Thoughts on two (or five) books and a general update

Cesare Pavese, The Selected Works of Cesare Pavese (translated by R. W. Flint)

Sometimes the internet is good. I was looking for recommendations for books set in or around Turin when a thread on Reddit directed me to the works of Cesare Pavese. I’ll admit to not knowing much about Pavese before cracking into this anthology of four of his novels published by NYRB Classics. Translator R. W. Flint contributes an introduction here that’s also a neat summary of how Pavese’s life and work overlapped with 20th century Italian politics. 

Each of the four works collected here — The Beach, The House on the Hill, Among Women Only, and The Devil in the Hills — is terrific. Flint refers to The House on the Hill as Pavese’s “masterpiece,” an observation I can only second. In all of these novels, Pavese demonstrates a precise attention to social hierarchies and details; it wouldn’t be entirely accurate to say “imagine an Italian anti-fascist version of Edith Wharton,” but if you enjoy Wharton (or the fiction of Pavese’s peer and friend Natalia Ginzburg), you’ll find much to savor here.

The House on the Hill, though — god, what a book. When the novel opens, the narrator is doing his best to remain alive and unobtrusive during the Second World War. Over the course of the novel, we see his close-knit social circle come undone, as the narrator and his friends’ attempted resistance to the fascism around them becomes harder to maintain and their safety becomes increasingly risky. Pavese’s attention to social dynamics makes the early parts of the novel feel comfortable; the way in which he tears away that comfort and shows a precarious society disintegrating is nothing short of stunning. 

Dennis Potter, Blackeyes

Most of my knowledge of Dennis Potter’s work came from his status as a broadcast television innovator, the man behind works like The Singing Detective and Pennies From Heaven. I’ll admit that I hadn’t realized that he had made forays into fiction as well until I was browsing the shelves at Black Spring Books one night and saw a couple of Potter’s novels for sale.

Blackeyes is a thoroughly heady work, about a young woman whose writer uncle Kingsley draws on her life for the story of the title character, a gorgeous model. It’s a short novel — the copy I have is 184 pages — and much of the book operates in a haze where what is fact and what is fiction is not entirely clear.  This becomes especially relevant when Blackeyes turns up dead. Are we in a situation where a fiction character has crossed over into the real world? Has Jessica’s perception of reality become distorted? Has Kingsley’s?

That’s an intriguing premise all its own, but Potter is after something else as well. In the opening sentence, he informs the reader that “[t]he lovely Jessica” has “murder in her heart.” There’s a reason that he leads with that information; much of Blackeyes can be described as the slow revelation of why Jessica bears such rage within her. It’s a thoroughly bleak novel, and one that may leave readers with a sense of wanting to leave the room burning behind them.

What I’ve Been Up To

I’m currently looking over page proofs for my book on the Ben Wheatley-directed film Kill List, due out at year’s end from Bloomsbury Academic. Friends, I’m going to be talking about this a lot more as we advance into the second half of the year.

At Reactor, I looked back on the early-90s miniseries Wild Palms, which was a lot of fun to research and write. (It’s also a shame that there is no legal way to stream it as of this writing.) I also reviewed Maile Chapman’s excellent novel The Spoil and discussed six May books in translation; the latter of those was for Words Without Borders. And at Zona Motel, I interviewed Aoife Josie Clements about her excellent novel Persona and her work in music and film.

And in podcast news, there’s a new episode of Framed & Bound out in the world; this time, Arianna Reiche and I talked about 84 Charing Cross Road.