Last week I submitted a review to the Brooklyn Rail of Magdalena Tulli's latest novel. I began to prepare by reading her first book, Dreams and Stones , and thought it was wonderful. Then I went straight to Flaw, the one I was reviewing. And I was about to start writing when I thought I'd try to digest Moving Parts, the second of the three that have been translated to English and brought out by Archipelago Books. I read about half of it, then wrote the review.
Today, waking in the second day of a nasty cold, I picked up Moving Parts from my bedside and finished reading. It's so much colder than the others. I thought of Barthes, "with the birth of the reader comes the death of the author," and decided that this book's intention is to engage the reader in the process of killing the Author!
The narrator can't be trusted, is constantly distracted and overwhelmed, or thrown into situations beyond his means, and the author, described as strung out and laconic, is "self-assured in his authority" but "hopelessly misinformed." Thus, the reader is commissioned to arbitrate the story. It's a sad and violent book, and though it attempts to weave myriad settings in time and place, as Tulli's other books achieve with great skill, the note of futility it ends on does not ring further than the covers of this volume. "Against darkness and inertia no one has ever yet prevailed," is the last line. It's defeatist!
I'm glad to have written a good review, and perhaps relieved that I didn't get through this one until afterwards. It's great to read an author's books all at once, but impossible to understand what they're up to as quickly. These things take time. Given that it's better to read a book than to not read a book, this has me thinking nonetheless of Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (which I did not read but is reviewed in this month's BOOKFORUM ), and the potential virtues therein.
