a couple of books i feel are pertinent to the ethos of this site
bark tree (witch grass) / la chiedent - raymond queneau
semi-quixotic modern story about a man who works at a bank then a plethora of peripheral events happen and certain impulses possess him. an extended metaphor he begins the story as a "flat-entity" and starts to become developed like a character is developed and three-dimensional, first after seeing a display case of rubber ducks in a shop window wearing a waterproof hat, then after hearing about the neighbour killing and skinning one of his cats, etc. then he wants some chips that's about as far as i've read into it so far. despite apparently being a merchant banker this is one of the most pleasant novels i've ever read because it's impossible to dislike the protagonist. he does nothing wrong and just suffers a number of slights on account of other people and reacts to them as you'd expect. the anecdotes and bizarre peripheral characters make it very funny or at least appeal to my sense of humour:
then certain anecdotes also follow a man who is in the same restaurant as the flat entity (main character) over the period of several days who then follows him into the metro and is disconnected due to a convolution in departures, a womanizer and a saxophonist who are pursuing a woman to the villa commissioned by the flat entity (main character) whereupon the womanizer got totalled by a car (or "laminated" as the novel puts it) and then the saxophonist reaches a nearby bistro and converses with a regular who suspects him to be a criminal, nother guy in the bistro who repeats war anecdotes and travelling to val paraiso in chile to meet an escort he's become acquainted with, and the flat entity's son and wife who are mentioned near the end of each chapter the son keeps smuggling boudoir photographs into textbooks and i guess unfortunately there isn't much characterization of the wife towards where i've read other than a man gets his head stuck in a red lead gate in the backyard after staring at her which the flat entity's son notices.
oh and the flat entity's wife remarried to the flat entity when described by his son's deduction after his paternal father was killed in the war.
i can't describe any particular insight i gleaned from it but i definitely enjoy reading it
the empty canvas by alberto moravia
edition that looks like this, because i saw it on biblio i purchased a copy that was very cheap along with a number of books by knut hamsun they're all nazis and their fiction doesn't deserve a fairhearing there is nothingtolearn frm nyone whoalliedthemselveswith national sociallism oritalianfascism hahah hahahahahh but several of alberto moravia's books were banned or prohibited from being reviewed during the fascist regime
though the behaviour of dino and cecilia seems to be scrutinized thoroughly by one another and dino contemplates for a long time several of the destructive qualities of the relationship due to its physicality. it may just be due to the author wishing to maintain an objective tone i'm not sure. it borders on or may be influenced by the new objectivity movement hans fallada and others, but i think it definitely reads somewhat similarly. it can be psychologically driven but is not allowed to pick sides or lead the reader into an argument for their own moral convictions, perhaps. naturally the reader will have a volatile reaction to the subject matter, though - i certainly did. fulfilment of the relationship is disentangled from sexual conquest and dino seems disinterested in the prospects of being in a relationship due to boredom, only occasionally interrupted by revelations in the form of mutual understanding of this boredom
the protagonist is a nepotistic and delusional individual dino, isolated from everything but surrogate activities and false fulfillment due to the ready accessibility of everything needs to live comfortably. i always have problems with this theme because i get irrationally angry at both the indolence and delusion of people who act this way and the degree to which my own actions reflect the actions of the protagonist - oblomov has a few circumstantial parallels, but today this state of mind had been magnified and is visible practically everywhere and easily permutated into the life of many real and fictional people we come to understand i guess. dino's decadent upbringing and circumstances leads to a state of mind which the author describes in detail and is perhaps the novel's central tenement.
it's written with a depth of analysis that sometimes defies the delusion as sometimes dino contemplates his assertions as incorrect. i've read too many decadence-centric books now. the temperament of the main character is how i envision the layman using the internet and squandering his/her life nowadays. not only because dino is pursuing painting and aggrandizing himself when he can't commit to the craft and i can easily project my own failure on to the story of dino but also cold, not definitely contributing to society in a meaningful way, maybe a bit paranoid.
without empathizing with the boredom the main character experiences, the emotions the book conveys are all abrasive and frightening which is an effective mirror into the quietude of the author of a dark satirical work and someone who hasn't accepted the element of truth therein. there are a lot of metaphors and comparisons which impress "repugnance and excitement" the kind of jaded sense of humour which might be conveyed by an author like that. ideas created out of a spiral of desensitization to volatile and disturbing fantasies
film has a completely different impact to the book and is objectively much more facile i think
