Abandonment

It’s been ages since I’ve written anything here. I’ve been wanting to write about two recent books I read, but I’m stuck on how to get started or what to say. Both books deal with abandonment, in a sense, but the protagonists in these novels react in totally opposite ways.

The first book is easier to describe. Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante tells the story of a woman, Olga, whose husband leaves her and their two children to start a life with a new, much younger woman. My book club friends described this book as the story of a nervous breakdown. They found it realistic and empathized with Olga’s pain. While I sympathized with her predicament, I thought her overwhelming anger and neglect of her children was over-the-top self indulgent. Even when she finally comes to terms with the abandonment and starts to emerge as a stronger woman, she still seems to think only of herself. My friends insist that her lack of interest in her children and her self absorption is a cultural issue (the author is Italian), but I’m not sure I totally buy that. I do agree that the book is well written. Ferrante conveys raw searing pain as well as anyone.

My second book (actually I had started this one first, put it aside to read Days of Abandonment, and then returned to it) is To Know a Woman by Amos Oz. The protagonist in this story, Yoel, is an Israeli secret service agent whose life has been devoted to careful, controlled analysis of political intrigues. When his wife dies suddenly, he abruptly gives up his career and spends the next year or so trying to decipher the mystery of his life (How did his wife really die? What is the real problem with their teenaged daughter?) in the same way he would have solved other mysteries: by careful observation and the ability to connect the dots.

Whereas Olga’s emotions are all on the surface and she is constantly acting out in the most public and self-destructive ways, Yoel’s emotions rarely bubble up to be expressed in any direct way. He’s a man who has been trained well to not give anything away. He achieves some sort of breakthrough (as did Olga), but even this is much more subtle.

There are two recurring images in To Know a Woman that I don’t think I’ve fully figured out. The first, and most obvious, is introduced on page 1: a figurine of a feline predator in the midst of a “spectacular leap,”on a shelf in the house he rents, where he will live with his daughter, mother, and mother-in-law. Yoel wonders if the carving is the work of an amateur or a skilled artist.

“Something or other was awry, obtrusive; either too finished, as it were, or not finished enough. What it was, Yoel could not discover. His eyes ached. Again he nursed the suspicion that this was the work of an amateur. But where was the defect? A faint, physical anger stirred inside him, with a certain momentary urge to stretch up on the tips of his toes.

Yoel finds himself extremely agitated by the figurine, which “seems to be flouting the laws of gravity,” as its weight appears greater than that of the small steel base to which it is attached by some mysterious mechanism.

“Finally, in a vague rage – Yoel was angry even at the fury that was stirring within him, because he liked to see himself as a calm, self-contained man – he took hold of the animal by the neck and endeavored, not by force, to break the spell and release the magnificent beast from the torment of the mysterious grip. Perhaps then the invisible flaw would also vanish.”

Throughout the book Yoel obsesses over the question of how the figurine is attached to the base and why it doesn’t topple over. Finally, after his year of soul-searching, he asks a young man who is courting his daughter for an explanation. The man responds,

“You’re asking the wrong question. The laws of mechanics. Instead of asking how come it doesn’t fall over, we should simply take note: if it doesn’t fall over, that proves the center of gravity is over the base. That’s all.”

When the man asks, “Why is it important to you to know,” Yoel replies, “Actually it doesn’t make much difference. Forget it. It’s not worth breaking it just to find out how it’s held together.”

This seems an obvious metaphor for his obsession about solving the other mysteries of his life; however, given that there is so little in this book that is really obvious, I suspect that there is much more to this symbol. The second image is of Yoel’s big ugly hands. This one is much more perplexing. Why does he have big ugly hands? There is nothing to indicate that Yoel himself I ugly, and we know that his wife was supposed to be beautiful. In his retirement, he becomes something of a handyman, wandering around his house with an electric drill in hand, searching for something to fix; and working tirelessly in his garden. Does this have anything to do with his ugly hands?

I found To Know a Woman completely compelling although it moves somewhat slowly and methodically. There is a richness to it that is often missing in contemporary novels, much of which I did not completely understand. Oz leaves much to the reader’s imagination, which some people might find annoying. But I like the way a book like this forces you to think and develop your own ideas.

Forgetting is what makes us smart

Continuing my efforts to learn more about memory and memory impairments, I just finished The Forgetting by David Shenk. Shenk explores the early, middle, and late stages of Alzheimer’s disease, drawing from history, literature, science, politics, and the personal experiences of people with AD and their caregivers.

Shenk is an excellent reporter as well as skilled writer. Take this description of the brain:

“A coconut-sized clump of grooved gelatinous flesh; an intricate network of prewired and self-adapting mechanisms perfected over more than a billion years of natural selection; powered by dual chemical and electrical systems, a machine as vulnerable as it is complex, designed to sacrifice durability for maximal function, to burn brightly – a human brain is 2 percent of the body’s weight but requires 20 percent of its energy consumption – at the cost of impermanence.”

Shenk weaves into his narrative the stories of many famous and not-so-famous people who have been victimized by AD, and through their stories he paints a vivid if disturbing picture of the relentless course of the neurodegeneration they experience. Among the famous people: Ralph Waldo Emerson, the father of American Transcendentalism; the abstract impressionist painter Willem de Kooning; Jonathan Swift; and Ronald Reagan. De Kooning’s story is particularly interesting. As the disease progressed and his memory declined, his paintings changed, becoming, according to Shenk, “happier, far less angst-ridden.” Shenk goes so far as to suggest that Alzheimer’s disease may have enhanced de Kooning’s art by robbing him of cognitive abilities but leaving his ability to process emotions intact.

“From this vantage, it almost seems as though de Kooning contracted just the right disease, the one neurological disorder that would spare his ability to create as it ate away at most of the rest of his abilities.”

Shenk discusses one of the paradoxes of aging that is too often ignored; that is, that by extending longevity, medical science has altered the “law of mortality,” extending life beyond its own innate limits and allowing illnesses such as AD to reach epidemic proportions. In times past, AD was virtually invisible because so few people lived long enough to develop it. Moreover, he argues that defeating AD would bring with it the danger that we would “lose sight of the disease’s essential humanity.”

“To be human as we know it today is to experience the cycles of life, to experience great loss and pain – not just the pain of tragedy but the pain of inevitability. The essential joy of life is embedded in our mortality, and in our forgetting"

I can't say I necessarily agree with Shenk's somewhat romanticized view of a horrible disease, but his perspective certainly gave me something to think about.