Luigi Pirandello- Eleven Short Stories

"Blog, you home?"
"Yeah, just got back from Ben and Jerry's.''
"Ay, ay, too much icecream. I'll need 2 computers to write my book reviews. Or worse, I'll have to write more to cover the... space.
''You're just envious u can't have icecream now that u're lactose intolerant."
"When did blogs get to be so smart? Anyway, wanted to share some notes on Pirandello. You interested?"
''Always keen on what goes on in writers' minds.''
"Can you believe Pirandello wrote in the time when people still got into duels? For funny concepts like Luve.''
''Or who gets the last scoop of icecream."
"Dueling for love is not something Pi wants to dwell on, but isn't it funny how serious people tended to be?"
"What's the big deal, nowadays they use knives or guns instead of swords to prove the same 'the mightest gets the girl' point. Why do you get hooked on details?"
"I guess I've just always found fencing quite amusing."
"So what did you find interesting in his craft? That's what you should focus on as a writer. Stories are more or less the same except for some centuries wearing more garments, or others getting to travel more and faster due to highly powered and polluting mechanical birds."
"Well, if you take "Little hut", for instance. I found it quite interesting how he managed to trick me into believing that the focus of this story were the two lovers who are eloping in the end..
"Ah, so romantic!"
"...because the young woman's father did not approve of their love. As he was only a..farmer.''
"Don't tell, the memories it stirs in me..."
"C'mon, Blog, don's sob...You mean Mr Squirel didn't like you as a son-in-law?!"
"Let's just get back to Pi, pls. What was the focus? If not LOVE?"
"It was a small little girl who appears at the beginning of the story. We don't know who she is, maybe it's Jeli's , the young man's sister. She used to live in his hut which is set on fire by the old angry fool when he finds out the 2 ran away. That's how the story ends, with her looking at her place burning down. Only 3 and a half pages, Blog, but that twist in the end, I'm tellin ya..That element of surprise, Blog, they don't teach u how to do it. In any creative writing book."
"I'm not impressed. What else is he cookin?"
"Guys weep in his stories".
"So now, only Italians have a heart?! How are the women?"
"Some are..let's call them pragmatic (cruel would be too harsh a word), like Sina in Citrons from Sicily. Her teenage lover gives her all his money and supports her to be a singer and then when she becomes famous and rich she forgets about their engagement. Now, it’s not like there’s anything new in that scenario, but there’s again that startling ending that gets me thinking. The poor guy comes to visit her first time after she left their village, and brings some fresh nice lemons for her especially from Sicily. At the time of his visit, she’s entertaining some high society men in the salon and doesn’t bother to come say hello to him. In the end, he loses patience and broken-heartedly, decides to leave realizing what kind of a woman she has turned into. The interesting element of surprise comes in the end. Once she finds out the guy has gone, she utters a short ‘’Ah, poor guy..”, shrugs her shoulders, admires the aromatic fruit and runs with it enthusiastically into the Salon to the courting gentlemen. Now, the question is, is she shameless, or is the guy not fighting enough, and she’s merely being pragmatic,-let’s face it, she has changed into a different person, they no longer belong to the same social class? Blog, are you snoring by any chance?
“I was, but still think she’s a bitch.”
“I think that’s the beauty of Pi, he leaves you hanging…Other female characters are merely stupid- sorry Pi- like Lydia from 'A Voice'. In a nutshell, she is blind marchese Borghi's well-bred-educated reader..."
"Ah, ou sont les hivers d'antant, when Kindle was a real woman?"
"...and she obviously falls in love with him. Lacking self confidence she keeps an important piece of info from him, i.e. Dr Falci's opinion that Borghi's blindness could be cured, fearing that if he's going to get his sight back he won't be pleased with her appearance. The operation is successful, and ta-dah, she leaves him before he gets back from the hospital, ''in order to remain, at least in his memory, a voice, which perhaps, now that he had emerged from his darkness, he would seek on many lips, in vain." Had to tell u the exact words. ''
"I agree, she was a silly case. She could have at least taken a chance. He was in love with her too, I suppose."
"He was in love with her Voice for sure. I was wondering if this scenario is outdated. Does a world in which you have 5 women fighting for a man give you the chance to blow it? Can you afford to be self conscious in this rush-rush world?"
"Well, luckily, you' re married. Let's move on."
"Gosh, so sensitive...I wish you could tell me what happened with Squirrel.."
"Any other point of interest in Pirandello's book?"
"I liked The Fly. Pi is a hell of a psychologist. To cut a story short, a guy called Giurlannu Zaru falls unexpectedly sick to death and his two older cousins, Saro and Nelli want to help him and fetch a doctor. The doctor gives out the terrible diagnosis, anthrax. Zaru realizes he got it from a fly that had bothered him a day before. The tragic part comes when Nelli, who’s described in the short story as an incurable, happy-go-lucky, charismatic optimist gets bitten himself by a fly during his visit at Zaru’s, so he also gets the disease. In his agony, Zaru is actually happy that his cousin will share his fate as they both were about to mary soon, and he couldn’t have stood the thought that his cousin had a life in front of him, whereas he was about to die. Pi punishes him, though, as the two cousins leave Zaru alone terrified that Nelli also got the disease. The story ends with the poor fly who’s cleaning her feet, ‘’as if in contentment’’.
“I’d have smacked its head, if I had been in Zaru’s shoes.”
“Why, the poor insect is only a messenger of death.”
“It’s the least one can do. Under the circumstances. It’s not good to go on the other side angry.”
“Ay, blog. How about some ice cream to cheer us up?”
“But you said..”
“I know what I said, but it seems I was able to fit in. Besides, I know you won’t overdo it. Now with the new health care bill, one has to take responsibility for one’s own…layout.''
"But u can't have ice cream."
''Ay, that's true.."
''Hey, you can have a sorbet! It's dairy-free.
"Blog, you just saved my life. A double Lemon sorbet, pls. And a double chocolate fudge with cream on top."

