually step up to defend Anne Brontë. It seems to me that everyone talks about Charlotte’s Jane Eyre or Emily’s Wuthering Heights and that Anne gets unfairly discounted by a lot of literature enthusiasts. She’s worth the read.

    Happy reading!

Struggles of a Dreamer by Yahaya Baruwa

Yahaya Baruwa’s Struggles of a Dreamer is a special book to me for reasons entirely independent of the novel itself. I recently taught a student who was enthusiastic, driven, and a dedicated reader. Several times, he discussed with me how this book set him on a better path and inspired his love of reading. He discussed meeting the author and getting his copy signed. Then, on the day of our exam, he brought me his personal copy as a gift. It seemed too meaningful—too special to him—to keep it. I didn’t feel worthy to be given something so special to him and I tried to return it, but he insisted I keep it. It may very well be the most meaningful gift I’ve received in all my years of teaching.

In a fun coincidence, Struggles of a Dreamer is about people giving books to one another. The book starts with Tunde, a beggar in New York who is assaulted and robbed of the few possessions he has. Tunde tells the nurse his life story, moving from Nigeria to Toronto. In his previous life, he worked for a rich man who was similarly robbed and had his life threatened. Instead, he paid for his life and dismissed Tunde with a bonus. Things did not go well when Tunde moved to North America, and he makes a promise to his nurse to turn his life around and help his wife and child get to North America. Living in the street, a wealthy woman in a limo passes by and gives him an envelope. Hoping for cash, he instead finds a book. The woman, a CEO of a beauty company, leaves a note about receiving the book and changing her life and we get her own story of hardship. Then, he reads the book, which is the story of Toku’te, another poor man who wants to leave his family’s farm to become wealthy.

The book then takes on layer after layer of people telling stories, similar in structure to the spiral of of Scheherazade’s stories in The Arabian Nights. There are a bunch of anecdotes about poor folk turning their luck around through sheer dedication and the book reads like a series of parables or folk tales. Stylistically, the book is a bit messy. There are some loose ends that just get dropped, some inconsistent quotation marks that make it unclear who is speaking when, some increasingly infrequent interruptions of Tunde commenting on the Toku’te narrative—so infrequent that you keep wondering if the main character of the frame narrative is ever coming back.

On occasion, Baruwa offers some insightful comments. I would venture that the highlight in that respect is the proverb that “Something that happens once will not happen again, but something that happens twice will surely happen a third time” (135). The other insights peppered throughout the book offer surface-level platitudes, which culminate in the six rules of success in the final section of the book. At their core, the rules break down to being: 1) have a vision, 2) thoughts become reality, 3) be disciplined, 4) manage your fear, 5) be willing to learn, and 6) handle money profitably. The rules for success are literally spelled out for the audience with the same (lack of) subtlety as The Alchemist.  

I can’t say the book really did much for me by way of inspiration. It seems to play into a naive notion of individual effort with one eye permanently on the concept of wealth. As a result, its appeals to the spirit are a bit at odds with the drive towards profit. I’m just lucky that my engagement with the book was driven by a sense of connection and a spirit of intellectual generosity. I’ll forever be grateful for the gift of the book—and I’ll forever be grateful for the impact it had on my student—even if the book does very little for me overall. 

Thanks to my student and happy reading!

The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante

        [Editor’s note: I actually missed the Ferrante book club, so oops.] Three months ago, I read The Wall by Marlen Haushofer as a book club novel for Type in Toronto. In the latest installment of book club, we’re taking a look at The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante, another book where a woman is blindsided into isolation and must care for dependents with an increasing level of frustration. It seems that Type has a type. But I’m underselling it for comedic effect. The Days of Abandonment is a challenging, existential work about relationships, responsibilities, and selfhood. 

The book opens with Olga’s husband leaving her, seemingly spontaneously, after years of marriage. This sends Olga into a spiral of obsession and rage, especially when she discovers that her husband has left her for an inappropriately younger woman. She engages in rash behaviours, all the while fearing that she is descending into a misanthropic trope she witnessed in her childhood: the poverella, who was similarly abandoned and similarly acted erratically. Now that she is in a similar position, Olga finds herself unable but to attack her husband when she sees him in public and engage in a sordid and failed sexual encounter with her neighbour, whom she hates. Meanwhile, her dog and her son are incredibly sick, much to her annoyance, and her daughter offers her intense judgment while she dissociates to the point of needing her daughter to stab her to bring her back to reality. The group of them gets locked in their apartment and the book spirals into a frenetic madness. 

