Thursday, June 05, 2008
A "Briefly Noted" gem
The New Yorker has a regular page toward the back of the magazine that contains short little reviews of books that for whatever reason do not rate a full-fledged essay. The section, "Briefly Noted," is a source of comedy gold. From the June 9 & 16, 2008 issue:
The Lost Daughter, by Elena Ferrante.
In this brutally frank novel of maternal ambivalence, the narrator, a forty-seven-year-old divorcee summering alone on the Ionian coast, becomes obsessed with a beautiful young mother who seems ill at ease with her husband's rowdy, slightly menacing Neopolitan clan. When this woman's daughter loses her doll, the older woman commits a small crime that she can't explain even to herself. Although much of the drama takes place in her head, Ferrante's gift for psychological horror renders it immediate and visceral, as when the narrator recalls the "animal opacity" with which she first longed for a child, before she was devoured by pregnancy.
Call me a Philistine, but I'd rather listen to the collected sermons of Jeremiah Wright than read that book. I'm reluctant to judge anything based on a paragraph in The New Yorker, but, well, sheesh.
2 Comments:
By 
, at
Fri Jun 06, 05:49:00 PM:
In recently looking at a group of newly published books on a number of inane topics, my reaction was,"why did someone waste time writing THAT?"
By 
Assistant Village Idiot, at
Sat Jun 07, 09:52:00 PM:
The exact quote "animal opacity" reinforces that your intuition is correct, TH.
