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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm still on Ahmed's Archaeology of Babel. Not much progress.
During the week I finished the last book in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, The Story of the Lost Child. While I had certain misgivings about the series and found it painfully slow at times, I don't regret reading them and felt quite moved by the end. I know some others here have read the full series, I'm curious what ye made of it.
A couple of years ago I developed a bit of an obsession with the JFK assassination, and picked up Gerald Posner's Case Closed, his attempt to set the story straight and debunk the assorted conspiracies about the second shooter on the grassy knoll and Oswald being a stooge for the Soviet Union or the CIA (or both). It's a massive tome at 600 pages, but I find it so absorbing that, after starting it on Wednesday, I'm already more than halfway through.
While Posner of course takes us through the forensic evidence from Dealey Plaza in exhaustive detail, he also wants to make the case for Oswald as a lone wolf, demonstrating both that he was a) the kind of person who could commit an act of savage, unprovoked violence and also b) not the sort of person any self-respecting intelligence agency would trust to run the hot tap. As such, the book is as much a character study of Oswald as it is a forensic analysis. I was familiar with the broad strokes of Oswald's biography (troubled childhood, Marines, attempted defection to the USSR, return to the US with Russian bride in tow), but Posner goes much deeper, and his portrayal is not at all flattering. I must confess that the book is confirming a lot of my biases about self-identified socialists being lazy (Oswald was both surprised and disappointed when, upon being granted permission to stay in the Soviet Union, he was put to work in a metalworking shop; he was apparently under the impression that he would be allowed to study politics and economics at his leisure), selfish (friends of Oswald's battered wife Marina took pity on her and offered to put her and her baby up; Oswald never even offered to make any kind of financial contribution, not even when he drops by for dinner) and anti-social (essentially everyone who knew him prior to the assassination describes him as rude, superior and inconsiderate; not to mention his abusive treatment of Marina, which was so bad she attempted suicide before he intervened). On some level Oswald must have been aware of what a pathetic loser he was, but rather than confronting this and trying to change, he retreated into a fantasy world (details of which furnished by the copious spy novels he read in his free time) in which he was a vastly more important and consequential individual than he really was, someone who'll be welcomed to Cuba with open arms as a fellow comrade (rather than politely turned away because he doesn't have a valid visa). I found it grimly amusing that, when he's evicted from a boarding house less than a week after moving in because his landlady can't stand his obnoxious and entitled behaviour, he immediately jumps to the conclusion that the FBI has intervened to make his life difficult. (This conspiratorial jumping at shadows ironically foreshadows that exhibited by Mark Lane, Oliver Stone et al.) And yet, for all that, it's not a completely negative portrayal of a warped, frustrated young man. Just a few weeks prior to the assassination, Oswald comes home to a surprise birthday party thrown by Marina and her friends, and he's so moved that he bursts into tears and sincerely apologises to Marina for the abuse and hardship he's subjected her to. One has to feel a little bit sorry for Oswald: it wasn't his fault his father died two months before he was born, nor that his mother could have given Norma Bates a run for her money. If a few things had gone slightly differently, he might well have made something of himself.
I found the climax of the quartet to be the darkest thing I had ever read in my life. I would describe book 1 as Greco, and by extension Ferrante, spectacularly embodying the ideal of a compassion and empathy through storytelling. In book 2, the values of the world, especially religion, get upended, setting us up for Greco having to reconstruct meaning in the next books. She basically fails, and her relationship with Nico eventually shows that she cannot even trust herself. In book 4, things fell apart to such a degree that I cannot even trust Greco's narration anymore. Harrowingly, what I took from the fourth book was that, no, we cannot, through stories, learn about others (like we can, for example, in Faulkner's Absalom) since even knowing oneself is hopeless - what is the fucking point of art if not that? And it can't do that. I didn't pick up a non-genre book for months.
I suspect my take is rather nonstandard, as is my belief that the fate of the doll from book 1 is completely ambiguous and a crucial part of the themes I proposed above. What I understand to be a lack of ambiguity in the TV show regarding this is why I refuse to watch the show.
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It is more literary than strictly biographical, but you might enjoy Libra by DeLillo. It gets a little conspiratorial but is more about trying to make sense of Oswald's different personality facets. I've recommended it to several people who were shocked at how good it was and how little discussion it gets (I think it's leagues better than other DeLillo books I've read).
I was about to say that I was painfully underwhelmed by White Noise, but if it's significantly better than that I might check it out. I've heard a rumour that a film adaptation was in the works until Oliver Stone torpedoed it, though Stone denies this.
I had the same reaction to White Noise. Upon reading Libra, my thought was, "why the fuck does White Noise get so much attention when this one exists?"
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