![]() Of the intervening years, we have learned that she married and abruptly divorced a kale-loving man, a classmate in her grad-school cohort, whom she describes as “nice” and “ever so understanding.” She is mocking him. Toward the middle of the book, some fourteen years after this Italian vacation, the same disparity crops up once more-but here it’s the narrator who internalizes it. It’s the vast disparity, the deep conflict, between Artemisia’s desire for absolute narrative control and her desire for sexual submission. But, instead of fear, it was appreciation and relief that overwhelmed her: appreciation because he had restored to their relationship the power hierarchy that she preferred, relief because she had been “released from control.” This is a startling opening scene, but what startles most is not, as one might expect, the husband’s display of brutality. The word she does use is “violence.” Her husband showed her his strength, pushing her against the wall, one hand on her shoulder, one on her neck. The story’s dénouement may or may not warrant the label of rape. The narrator, mesmerized by the older woman’s poise, the conviction of her self-knowledge, listens but barely speaks.Īrtemisia’s story is about power: who has it and why, how it animates and shapes desire. Prompted by a bottle of wine, a pack of cigarettes, and the narrator’s talk of a recent breakup, she is soon recounting the events that hastened the collapse of an earlier marriage. One evening, after the children are asleep, their mother, Artemisia, a formidable psychoanalyst who was born in Argentina, joins the narrator on the hotel terrace. ![]() The unnamed narrator, twenty-one and set to begin graduate coursework in the fall, has been brought along on a wealthy friend’s family vacation. ![]() Miranda Popkey’s début novel, “ Topics of Conversation,” opens in Italy, in 2000. Miranda Popkey’s protagonist reckons with “the folly of governing narratives.” Photograph by Elena Seibert ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |