I see the sun has knocked you out. But let's not overdo it, eh. It's supposed to go up to ninety today.
Maybe I should get you some water. And while I'm at it a nice tall glass of iced tea for myself.
Oh, look at that. Butterflies. A whole swarm of them, floating like a small white cloud across the lawn. I don't think I've ever seen so many flying together like that, though it's not unusual to see them in pairs. Cabbage whites, I think. Too far to tell if there are black dots on the wings.
They should watch out for you, o eater of insects. One snap of those jaws would take out most of them. But there they go, heading right for you, as if you were no more than a giant rock lying in the grass. They shower you like confetti, and you--not a twitch!
Oh, what a sound. What could that gull have seen to make it cry out like that?
The butterflies are in the air again, moving off, in the direction of the shore.
I want to call your name, but the word dies in my throat.
Oh, my friend, my friend!
Yesterday, I quoted the start of "The Friend." This, here, is the end. A few things to notice. Remember at the start the narrator was describing survivors from Cambodia. They were so traumatized, they opted to go blind. To "turn the lights out." A world so disastrous you might will yourself to lose your own ability to see things. And here the ending seems to comment on the beginning--without using the word "Cambodia" or the word "blindness." Here the narrator is on the beach, observing beauty: "cabbage white" butterflies, the shore, the lawn. A world large enough to encompass both the Khmer Rouge and the spectacle of butterflies: That's the kind of mystery Nunez is dealing with in this book.
Something menacing is never very far away. Even the prettiness of butterflies can be alarming; the butterflies are too close to the snapping jaws of the Great Dane. Violence lurking just alongside beauty.
The passage is charged with ambivalence. We don't know if the gull's cry is an expression of anguish or joy; it's possible the narrator, also, does not know. The narrator is speaking to her Great Dane, her friend, but it also seems that she is speaking to the dead writer; the lines get blurry. The narrator wishes to call out her friend's name but can't--and yet, at the same time, that friend is the main thing that seems to occupy her inner world ("My friend, my friend!").
Nunez speculates that loss is the thing that defines us. Our grief--and our ways of responding to grief: These are the building blocks of our personality. Caring for the aging dog is a metaphor for the fraught nature of human relationships. At the end of life, the dog is so smelly, the narrator must take him to a beach house, away from her apartment building; keeping the dog home would mean provoking the wrath of neighbors. What better image for the hardships of life, the way we have to "carry" one another?
A good deal of the power of the ending comes from its restraint. You sense the narrator is just barely holding it together. Her despair is in between the lines. "Dying words," that last exclamation point, the concern for the gull: A sense of disequilibrium bleeds through. It's haunting because of the effort to make it small. (We don't generally discuss our pain "head-on.")
Elena Ferrante, like Nunez, is drawn to the beach; one of her more recent efforts is called "The Beach at Night." And you can see how the beach might enchant a writer: Nunez seems to light up every corner of the shore she examines. The dog, the gull, the butterflies, the heat: All seem to be players in a mysterious drama. I like the ending also because it feels very concrete, very tactical--whereas much of the novel has not seemed rooted to an actual place or time.
There's so much sadness in life, and this book seems to look long and hard at painful things that we might otherwise choose to ignore. And, by looking at painful things, by not denying pain, the book feels therapeutic. Which seems paradoxical. It's also a bit like "Mad Men," in the sense that multiple things often seem to happen at once. A beach scene is just a beach scene but it's also an oblique statement about life's strangeness and it's also a little comedy about hunger and predation. I'm eager to see what Nunez does next.
Maybe I should get you some water. And while I'm at it a nice tall glass of iced tea for myself.
Oh, look at that. Butterflies. A whole swarm of them, floating like a small white cloud across the lawn. I don't think I've ever seen so many flying together like that, though it's not unusual to see them in pairs. Cabbage whites, I think. Too far to tell if there are black dots on the wings.
They should watch out for you, o eater of insects. One snap of those jaws would take out most of them. But there they go, heading right for you, as if you were no more than a giant rock lying in the grass. They shower you like confetti, and you--not a twitch!
Oh, what a sound. What could that gull have seen to make it cry out like that?
The butterflies are in the air again, moving off, in the direction of the shore.
I want to call your name, but the word dies in my throat.
Oh, my friend, my friend!
Yesterday, I quoted the start of "The Friend." This, here, is the end. A few things to notice. Remember at the start the narrator was describing survivors from Cambodia. They were so traumatized, they opted to go blind. To "turn the lights out." A world so disastrous you might will yourself to lose your own ability to see things. And here the ending seems to comment on the beginning--without using the word "Cambodia" or the word "blindness." Here the narrator is on the beach, observing beauty: "cabbage white" butterflies, the shore, the lawn. A world large enough to encompass both the Khmer Rouge and the spectacle of butterflies: That's the kind of mystery Nunez is dealing with in this book.
Something menacing is never very far away. Even the prettiness of butterflies can be alarming; the butterflies are too close to the snapping jaws of the Great Dane. Violence lurking just alongside beauty.
The passage is charged with ambivalence. We don't know if the gull's cry is an expression of anguish or joy; it's possible the narrator, also, does not know. The narrator is speaking to her Great Dane, her friend, but it also seems that she is speaking to the dead writer; the lines get blurry. The narrator wishes to call out her friend's name but can't--and yet, at the same time, that friend is the main thing that seems to occupy her inner world ("My friend, my friend!").
Nunez speculates that loss is the thing that defines us. Our grief--and our ways of responding to grief: These are the building blocks of our personality. Caring for the aging dog is a metaphor for the fraught nature of human relationships. At the end of life, the dog is so smelly, the narrator must take him to a beach house, away from her apartment building; keeping the dog home would mean provoking the wrath of neighbors. What better image for the hardships of life, the way we have to "carry" one another?
A good deal of the power of the ending comes from its restraint. You sense the narrator is just barely holding it together. Her despair is in between the lines. "Dying words," that last exclamation point, the concern for the gull: A sense of disequilibrium bleeds through. It's haunting because of the effort to make it small. (We don't generally discuss our pain "head-on.")
Elena Ferrante, like Nunez, is drawn to the beach; one of her more recent efforts is called "The Beach at Night." And you can see how the beach might enchant a writer: Nunez seems to light up every corner of the shore she examines. The dog, the gull, the butterflies, the heat: All seem to be players in a mysterious drama. I like the ending also because it feels very concrete, very tactical--whereas much of the novel has not seemed rooted to an actual place or time.
There's so much sadness in life, and this book seems to look long and hard at painful things that we might otherwise choose to ignore. And, by looking at painful things, by not denying pain, the book feels therapeutic. Which seems paradoxical. It's also a bit like "Mad Men," in the sense that multiple things often seem to happen at once. A beach scene is just a beach scene but it's also an oblique statement about life's strangeness and it's also a little comedy about hunger and predation. I'm eager to see what Nunez does next.
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