Margaret Mazzantini - "Don't Move"
"Don't Move", by Margaret Mazzantini, translated from Italian by John Cullen
Doubleday 2004 (Original, "Non ti muovere", 2002), 353 pp.
Summary: A middle-aged successful surgeon is having an internal monologue, in which he recounts his side of the story of his love for a woman, his social inferior, whom he met by chance; this silent confession is directed at Angela, his daughter, who was brought to the hospital where he works with a potentially fatal head trauma and is being operated on. The daughter survives in the end; the woman does not.
It seemed like a good recipe: begin with the big bang on the first two pages, the ominous dark sky, the whirling clouds of starlings over the indifferent city, then spice it up with purposefully grounded, cynical detail - the ground slick with the bird droppings, plop a reckless teenager in the middle and watch the premise unfold. Oh, and add a trite metaphor, the crash victim being a "bird with folded wings". Yes, that's actually a quote.
Feeble, obvious, artificial. And cruel to boot, to require an innocent character to suffer just to make anguished Timoteo, the protagonist, see Angela's shorn hair in the corner of the hospital room as she's wheeled off into the surgery and jump-start his broodings. The pages letting us in on his tortured thoughts "in the present" read fakest of all (disclaimer: I've never found myself in the situation as dire as the one Mazzantini dropped her hero into, but I can't imagine that she had either. The overall effect is of a method actor performing the prescribed "horrible tragedy" motions).
And it does not get better from there, unfortunately. I was expecting (hoping?) the book would settle a bit once the initial foam is out of the bottle.
We are now listening to the careful retelling (to himself, never out loud) of the story of the hero's relationship with his wife Elsa the cool international journalist, his daughter the typical teenaged rebel wannabe, and the dumpy, dirty, common, but irresistibly attractive Italia, whom he meets by chance and has violent sex with on a very hot afternoon.
Of course, that act (did I mention that the sex scenes are multiple and uniformly awfully written?) is in fact an acknowledgment on his part of the sudden and deep love he feels for her, the love of his life, and he returns again and again to her horrible hole of an apartment, and then even takes her out once as a companion on a medical conference out of town (where he's too full of his own generousness and too much enjoying the forbiddenness to pay attention to anything but himself). Of course he agonizes (inexpertly) over everything - his inability to relate to people, his ability to relate to other people, his lack of love and compassion towards his wife and/or Italia, his lost interest in his work - the usual bouquet, not a single petal missing.
Then he finds out both women are pregnant; the wife has an ultrasound in a plush clinic, the love - a back-alley abortion. Which eventually kills her. Of course. But not before she has a chance to die in his hands (literally: he performs the emergency operation), just as he finally decides to acknowledge the facts he's been staring at for a long time now and to move out on the wife.
Let's check: any buttons still not pushed? Oh, OK, we'll make the entire sequence with the getaway, the fatal septicemia, the desperate surgery and the funeral coincide with the birth of his daughter.
The author is trying her best to make the several men in the book seem alive or at least different from one another, but they all turn out to be cardboard cutouts of one big, clumsy (in both physical and moral sense), blind, inconsiderate, egotistic Modern Man. It's from women that whatever strength, calmness and order that remains in the world is flowing - which is a decent and worthwhile sentiment, if only it weren't played through the equally cardboard female contingent; there's not a single character in the book who is believable, apart from the cynical undertaker appearing towards the end to help the narrator bury Italia.
Verdict: There certainly are redeeming qualities in the book, but they are few and far between: a sudden turn of phrase, a (rarely) glimpsed psychological truth. Mostly, though, it is hollow and trivial; coarse and imprecise; lumbering and unsure, despite (or because of) the predictable plot turns; and overwhelmingly, relentlessly, unimaginatively contrived. Arguably, these are all qualities that author was striving to expose, but then it could have been achieved (and to a devastating effect, if played right; oh, I would've loved to read that one) in the space of a short story. It never recovers from the paint-by-numbers set-up and the forced title ("Don't move" is the mental, or occasionally verbal, refrain thrown by the narrator at the various women at crucial times - without much logic or conviction), and the language, dense and repetitive, never straying far from the obvious choice of words, cannot save it.
They say the book has been successfully filmed, with Mazzantini writing the script herself. Good for her. The shark (in this case the life of the hero's soul - isn't that what the whole thing was supposed to be about?) is still fake.
Sorry.
This is a translation; being bilingual myself, I can easily imagine the original text having been butchered by the "traduttore tradittore". If so, my apologies to the author; told in a different cadence, this could easily have been a different story and a different experience altogether.