Plot-wise, the book is pretty thin. Depth-wise, it’s incredibly rich. It’s a finely wrought exploration of the psychological dynamics of identity, relationships, time, and existence. I ended up documenting a number of passages from the text, and, admittedly, I’m about as chaotic in my notetaking as Ferrante’s narrator is in her actions.

The initial pull of the book is the secrecy in which the abandonment is shrouded. There is a history of her husband trying to end the relationship and so Olga has a level of doubt that he may return. Upon reflecting about a previous attempt for him to end the relationship, she notes, “five days later he telephoned me in embarrassment, justified himself, said that there had come upon him a sudden absence of sense” (10), and says that “the phrase made an impression” about lingered with her. The question of whether he will come back lingers and, as she gets into increasingly desperate attempts to get in touch with him, it builds towards the conversation of whether there’s another woman. He says there is, but for a reader, I found there was that little bit of doubt: is he lying about a paramour because it’s the easiest way to make a clean break?

Of course, it is eventually confirmed that Mario is indeed seeing another woman and is not coming back. Olga gets more paranoiac, more obsessive. It’s uncomfortable to observe, but the book challenges its readers by presenting a feminine version of the male messiness at which nobody blinks. The vulgarity of her speech, the crassness of her comments, the repetitiousness in her thought patterns are all recognizable—in someone like Henry Miller. Olga notes that as a girl she “had liked obscene language, it gave [her] a sense of masculine freedom” (22). She continues, “Now I knew that obscenity could raise sparks of madness if it came from a mouth as controlled as mine” (22).

Indeed, Ferrante’s novel offers a kind of metacommentary on the literary history of the rejected woman. Her narrator describes being given a book and reading it, “But when [she] gave her back the volume, [she] made an arrogant statement: these women are stupid. Cultured women, in comfortable circumstances, they broke like knick-knacks in the hands of their straying men. They seemed sentimental fools” (21). Olga’s narration continues, “I wanted to be different, I wanted to write stories about women with resources, women of invincible stories about women with resources, women of invincible words, not a manual for the abandoned wife with her lost love at the top of her thoughts” (21). Her writing philosophy opens the door for the very messiness (that is, complexity) of human emotion: “I had pretensions. I didn’t like the impenetrable page, like a lowered blind. I liked light, air between the slats. I wanted to write stories full of breezes, of filtered rays where dust motes danced. And then I loved the writers who made you look through every line, to gaze downward and feel the vertigo of the depths, the blackness of inferno” (21). When childhood Olga tells her teacher that, her reaction suggests that she lost someone and it is only twenty years later that she suspects the same thing is happening to her. The passage continues with repetitive disbelief: how could Mario leave? How could he “become uninterested in [her] life, like a plant watered for years that is abruptly allowed to die of drought” (21). 

Olga obsesses over the past. Now that her marriage has collapsed, she sees herself in her distraught elementary school teacher; she sees herself in the poverella; she sees herself in the novel she had so abhorred: “Of that book from my adolescence the few sentences I had memorized at the time came to mind: I am clean I am true I am playing with my cards on the table” (22). She reflects, though, that “those were affirmations of derailment” (22). Again, Ferrante offers a hint to the style of obsessive rejection: “I had better remember, always put in the commas. A person who utters such words has already crossed the line, feels the need for self-exaltation and therefore approaches confusion” (22). There are several other moments in the text in which she recalls the need for commas, the lack of which point towards her increasing deterioration (“Hold the commas, hold the periods. It’s not easy to go from the happy serenity of a romantic stroll to the chaos, to the incoherence of the world” (70)).

Throughout the entire book, there’s a divide between what Olga rationally knows against the unfathomability of being left. On the one hand, she admits, “I was ashamed of myself” (34) while on the other she “couldn’t do anything about it” (34). Her desperation leads to a self-destructiveness, hoping that in performing her inability to exist without Mario that it will lure him back. She notes, “I couldn’t think of anything except how to get him back I soon developed an obsession to see him, tell him what I could no longer manage, show him how diminished I was without him” (34). It’s a psychologically complex response in which she attempts to align their different conceptions of reality: “I was sure that, stricken by a kind of blindness, he had lost the capacity to place me and the children in our true situation and imagined that we continued to live as we always had, peacefully. Maybe he even thought we were a little relieved, because finally I didn’t have to worry about him, and the children didn’t have to fear his authority, and so Gianni was no longer reprimanded if he hit Ilaria and Illaria was no longer reprimanded if she tormented her brother, and we all lived—we on one side, he on the other—happily” (34-35). She wants to try to force Mario’s perception, which is such a limited point of view and yet feels completely plausible in the context of loss: “I hoped that if he could see us, if he knew about the state of the house, if he could follow for a single day our life as it had become—disorderly, anxious, taut as a wire digging into the flesh—if he could read my letters and understand the serious work I was doing to sort out the breakdown of our relationship, he would immediately be persuaded to return to his family” (35).

At this point, you may be noticing how much of Ferrante’s text is being reproduced here in full. There are a few reasons for that. First, I think that Ferrante’s prose is compelling since it so accurately captures the desperation of her character. The skewed logic, the lapse in clear-thinking (which harkens back to what Mario had said to her). The other reason I want to replicate Ferrante’s words faithfully here is because the excess in Olga’s speech is, I think, critical to the work.

I mentioned Olga’s parallel to her husband. Mario claims a “sudden absence of sense” (10). That becomes an underlying apothegm for the novel. She has lost her sense and the novel offers a glorious conclusion to the throughline. When Olga is able to meet her husband on a level playing field, she admits that she no longer loves him. He makes some assumptions, which Olga then corrects: “I don’t love you anymore because, to justify yourself, you said that you had fallen into a void, an absence of sense, and it wasn’t true” (185). When her husband says it was true, she again corrects him: “No. Now I know what an absence of sense is and what happens if you manage to get back to the surface from it. You, you don’t know. At most you glanced down, you got frightened, and you plugged up the hole with Carla’s body” (185). I love the way these lines simultaneously offer a visceral response (“plugged up the hole with Carla’s body”) and an existential one. She confronts the depths of her own sorrow and disassociation from herself head-on, leaning into the isolation rather than trying to overcome her loneliness with other men—although there is one scene, where…well…

But more importantly, the novel confronts the relationship of Olga—and women in general—to time. Again, it becomes a kind of inversion between Mario and Olga. She remembers a conversation they had and narrates it as follows:

I don’t know exactly what he said. If I have to be honest, I think that he mentioned only the fact that, when you live with someone, sleep in the same bed, the body of the other becomes like a clock, ‘a meter,’ he said—he used just that expression—‘a meter of life, which runs along leaving a wake of anguish.’ But I had the impression that he wanted to say something else, certainly I understood more than what he actually said, and with an increasing, calculated vulgarity that first he tried to repress and which then silenced him I hissed:

‘You mean that I brought you anguish? You mean that sleeping with me you felt yourself growing old? You measured death by my ass, by how once it was firm and what it is now? Is that what you mean?’ (40)

Ferrante illustrates the way women embody time. I’ve seen a number of novels and philosophers which suggest that women have a deeper connection to time (whether it be through the notion of a ‘biological clock’ or something more metaphysical). But the way that Ferrante offers such a scathing critique of the hypocrisy of male midlife crises is so compelling here. This is particularly so because in the pages that follow, Olga follows her husband with “a million recriminations” in her mind. The actual objection she raises, though, is about how she provided him time; she created time. While the argument has been trod before, Ferrante does so in a particularly compelling way. She narrates, “I wanted to cry: don’t touch anything; they are things you worked on while I was there, I was taking care of you, I was doing the shopping, the cooking, it’s time that belongs to me in a way, leave everything there. But now I was frightened of the consequences of every word I had uttered, of those that I could utter, I was afraid I had disgusted him, that he would go away for good” (42). Again, there’s the tension between the righteous critique of her husband and the desperate fear of losing him for all time.

In many ways, The Days of Abandonment is a book about self-sacrifice, of losing oneself to others, and how women are especially subject to such demands. Continuing on with the discussion of time, Olga elaborates:

I had taken away my own time and added it to his to make him more powerful. I had put aside my own aspirations to go along with his. At every crisis of despair I had set aside my own crises to comfort him. I had disappeared into his minutes, into his hours, so that he could concentrate. I had taken care of the house, I had taken care of the meals, I had taken care of the children I had taken care of all the boring details of everyday life, while he stubbornly climbed the ladder up from our unprivileged beginnings. And now, now he had left me, carrying off, abruptly, all that time, all that energy, all that effort I had given him, to enjoy its fruits with someone else, a stranger who had not lifted a finger to bear him and rear him and make him become what he had become. It seemed to me an action so unjust, a behaviour so offensive that I couldn’t believe it, and sometimes I thought his mind had been obscured, he had lost the memory of us, was helpless and at risk, and it seemed to me that I loved him as I had never loved him, with anxiety rather than with passion, and I thought he had a pressing need for me. (63)

I love that passage. The personification of time—or rather its becoming material—-is particularly effective. The way Olga equates her gestures into quantifiable, measurable units, makes the impact felt that much more powerfully. The latter half of the passage provides a more refined discussion around types of love.

Olga demonstrates love in many ways to her other dependents, albeit with frustration and increasing dissociation. She hates their dog, for example: “Stupid dog, stupid dog, whom Mario had given as a puppy to Gianni and Ilaria, who had grown up in our house, had become an affectionate creature—but really he was a gift from my husband to himself” (54). She critiques Mario for his selfishness, since he “had dreamed of a dog like that since he was a child, not something wished for by Gianni and Ilaria, spoiled dog, dog that always got its way” (54). There are a number of moments where Olga abuses the dog, alternatingly being obliged to care for it.

Indeed, the dog becomes a symbol of Ogla’s obligations. Partway through the novel, Olga gets trapped in the apartment with her children and the dog, Otto. They are accidentally locked in and Olga cannot get the key to work. The obligations pile up and cause her to spiral into the self-destructiveness that she had formerly tried to portray to Mario—now, unseen by anyone else, she lives out her own prophecy. Problem after problem emerges. The dog gets sick. The son gets sick. There are ants: “they ran in a line along the base of the bookcase, they had returned to besiege the house” (126). With the ants in particular, Ferrante offers an interesting suggestion. The ants are described as “perhaps [...] the only black thread that held [the apartment] together, that kept it from disintegrating completely” (126). The notion that this flaw is precisely what grounds the apartment in reality for Olga is indeed reflective of the bigger picture: without her wards, Olga would fall apart completely. As for the ants,

without their obstinancy [...] Ilaria would now be on a splinter of floor much farther away that she seems and the room where Gianni is lying would be harder to reach than a castle whose drawbridge has been raised, and the room of pain where Otto is in agony would be a leper colony, and impenetrable, and my very emotions and thoughts and memories of the past, foreign places and the city of my birth and the table under which I listened to my mother’s stories, would be a speck of dust in the burning light of August. Leave the ants in peace. Maybe they weren’t an enemy, I had been wrong to try to exterminate them. At times the solidity of things is entrusted to irritating elements that appear to disrupt their cohesion” (126).

That final line seems to serve as a key to the text as a whole. Fissures are what reflect reality, what draw Olga back—as I mentioned, Olga gets her daughter Ilaria to stab her when she starts to lose focus while trying to tend to all of the issues she’s facing.

One of those issues is her disassociation from herself. Her loss of self manifests in various ways throughout the novel. In one gruelling encounter, she tries to give herself to her neighbour in one of the most (intentionally) awkward sexual encounters I’ve read in a novel. At first, Olga disassociates from herself using her body, but later uses her body to return to herself. All the while, she “thought of beauty as a constant effort to eliminate corporeality” (97). She describes how she “wanted him to love [her] body forgetful of what one knows of bodies. Beauty. [She] thought anxiously. Is this forgetfulness. Or maybe not” (97). She blames her mother for “the obsessive bodily attention of women” and describes a moment of connection when a young office mate of hers “farted without embarrassment and, with laughing eyes, gave [her] a half smile of complicity” (97). Again, we are psychologically contradictory. On the one hand, she wants to eliminate her corporeality. By the same token, it is her corporeality that allows her to connect with herself and others. In a pivotal moment, she describes taking off makeup and seeing herself in a triptych-style mirror. She sees “the two halves of [her] face separately, far apart, and [she] was drawn first by [her] right profile, then by the left” (123). The fragmentary nature of her reflection renders all angles of her unfamiliar to herself. She then rearranges the mirrors to see herself differently and remarks, “there is no technical means of reproduction that, up to now, has managed to surpass the mirror and the dream” (123). While using a mirror as symbolism for a fragmented identity is a little trite, Ferrante still renders the scene compelling. Two of the three reflections speak against Olga and “over those two half portions, Olga had scant control, she was not very resistant, not very persistent” (123). There is “the worse side, the better side, geometry of the hidden” (123). She continues, “If I had lived in the belief that I was the frontal Olga, others had always attributed to me the shifting, uncertain welding of the two profiles, an inclusive image that I knew nothing about” (123). She reflects on which version of herself she thought she was giving others and who others received.

