Hand me a febrile Italian novel, stat
Assorted postpartum readings
In a reversal of my typical reading preferences, I can only read fiction right now. My brain seems to lack the will and processing power to consume knowledge or facts. Instead, I have a craving for the lives of others. I have a special appetite for Italian fiction written by women. I finished the massive, intense Lies and Sorcery, by Elsa Morante, a few days after Lucinda’s arrival, and now I’m on to the lighter but still extremely excellent Natalia Ginzburg (starting with Happiness, As Such and then The Dry Heart). I might even re-read some Ferrante.
There’s something about the feverish emotional states and wittiness of Italian novels that calls to me right now. If I had to hazard a guess, the heady interpersonal drama of these novels feels satiating, small as my life and world have become.
Since reading Foster, Guion has also been on a Claire Keegan kick, and I read her incredible novella Small Things Like These in an afternoon. She has a very different vibe than these febrile Italians; Keegan’s Irish folk are plain and virtuous, striving for a good life in the midst of hardships. Reading the novella was like a breath of fresh air, a moral reset, after being steeped in the hysteria and generational dysfunction of Morante’s characters.
Keegan gives us people who are actually trying to be good, within the confines of their simple lives, and the stories can’t help but be heartwarming. This particular story was especially weighty, given the subject matter (and, perhaps, my postpartum condition), but I recommend it heartily.
I wish I liked reading on a Kindle more, because it would make the long hours of nursing and reading more compatible, being able to hold a small device with one hand while the other is engaged with the baby. My brain, alas, isn’t well engineered to process stories on the Kindle. I’m not sure why, but I never remember what I read on a Kindle. The stories pass through me like smoke. So, instead, I am looking for paperback editions of novels that I can hold easily (finishing the 800-page Lies and Sorcery was no easy feat, and I think I developed a slight hand cramp). Send recommendations.
The weather has been very spring-like. It seems like we just won’t do winter anymore. The balmy days make me feel lighter. The birds are calling out to each other; the bulbs are coming up; I can sit on the back deck and nurse my baby without a sweater.
We’re adapting to life with another family member, and Guion has been a heroic single parent to the boys. Although I am perhaps more tired, I think he arguably has the harder job. I just have to be an on-call milk bar who reads and changes diapers, but he has to chase the dudes around and keep them occupied, which he has been doing with great skill and patience.
Having a baby has made me realize how little Moses and Felix are as well. I was inclined to think of them increasingly as “big boys,” but adding Lucy to the mix has made me realize, Oh, right, we have three very young children. They all need a lot from us right now. It’s a sweet and intense phase of life, and we are very grateful.
“I start from the conviction that many of the most important things we know are things we know before we can speak them; indeed, we know them—though with very little in the way of concepts to make them intelligible to us—even as children, and see them with the greatest immediacy when we look at them with the eyes of innocence. But, as they are hard to say, and as they are often so immediate to us that we cannot stand back from them objectively, we tend to put them out of mind as we grow older, and make ourselves oblivious to them, and try to silence the voice of knowledge that speaks within our own experiences of the world. Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience; it is the ability to see again what most of us have forgotten how to see, but now fortified by the ability to translate some of that vision into words, however inadequate. There is a point, that is to say, where reason and revelation are one and the same.”
— David Bentley Hart, “The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss”