Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay.1

A fascinating and depressing portrait, the third of four books in the series. The narrator is lost; her kids figure barely at all.

It’s an interesting look at status and politics-as-status from the inside:

Today it’s hard to explain why I insisted on writing that stuff or, rather, why, although I scarcely took part in the city’s political life, and in spite of my meekness, I felt increasingly drawn to extreme positions.

[…]

Or out of the vivid knowledge of poverty, which I felt an obligation not to forget; I wanted to be on the side of those who remained downtrodden and were fighting to turn everything upside down. Or because everyday politics, the demands that I myself had scrupulously written about, didn’t matter to me, I wished that something great—I had used and often did use that formulation—would break out, which I could experience, and report on.2

✦

I looked at my notes again. I was absolutely convinced that I had to change course. I wanted to leave behind me what Franco had called petty love affairs and write something suited to a time of demonstrations, violent deaths, police repression, fears of a coup d’état. I couldn’t get beyond a dozen inert pages. What was missing, then?3

Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child.1

Returns to the question of the children, the final book in the series. It is a good end to a good series of books, though the feeling of mourning the characters outstrips any pleasure of narrative resolution, of which there was little.

Much interesting stuff on narrative and structure:

“You’re lying.”

I hesitated, I admitted: “I’m lying, yes, but why do you force me to give a linear explanation; linear explanations are almost always lies.”4

✦

"Don’t discourage me. In my job I have to paste one fact to another with words, and in the end everything has to seem coherent even if it’s not.”

“But if the coherence isn’t there, why pretend?”

“To create order. Remember the novel I gave you to read and you didn’t like? There I tried to set what I know about Naples within what I later learned in Pisa, Florence, Milan. Now I’ve given it to the publisher and he thought it was good. It’s being published."5

✦

I realized in a flash that the memory was already literature and that perhaps Lila was right: my book—even though it was having so much success—really was bad, and this was because it was well organized, because it was written with obsessive care, because I hadn’t been able to imitate the disjointed, unaesthetic, illogical, shapeless banality of things.6

Stephen Kotkin, Stalin, Volume II: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941.

Kotkin begins Chapter 14 by quoting Hitler, 1941:

Stalin is one of the most extraordinary figures in world history. He began as a small clerk, and he has never stopped being a clerk. Stalin owes nothing to rhetoric. He governs from his office, thanks to a bureaucracy that obeys his every nod and gesture.7

This giant history, even more than the first volume, documents the degree to which Stalin was in the weeds. He worked through endless documents, endless editing, and endless orders. He would edit screenplays to be produced and he would edit the records of supposed confessions he received from the unfaithful. Once established, his power was sustained by relentless pruning of anyone conceivably (or not) against the cause and relentless modification of everything that passed through his little corner office or through his “near dacha”, outside Moscow.

The last parts of the book focus on international affairs between Stalin and Finland and then Hitler’s Germany.

Theophrastus, Characters.8

A work by Aristotle’s successor with thirty portraits of types of people. The introduction argues that the text might more accurately have the title of “traits”, with each chapter covering some specific type of (bad?) trait. The first is ΕΙΡΩΝΕΙΑ: dissimulation, ignorance purposely affected, mock-modesty.9

Somewhere between ethics and comic sketches.