A Chat with Blog on Mary Robison, the ultimate minimalist

Dear Blog,
Sorry for staying out of touch for so long. Pls don't take it personally. It's ME, entirely. I've had the blues for a long time because of Mary. Robison. She's so good that I got all melancholic thinking I could never write like her.
'Silly girl.'
'U're there. That's a nice surprise!"
"Why would any writer want to write like ANOTHER writer?"
"Heavy repetition there, but, hey, u're too smart for a blog, u know that? How was the H1N1 trip? Did you have high fever and cold-shivers angst? Did you start grunting like a pig in the first week?"
"I think ur blues have completely blurred ur imagination."
"I heard some blogs had those particular symptoms."
"I didn't even get H1N1. I got H1N2."
"Haha, aren't u a seer? So what's the next animal?"
"Squirrel. Yes, don't laugh, the squirrel flu."
"How did u get on it and how did u get off it?"
" On: I befriended a squirrel at an IT conference. (Don't give me that look, blogs need to socialize as well.) Off: I ate linksful of hazelnuts topped with acorn HTMLs. It helped. So what about this Mary Robison?"
"She's sooo funny, bloggie, while talking about very serious things, you know, like fallen apart marriages, poverty, drug addict and raped kids."
"Now that sounds like good, wise, positive thinking literature. Something I would really like to read before going to bed."
"Hey, that's life. And she does a hell of a job to portray drama in haiku-like diary entries. Simply brilliant. Sigh, here, bloggie, can u hear it?''
"Hold ur spirits high, now, Cake. Fortunately there's no limit to fiction. It's elastic like our bouncing universe. You can write your own stuff, and then Mary Something will say, "Who is this girl? She's brilliant!"
"You do sound corny, bloggie, but u're a good chap. How about some icecream?''
"If it's on u. I had to cut down on some settings due to the budget cuts."
"Oh, and how is the blogger affected by the change?"
"Oh, nothing much. You won't be able to publish long posts, like a novel."
"Makes one more responsible. A true minimalist.
Lemon or chocolate?"

