Gotham Diary:
Unwise Rave
22 May 2014
In the one mordantly funny story in The Other Language, Francesca Marciano’s superb new collection, the unnamed protagonist of “The Italian System” takes the subway from her flat in Brooklyn to her job in midtown, getting off at “the Q train at Lexington Avenue.” This must be a mistake, I thought; the Q train comes to an end by Carnegie Hall, at 57th and 7th. Eventually, it will run up to 96th Street and Second Avenue, and I shall be able to take it to Carnegie Hall, but that’s still a few years away. Might Marciano be casting her gaze into the future? A little research confirmed what I began to suspect: the Q train has already been pushed around the previously unused corner of track that connects the Broadway line to the relatively newish line that runs deep under East 63rd and beyond, with stops at Roosevelt Island and in Astoria, Queens. When the Second Avenue subway goes operational, the Q will turn left just beyond the Lexington Avenue station to follow its new route through the Upper East Side and Yorkville.
You learn something every day, and I suppose it’s especially likely that you’ll learn something from a Roman who writes fluently in English, and who appears to have spent time not only in New York but also in India and Kenya.
Only three of the nine stories in The Other Language take place entirely in Italy, and two of them have multiple settings. (The richly ironic “Roman Romance” alone is confined to Rome.) Nor is the unity of time shown much respect. The passage of years — decades — is not uncommon, and it invariably conveys a sense of novelistic expanse: I thought of Dr Zhivago (the movie; I’ve never read the book) more than once. I also thought of O Henry, which I probably ought not to say, since I do admire and recommend The Other Language. Marciano delivers enormous satisfactions. That’s why I should discourage anyone from reading more than one of these stories at a time.
With the exception of “An Indian Soirée,” which is the portrait of a discontented couple, Marciano’s tales are centered on women, and most of her women are wanderers, both geographically and linguistically. The professor in “Big Island, Small Island” has retained her home base in Italy, but as her wandering has hitherto taken the form of traveling to and from distant conferences, all of which are the same, she makes an impulsive decision to visit an old flame who has retired, in more ways than one, to the Spice Islands. The girl in “The Italian System” experiences a homesickness so colorful that she is able to make a salable book out it; only at the end does she discover that her picture of Italy is a delusion that she would never have fallen into had she stayed home. (Indeed, her “Italy” is the fantasy island that tourists flock to see.) The widow of a Goan doctor who practiced in Mombasa (in “The Club”) turns out to have been a pale girl from Glasgow; she has not gone back to her native isle since leaving it with her husband, and she has no regrets about that.
In “Quantum Theory,” however, Sonia, having grown up in Kenya, then married an Italian and lived in Italy, finds herself unhappy in New York, where her husband’s cancer is getting the special treatment it requires. Sonia was desperate to leave her unsophisticated homeland, but now, and not for the first time, she doubts the wisdom of her decision; and this longing for an alternative past is embodied in the handsome frame of an unnamed man who reappears not once but twice in her later life. This alternative past, which also figures in the title story and, highly muted, in “Chanel,” is the more erotic life that the heroine rejected or resolved not to pursue when, as a youth, she set out to make something of herself. (In “Roman Romance,” she was dumped.) To speak of “mid-life crisis,” however, only underscores the sharp difference between men, who tend to daydream passively and rather vaguely, as the husband in “An Indian Soirée” does, and women, who don’t so much know what they’re missing as experience it precisely and viscerally.
Men appear as desirable, but usually loutish, others, and never as soul-mates. Even the louts — especially the louts — are charmers. Friends can be less than helpful. “The Presence of Men,” in which the only romantic figure is an ex-husband, abounds in both men and friends, but the moral of the story is that we each have to find our own way — or, better, that we are each always in the middle of trying to find our own way. Nobody else can make you happy; only you can do that. Marciano is neither cynical nor moralistic about this, but it is clear that most of her women have experienced a certain shock, in learning that knights in shining armor are just guys underneath.
Also recurring in most stories is the conundrum faced by attractive, educated women when they shop in today’s Supermarket of Life, with its countless menu opportunities that mock the unhappy fact that there is only one meal to plan.
As to the language: something rather devilish just occurred to me. For a writer in a second language, Marciano is unusually informal, but for all the risk entailed in freestyle writing, she never slips. And yet her sensibility is not at all American. One might say that she has turned the old language student’s vice on its head, by learning to speak Italian using English words. Here is the professor, considering her old friend’s life in the middle of nowhere:
Fifteen years of never eating fresh vegetables, but only rice, chapatis and fried fish in coconut oil have modified his shape, the texture of his skin, the molecules of his inner organs. Fifteen years of not having access to decent books, but just airport paperbacks snatched from the few foreign visitors, must have starved his mind, shrunk his intellect. Fifteen years of not speaking his mother language, forgetting its poetry, its songs, its sonorities and rhythms. And how about going to prayer five times a day, kneeling on a mat, his forehead touching the ground? In which way might that strict discipline transform an agnostic, a free spirit, a biker with long curls? (105)
Although not the literal translation of an Italian text, it is obviously the translation of an Italian’s mind. I can think of only one other writer who has managed to do this, and she — also a woman — was born and grew up in New Jersey. She lives in Venice now, and writes about a police detective: Donna Leon. I probably ought not to have said that, either.