A Frozen Woman

Annie Ernaux's novelization of her adolescence and young adulthood succeeds because of its specificity and honesty. The writer is not a feminist, but a "womanist" who excavates the fears and desires of her sex with such ruthlessness that the effect is like being washed in the cool (not cold) water of revelation.  

The Smell of Hay

Perhaps because this one was the last of Giorgio Bassani's Ferrara works, read all in a row, but The Smell of Hay sank without a bubble and has been quickly forgotten.

The Heron

Giorgio Bassani's short novel is a day in the life of a man adrift and unsure of his place in society and the meaning of his existence. Seemingly well-off, he is afraid of the employees whose work enriches him. His marriage is defective, and the only true affection he gets from a woman is from his mother. The centerpiece of the story is a pointless hunting trip in which the man shoots nothing as an underling massacres scores of ducks and other birds and, sickeningly, a heron. What is the point? "You only had to observe life's events from a certain distance to conclude that all they amounted to was what they were; in other words nothing, or almost nothing."

The importance of money and status overrides all, in this telling. "Money, cash, dough: in the vicinity of those who had it, everything but everything – Fascism, Nazism, Communism, religion, family quarrels or affections, agricultural disputes, bank loans and so forth – everything else suddenly became of no concern or importance."

The ending comes not as a surprise but as a culmination of all the factors that Bassani has so meticulously assembled up to that grim point.

Small Things Like These

What do we owe to others? Not just in words, but in deeds. This is the question at the center of Claire Keegan's brief but powerful novel. The story, set in the mid-1980s, centers on Bill Furlong, a coal and firewood merchant in Ireland with a wife and five daughters who is hardworking and a good provider. When he is confronted with a deeply disturbing event, he is forced to consider his Catholic faith and what it is worth if suffering can be so simply ignored. Keegan's crystalline prose and deep sincerity bring forth a beautiful novel.

Behind the Door

Giorgio Bassani's novel returns to his theme of separateness, specifically that of a Jewish boy in prewar Ferrara. The act of kindness that the nameless narrator pays to an awkward and poorer classmate is repaid with the classmate's insults as the narrator listens behind a half-open doorway. The symbol of the door, although entirely on the nose, is nonetheless affecting.

Lessons

My harsh judgment on this Ian McEwan novel softened somewhat in the last 100 pages. In draft, my first sentence was: "This big fat novel is a big fat dud." Like other novels by this author it is a work of vanishingly small ambitions, despite its scope and length (150,000 words, I'd guess). This sentence refers to the main character of the book, a typical middling Englishman of McEwan's generation: "How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events. He had never made an important decision." Novels, as Mario Vargas Llosa has written, should give the reader an intensified version of reality; it is barely worth the effort to read a book that simply reflects our day-to-day life.

Early on, the character's wife deserts him and becomes an acclaimed novelist, and it is those novels the reader wishes he were reading, not this one. Eventually, though, the poignancy and haze of melancholy lulled me into a kind of pleasant funk as I followed this unexceptional man into his twilight years, and for that McEwan deserves some praise.

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

On this, my second reading of Giorgio Bassani's novel about Ferrara in the years before World War II, I wonder if an alternative title might be The Sleepwalkers. The Jewish characters seem immobilized by passivity in the face of threats that escalated in 1938 with the imposition of the Racial Laws. Life goes on, characters fall in love and play tennis, and Il Duce is nothing more than a faint background buzz.

Act of Oblivion

It is not possible for Robert Harris to write a bad novel, but this one falls into the second tier of his oeuvre. Set largely in New England during the second half of the 17th century, Act of Oblivion focuses on a manhunt for two Englishmen who took part in the execution of King Charles I. There is a lot of hiding and waiting, scrounging for food, then more hiding and waiting, together with a gloss of inquiry into the merits of the Cavaliers versus the Roundheads. Harris's Cicero trilogy was able to combine dramatic sweep with philosophical depth; this one has little of either.

The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles

This novel by Giorgio Bassani held strong echoes for me of Death in Venice. The critical action takes place on a resort beach and involves an older, respected doctor making a fool of himself for a young man. The way Bassani presents the poison of gossip as it spreads is masterful, and a sequence near the end involving a stray dog is heartbreaking – maybe too heartbreaking and a tad manipulative, in fact.

Within the Walls

Giorgio Bassani's story collection set in Ferrara in the years before and shortly after World War II delivers a nuanced and elegant view of the city's residents and their overlapping loyalties. The Jewish community is the focus, and readers may be surprised to learn that some Jews eagerly joined the Fascists in the 1930s. Nothing is simple in Bassani's world: There are outsiders of all stripes, separated by class, scandal, religion, or politics. The complexity of human impulses, however, does not obscure Bassani's tremendous humanity, which shines through in all these stories.

A Ghost at Noon

This novel by Alberto Moravia, the basis of the film Contempt by Jean-Luc Godard, reads like a breeze despite its heavy underpinnings. At its core it is the story of a man trying to find out why his wife has stopped loving him. The man's artistic ambitions in playwrighting may be beyond his grasp, so he settles for writing film scripts for a crass Italian producer in order to give his wife the home he thinks she desires. Issues of class, Freud, and filmmaking (the movie at issue is a planned version of The Odyssey) make for a rich stew.