I really like the way Ferrante explores the question of how we see one another. At one point, her daughter makes a statement about how Olga hits the children. Olga objects: “I didn’t hit them, I had never done it, at most I had threatened to do it” (102). She thinks, though, that “maybe for children there’s no difference between what one threatens and what one really does” (102). She continues, “the words immediately made the future real, and the wound of the punishment still burned even when I no longer remembered the fault that I would or could have committed” (102). She remembers her mother threatening to cut off her hands, “and those words were a pair of long, burnished steel scissors that came out of her mouth, jawlike blades that closed over the wrists, leaving stumps sewed up with a needle and thread from her spools” (102-103). Nonetheless, she tries to explain to her daughter that she never hit her and at most said she would slap her, but realizes “there’s no difference [...] and hearing that thought in [her] head scared [her]” (103). The difference between reality and our perception erodes and Olga “ended up in an alluvial flow that eliminated boundaries” (103). Again, the bodily is what comes to matter most: “The word ‘slap’ is not this slap” (103). Olga then slaps her daughter to prove the point. It’s chilling.

Later, when Ilaria puts on makeup, Olga is disturbed by her imitator: “What did it mean, we were identical, at that moment I needed to be identical only to myself” (121). She is nauseated by the experience and “Everything began to break down again” (121). Olga starts to wonder, “Maybe [...] Ilaria herself wasn’t Ilaria” (121). Again, Olga refers back to stories from her past—The Vomero and the poverella. She wonders if they have somehow transcended time and are actually these figures from the past, feeling, “without realizing it, I had been transformed into one of them, a figure of childish fantasies, and now Ilaria as only returning to me my true image, she had tried to resemble me by making herself up like me” (121). Olga enters the abyss. Her lapse of sense is characterized as follows:

This was the reality that I was about to discover, behind the appearance of so many years. I was already no longer I, I was someone else, as I had feared since waking up, as I had feared since who knows when. Now any resistance was useless, I was lost just as I was laboring with all my strength not to lose myself, I was no longer there, at the entrance to my house, in front of the reinforced door, coming to grips with that disobedient key. I was only pretending to be there, as in a child’s game. (121)

I’m rambling. I’m giving away the best parts and existential reflections. At the same time, I’ve withheld a number of scenes. The actual beats in the plot have been wildly underreported. One of the things I’ve hardly mentioned is the sordid affair she has with her neighbour, which leads to a number of reflections on sex and connection. She hates him, he hates her dog, she hates her dog, she needs him to help save her dog, and—when they can’t—to bury it. There’s a moment too when she thinks she sees her dog: “it seemed to me that the shade of Otto had joyously crossed the scene like a dark vein through bright, living flesh, I wasn’t frightened. The whole future—I thought—will be that way, life lives together with the damp odor of the land of the dead attention with inattention, passionate leaps of the heart along with abrupt losses of meaning. But it wouldn’t be worse than the past” (176).

Returning for a moment to the topic of sex, I’ll offer one passage that reflects the crassness that Olga reclaims it with justified feminine rage:

we consummate life and lose it because in some long-ago time someone, in the desire to unload his cock inside us, was nice, chose us among women [...] “we take for some sort of kindness addressed to us alone the banal desire for sex. We love his desire to fuck, we are so dazzled by it we think it’s the desire to fuck only us, us alone. Oh yes, he who is so special and who has recognized us as special. We give it a name, that desire of the cock, we personalize it, we call it my love. To hell with all that, that dazzlement, that unfounded titillation. Once he fucked me, now he fucks someone else, what claim do I have? Time passes, one goes, another arrives. I was about to swallow some pills, I wanted to sleep lying in the darkest depths of myself. (74).

Throughout the book, Ferrante offers perceptive insight into our internal storms. Whether it’s about the bodily or conceptions of self or time or relationships, there is a dark undercurrent that makes us question how we ought to live. The fissures seem to guide Olga’s way and when everything is going poorly she relies on the mantra “I love my husband and so all this has meaning” (88). She repeats that sentence as she falls asleep—of course, there’s some irony there which begs the question of—when she no longer loves her husband, does this journey then have no meaning?

As you can see, there is a lot to talk about for The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante. I have barely scratched the surface and worry about over-citing the book and offering very little commentary. It’s a shame I wasn’t able to make it to the book club, because I would love to have heard what others had to say about this descent—this true descent, not Mario’s superficial crisis.

Happy reading!