theholyinnocent | that awful mess on the bookshelf

Usually you see me crowing about my reading triumphs, such as they are: I finished Middlemarch! I read three--count 'em, three!--books by Patrick Leigh Fermor with lots and lots of big words in them! But when have I written about the books that have defeated me?

Perhaps it's silly, but I do feel defeated when I can't finish something. Sitting in shame upon my shelf, unfinished, is Don Quixote. Apparently I can take only so much wacky picaresque Spanish fun. Then there's the Leni Riefenstahl autobiography, which is another kind of wacky fun altogether--that of the self-delusional kind. (I don't even think I made past page 30 of the Riefenstahl book.)

My latest defeat was an post-World War II Italian novel, That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana. On first glance, it seemed right up my alley: It's Italian, it's about murder, it's grim, it's fabulous, it sounds as if it's written by a dude who is the Italian equivalent of Nabokov. "Baroque wordplay," the book blurb says. Well, I careened through all the baroque wordplay like a pinball, battered against classical allusions, Mussolini puns, and serpentine lines of ancient Greek that required the help of my spouse:

Me: Honey, what does this here line o' Greek mean? [insert banjo music]

Her: You know that one...it's from Heraclitus, you know, "no one ever steps in the same river twice," blah blah blah.

(Actually, she did say the whole line, I'm just too lazy to write it here.)

So I plow on, grimly determined to finish, not enjoying it at all, and I hit this passage, where the main character, a detective named Ingravallo, indulges in some musings about the opposite sex:

The female personality...what did it all mean?...Typically gravity-centered on the ovaries...the woman's personality turns for affective coagulations and condensations to the husband or whoever functions in his place, and from the lips of the idol take the daily oracle of the understood admonition....

And I was done. To quote Heraclitus, "blah blah blah." (My translation.)

The plot involves the murder of a woman who could not bear children, and was so desperate for a child that she tended to "adopt" young women (yes, lesbo undercurrents, but not developed or explored--oh, what the hell, I didn't really finish the book, so I don't know. I'm just going by Calvino's foreword). So there is a lot of blather about women and how necessary childbirth is to their fulfillment. Yawn. I accept that having children means a lot to many, many women, but not when this truth is reduced to the be-all and end-all of a woman's existence, to a lot of pseudo-psychological misogyny, and when the character in question is not written with any real empathy, depth, or understanding. (Not that the other characters are written with a great deal of empathy either.)

So in order to hopscotch to the end, I started to read only the first sentence of each paragraph and nothing more. (A trick proposed by the missus, which made me realize this is how she gets through all those goddamn big boring books!) It kind of made sense that way. I found out what happened to the stolen jewels, at least. But as for who murdered the woman?

You never find out.