Letter to my blog

Dear blog,

I'm sorry you're feeling alone. I guess november blues doesn't make it easier, does it. Poor you, what must be going on in your heart. I know, I only wrote one review in November. But please keep in mind that I'm reading more books at the same time. Some need to be returned to the library, others are personal property, so I take more time with them. It doesn't mean I'm not reading and I'm not thinking about you. I do. I wonder if you like my latest review. I'm being really mean with all writers, aren't I? What all will people tell about my imaginary book, I wonder? I need to be prepared for the worse. Please don't take my reviews personally. I know you had to put up with a lot, and you can't even mutter a word of disapproval. You just sit there and accept everything like a good mother.

Listen to me, I haven't even asked how you feel about the settings, layout, you like them? Would you like to see any changes? What? They're too long? The reviews? Oh, it means they're also boring. Well, sorry, it's not Saturday Night Live here. I can't make writers' work better in a review. If they had asked me for cowriting, it would have been a totally different story. I would have felt obliged to be corteous. Luckily I have no obligations.

How are you, how is space treating you? Are satellites on time with dinner delivery, do you catch all 400 TV channels? Oh, c'mon, so what if Oprah retires? You should open an account on Facebook. It will make you feel better.

C'mon, let's get us some Tori Amos on youtube and chocolate icecream. Love is a tap, after all, and there's never want of plumbers.

Paulo, Oh, Coelho! or The Reader Stands Alone

He has a wonderful name. Very romantic. Paulo Coelho. It’s only natural that I like it, as I love Romance languages, I’m a Romanian. But when it comes to his books, and I admit only reading 2 of them, 11 Minutes and The Winner Stands Alone, I don’t think I’ll ever be tempted to start another one authored by him. “The Winner..’’ is the one I’m going to talk about since I just finished it. And it will probably be the briefest review I’ll ever write (am I being too optimistic?).
This book confirmed again the ‘’De gustibus non disputandum’’ dictum, I guess (sorry for the tongue twister). It must be a good book since I read it with quite an excitement probably caused by the successfully woven detective novel plot. A psychopat rich guy (which adjective goes first? And it’s not a grammar but an existential question!) decides to randomly kill people at the Cannes festival where he knows his ex-wife is present, just to draw her attention that he wants her back. In his view, anything is Ok as long as it's in the name of Love, even destroying whole worlds. He is the owner of an international phone company, so I guess the business might have run much smoother, without bloodshed, had he just picked up the phone and left a few voice mails. Alas, that cannot be recounted in 341 pages, that’s true. And then, he does have some cuckoos in his attic caused by his heroic participation in the Afghanistan war where he learned how to kill without remorse. The whole action happens only within a day - 4 victims, I think-, so I have to admit, he’s good at suspense and keeping my attention. The criminal manages to escape of course, and the morale is, well, a lot of bad guys get away with crime nowadays, so, bravo, realism at its best. Other than a successful plot, I feel I didn’t get much out of this book. He really tried, maybe too hard, to write more than a detective novel. He wanted to depict a modern kali yug in which stars of the show biz fall prey to an insatiable will for power: actors, fashion models, couturiers who all want to make it and forget when it’s time to stop and enjoy the simple things in life, like love and family. The problem is this craving-for-power-leitmotif gets repetitive and it loses its charm over 300 and more pages. Moreover, instead of him lecturing me on Power and the mortal traps it might set for people chasing it, I would have preferred to see it reflected in the way characters acted.
Another thing I don’t like about Coelho is his lack of language artistry. He’s blunt like my kitchen knives. How could he ever touch me? Not to mention he writes a short summary of his book together with the ‘philosophy’ behind it on the VERY first page. I mean, WTF, it’s like during an exam, the Professor gives you the answers to the problem you’re then ‘trying’ to solve. It only shows he’s afraid he’s going to lose his job, so he’s being a little bit ‘lenient’, poor kids need to make a future. Read as uncle Coelho needs to sell his books. To anyone. So, thanks to God, he tends to the less cultured ones by telling them what the book they’re going to read is about. Because, eventually, at home, the Reader stands alone.

PS. By the way, he has a blog. Please visit and discuss the depths of his work with other fellow enthusiasts.

Call it Masochism

There it is, lying near me: green covers, yellow, stained pages, old library smell. A 1979 edition of Dgey Pe Sartre (in case your tongue has some trouble with the last name, think about a lemon, it will come back to its common shape)- Nausea. Can’t tell you how glad I am I’m done with it. When I was little past the middle of the book, I couldn’t help writing this on Facebook, ‘Reading Sartre’s Nausea is like going to a dentist who runs out of anesthetic every time I have an appointment, so I end up staring at my pain like a frog watching a horror movie.’ I was not surprised there were no reactions to my post. Who in the name of God would read Nausea in the 21st C? Or to put it better, who would read Nausea when she’s thirty? It’s a book that is usually opened when your breasts grow or your voice cracks, and you start either feeling important (in which case you don’t read the whole damn thing; you throw it in the air, let it fall and enjoy whatever’s left from the book), or you’re wondering what’s so damn interesting about being important, anyway (in which case you read the whole damn thing). Sartre must have fallen under the second category, but he overdid himself by leaving the ‘important’ part aside. That he wrote the book when he was 33 years old is something that should leave one pondering or wobbling (depending on what part of the world one finds herself). It might be that red-haired guys grow their first beard only in their thirties. (Research needs to be done). Why did I read it? Call it masochism. Aesthetic masochism. You need to read ‘gloomy’ after ‘happy’, only so you can better enjoy ‘happy’again. You need some junk food after eating only home cooked food, so your taste buds can wholly appreciate the latter. Is there a better way to explain the bitter-sweet polarity of good-and-evil that we’re constantly bathing in? It’s God’s aesthetic taste, that’s all there is to It, if you ask me.

Existentialist friends, before you kill me for good, I have to admit. Sartre is not really junk. I am becoming a fan of the law of attraction. It postulates that the more you think about something the higher the chances it will happen. And it worked. I kept wondering if you can truly say, I read a good book but I did not like it that much. I’m not going to split hairs now about what makes a good book. Let’s just put it simply: something that both entertains you or makes you want to read the book, and has got ‘substance’, or ‘truth’ in it. So vieux Sartre returned from the grave to answer my question. ‘Il est possible, mon amie. It’s a perfectly valid contradiction in terms’, he said running his long fingers through his thick red hair.

What makes Nausea a good book? Well, it is entertaining, it makes you want to flip page after page in the hope that Antoine Roquentin, a historian, will find a cure to his malaise. His Nausea comes from the impossibility to find meaning to life, and thence, his acute feeling of being in the way of existence, of not fitting anywhere, among people, or not even in nature. He is first gripped by anxiety when he tries to pick a pebble from the ground and realizes he can’t because he’s struck by its mere existence and the nothingness it ultimately contains. In a nutshell, everything that follows is Roquentin’s discoveries of the uselessness of himself (‘’I hadn’t the right to exist. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant or a microbe’’), of his puppet, defined-by-duty fellow people (“How happy one must be to be nothing more than a Legion of Honor and a moustache’’), the general absurdity of life (“Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance’’), and of death itself (“I dreamed vaguely of killing myself to wipe out at least one of these superfluous lives. But even my death would have been in the way”). No surprise that very few ‘events’ really happen, other than his wide range of pathological feelings which sometimes reach the extremes of paranoia (‘’The nausea is not inside me: I feel it out there in the wall, in the suspenders, everywhere around me. It makes itself one with the café, I am the one who’s within it’. “I suddenly lost the appearance of a man and they saw a crab running backwards of this human room’’).

So what can a man who feels in the way of Existence do in order to get out of it? He’s permanently in search of what he calls ‘an adventure’, which actually translates as anything that could stir his interest in life again, anything that could make sense, yet all his ways out seem prone to failure: his book, sensual pleasures, love. He realizes it makes no sense to continue writing a book on Marquis Rollebon because he’s a thing of the past, and the past cannot explain existence (‘‘Existence is without memory; of the vanished it retains nothing-not even a memory’’). Finding pleasure in whores is also futile since they’re only doing their job, and as mentioned before, duty is not a good enough reason for existence. Romantic love, expressed by his love for actress Anny, also fails him. Anny escapes him twice. In the past, six years back, she could not bond with him because of a professional (but ultimately, existential) flaw, that of seeing Love as the pursuit of ‘perfect moments’(Ah, quelle illusion!) who never came into being. When they reunite, Antoine finds he's still in love with her, but Anny herself had an existential crisis realizing the grand illusion of her past existence, and of existence, in general, and regards him as a memory of the same past, which doesn’t make sense anymore (I’m not sure I understood her character completely, but I think neither did she, so no worries. The whole point in this book is there is no point. That’s why we can relax).

And relaxed we are. In spite of the uneasy ‘truths’ of this book, which make it a good book, goose bumps and all. The novel can be read as the tremendous angst (yes, I seem to like this word, see previous post) of man of all times who’s trying to make sense of his existence ( even if it may seem a little bit immature for someone to cut himself with a knife just to see if one exists or not, when one is already in their 40’s (not sure ab this detail). Sartre makes painfully accurate observations on the way people falsely define themselves through their social relationships (“People who live in society have learned to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked? You might say,-yes you might say, you might say, nature without humanity”). He laughs at man’s ability to deceive himself in order to justify his meaning in the world (“This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story”). In an absurd universe, time is also a category that can’t make sense (“I don’t know where I am anymore: do I see her motions, or do I foresee them? I can no longer distinguish present from future and yet it lasts, it happens little by little”; “The past is a landlord’s luxury”). Last but not least, Sartre faces the ultimate deception, that of the impossibility of language to define nothingness (“Black? I felt the word deflating, emptied of meaning with extraordinary rapidity. [..] I looked at the root: was it more than black or almost black?)

Call me masochistic, but I’m also optimistic. The book ends in a rather ambiguous fashion. We find Roquentin elated at hearing a jazz tune, which moves him and suddenly gives him Hope. He is stirred by the possibility that he could write a novel that could give meaning to his life and make him finally accept himself. So even if his safe line is an uncertain future, I choose to believe the novel has an optimistic ending.

All of a sudden this review has an undesired length and an incroyable air of seriousness. A light nausea encompasses the writer's stomach and her fingers turn slowly into black insects. (Hey, that’s another novel.) But I, I have learned the Sartrian lesson. Existence doesn’t make sense out of existence. We live in order to live. We make love in order to make love. We make art in order to make art. Amen and women.

An itchy book

What do you do when you start reading a book that makes you itchy? Bad-itchy. Do you drop it thinking there are so many good books out there, why waste time on this one or keep reading just to satisfy your curiosity as to why it gained so much acclaim, even if you know it's polluting your mind? Even if you know it won't get better...How can we protect ourselves from what we read? This calls for a healthy laughter. Can you hear it?

Please share your thoughts.

Elizabeth Gilbert-Eat, Pray, Love

Although I’m sure it appeals more to women than men due to the chicklit perfume that emanates from Elizabeth Gilbert's book, I am recommending ‘Eat, pray, love’ to anyone who wants a fun, light, yet not superficial read. I actually didn’t know it wasn’t a fiction book, but rather a travel account, and while reading the first pages, I kept wondering why she had to 1) tell me she’s not going to talk about why she ended up in a divorce (fiction books usually focus on (melo)drama); 2) apologize for not revealing her guru’s name, and 3) lecture me on what a japa mala is, the origins of the Italian language, where the word yoga comes from etc. I kept waiting for the illusion of lights off, curtains drawing, characters bowing, doing their thing etc. It didn’t happen. And then I got my share of enlightenment (it will be called the Liss Gilbert phenomenon). I read on the back cover that it was one of Entertainment Weekly’s Top 10 NONFICTION Books of the year. 2006, i.e.