Doubleday 2004 (Original, "Non ti muovere", 2002), 353 pp.
Summary: A middle-aged successful surgeon is having an internal monologue, in which he recounts his side of the story of his love for a woman, his social inferior, whom he met by chance; this silent confession is directed at Angela, his daughter, who was brought to the hospital where he works with a potentially fatal head trauma and is being operated on. The daughter survives in the end; the woman does not.
It seemed like a good recipe: begin with the big bang on the first two pages, the ominous dark sky, the whirling clouds of starlings over the indifferent city, then spice it up with purposefully grounded, cynical detail - the ground slick with the bird droppings, plop a reckless teenager in the middle and watch the premise unfold. Oh, and add a trite metaphor, the crash victim being a "bird with folded wings". Yes, that's actually a quote.
Feeble, obvious, artificial. And cruel to boot, to require an innocent character to suffer just to make anguished Timoteo, the protagonist, see Angela's shorn hair in the corner of the hospital room as she's wheeled off into the surgery and jump-start his broodings. The pages letting us in on his tortured thoughts "in the present" read fakest of all (disclaimer: I've never found myself in the situation as dire as the one Mazzantini dropped her hero into, but I can't imagine that she had either. The overall effect is of a method actor performing the prescribed "horrible tragedy" motions).
And it does not get better from there, unfortunately. I was expecting (hoping?) the book would settle a bit once the initial foam is out of the bottle.
We are now listening to the careful retelling (to himself, never out loud) of the story of the hero's relationship with his wife Elsa the cool international journalist, his daughter the typical teenaged rebel wannabe, and the dumpy, dirty, common, but irresistibly attractive Italia, whom he meets by chance and has violent sex with on a very hot afternoon.
Of course, that act (did I mention that the sex scenes are multiple and uniformly awfully written?) is in fact an acknowledgment on his part of the sudden and deep love he feels for her, the love of his life, and he returns again and again to her horrible hole of an apartment, and then even takes her out once as a companion on a medical conference out of town (where he's too full of his own generousness and too much enjoying the forbiddenness to pay attention to anything but himself). Of course he agonizes (inexpertly) over everything - his inability to relate to people, his ability to relate to other people, his lack of love and compassion towards his wife and/or Italia, his lost interest in his work - the usual bouquet, not a single petal missing.
Then he finds out both women are pregnant; the wife has an ultrasound in a plush clinic, the love - a back-alley abortion. Which eventually kills her. Of course. But not before she has a chance to die in his hands (literally: he performs the emergency operation), just as he finally decides to acknowledge the facts he's been staring at for a long time now and to move out on the wife.
Let's check: any buttons still not pushed? Oh, OK, we'll make the entire sequence with the getaway, the fatal septicemia, the desperate surgery and the funeral coincide with the birth of his daughter.
The author is trying her best to make the several men in the book seem alive or at least different from one another, but they all turn out to be cardboard cutouts of one big, clumsy (in both physical and moral sense), blind, inconsiderate, egotistic Modern Man. It's from women that whatever strength, calmness and order that remains in the world is flowing - which is a decent and worthwhile sentiment, if only it weren't played through the equally cardboard female contingent; there's not a single character in the book who is believable, apart from the cynical undertaker appearing towards the end to help the narrator bury Italia.
Verdict: There certainly are redeeming qualities in the book, but they are few and far between: a sudden turn of phrase, a (rarely) glimpsed psychological truth. Mostly, though, it is hollow and trivial; coarse and imprecise; lumbering and unsure, despite (or because of) the predictable plot turns; and overwhelmingly, relentlessly, unimaginatively contrived. Arguably, these are all qualities that author was striving to expose, but then it could have been achieved (and to a devastating effect, if played right; oh, I would've loved to read that one) in the space of a short story. It never recovers from the paint-by-numbers set-up and the forced title ("Don't move" is the mental, or occasionally verbal, refrain thrown by the narrator at the various women at crucial times - without much logic or conviction), and the language, dense and repetitive, never straying far from the obvious choice of words, cannot save it.
They say the book has been successfully filmed, with Mazzantini writing the script herself. Good for her. The shark (in this case the life of the hero's soul - isn't that what the whole thing was supposed to be about?) is still fake.
Sorry.
This is a translation; being bilingual myself, I can easily imagine the original text having been butchered by the "traduttore tradittore". If so, my apologies to the author; told in a different cadence, this could easily have been a different story and a different experience altogether.