Taking off expectations like a rugged, old coat is the first step to freedom (Monica Dobos Garg, p 12). Therefore, I listened to the lectures as part of the deal and enjoyed the greatest quality this book has to offer, HUMOR (you won’t read the book if I tell you the best jokes I found in it). The author is mostly poking fun at herself, and even in the darkest hours of her fight with depression, she manages to come to the light with some dark humor. Another feature that makes this ‘travel book’ a very good read is the mix of honesty, candidness and her (hers and others’, whom she diligently and conscientiously quotes) philosophical musings on pleasure, love, God, and finding balance, which actually are the objectives she’s trying to meet during her four-month stays each in Italy, India and Bali.

So there she goes to Italy (or ‘Say it like you eat it’, the first Book) to find pleasure. In pizzas, pastas, wine, and pizzas, gelatos, and pizzas. (She doesn’t ‘taste’ Giovanni, her ‘tandem exchange’ -Italian for English- due to her one-year vow of chastity, which she actually breaks in Bali, in her third book. The misdemeanor happened after she found balance, so the jury is lenient). I found this first part a little bit ‘thin’. Maybe it’s because she mostly tells us how much she ate to overcome her post-divorce grief and feeling at a loss. I think she overdid it when she recounted how one night she had 2 large pizzas and then some pastry as well- probably because I’m on a cheese ban. I guess I just can’t understand American appetite (let alone American divorcee’s appetite). She obviously never had European female readers in mind. On one side we have Gargantua and Pantagruel, on the other side-Liss Gilbert. A good illustration of the concept of relativity.

India was her next stop, where she made an appointment with God, in a very organized fashion, like it best suits Americans. Now, you can call it innate skepticism, lack of faith, etc, but she didn’t manage to convince me God had actually showed up at the meeting. Someone who had had minor encounters with meditation before going to India was able in 4 months at an Ashram to 1). awaken the kundalini shakti after one session of So-Ham meditation, which she just decided to try, because the technique she had been practicing up to that point wasn’t fruitful; 2). to sit in Vipassana meditation (she decided to try this one out too) for 2 hours while being bitten by killer mosquitoes; 3). To reach the turiya state (i.e.the cherry on the cake of a spiritual journey to oneself, or ultimate enlightenment) during a group meditation. Basically, what I’m trying to say is that she might have, I underscore might, exaggerated the facts just because she had to write a book and meet the readers’ expectations that an Indian Ashram can only be a place where enlightenment will no doubt be attained. But again, I may just be jealous of her spiritual success or doubting Americans’ highly achieving capabilities.

Bali was my favorite book. Maybe because I never knew anything about Bali before: how they name their children First, Second, Third etc; how rituals and ceremonies arrange each individual’s place in the universal ‘grid'; how you have to consult the priest, and your dreams before buying a house, etc. Moreover, all characters in this book are very 'well-built': Ketut, the wise, funny, light-hearted magician/healer (my favorite); Wayan, the woman healer, who dares get a divorce in ultra-conservative Bali and tries to make a future for her own daughter and the two adopted girls by opening a clinic. In the good tradition of Balinesians, she’s trying to take advantage of charitable Liss, but can’t pull it off because Liz meets the love of her life, Felipe, a localite, who cautions her against Wayan’s plans (not before causing Liz a bladder infection, read the book and you’ll know why). And yes, she does meet her final objective, balance, as she falls in love and gives in to pleasure, but also manages to keep her daily meditations and enlightenments. Ha.

Concluding, Eat, Pray, Love is a funny, witty, informative book, and I’m looking forward to reading her fiction as well.