What Does The Chanel Kabuki Brush Do

black slug, snail red

Antonia Susan Byatt

, A woman who calls [2002], Torino, Einaudi, 2006, € 12

whistles Why a woman? As a sign of recognition designed for the afterlife? To recall, beyond a shelf in a supermarket aisles traveled by people already died without knowing it? A woman whistling and a clucking hen / - says the man - not like neither to God nor to me , as stated in the first reference in exergue of the novel. A woman sometimes whistles because it is not appropriate, because only men whistle, and then blows his whistle because he wants to be free. The whistle of women, as demand for freedom, but also as a punishment for freedom claimed, circumscribes the boundaries of the book: Just whistle more. stronger, he will say in conclusion Luk Lysgaard Frederica Potter (the figure that, without this being the main character, knot the threads of the novel) when that admit their doubts to enter working in a male world, and the novel opens with the tale of a Tolkien story, focusing on whistling, winged female creatures, lost in the icy shores because of the danger of looking wind and snow and darkness , executed by confinement in the city men, they were driven out as evil and filthy , and whose voice has become a whistle understand that nobody knows. And story-telling, metaracconto, virtuosic narrative montages (although sometimes frown fragmentation makes the reader even more patient), mirrors and reflections are the key to this novel ends, ends?, Tetralogy ( The virgin in the garden , Still Life, Babel Tower ) that covers the life of Frederica fifties at the end of the sixties, as a reflection of socio-cultural modern England. The year 1968 is the year of the apocalypse and the birth of the new world (and that January 1970 that only occurrence, headline the final chapter, opens a new decade). A great choral novel, in which, on the spindle of Frederica, its fragility and its growing human and cultural events are wrapped multiple personalities (not all of them succeeded, you can tell, and, worse, not all elements). Those few months in which the clot thickens forms of thought and scientific concepts; as typical of the work of Byatt, in fact, the system of concentric narrative novel, streak chemistry, ethology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, genetics, mathematics, neuroscience, zoology, biology, the great debates of the time, tied to each other.

fulcrum of the novel, in a sense, is the body and mind conference held at the University of North Yorkshire, in confronting scholars of every discipline: hence radiating connections with characters, episodes, themes of the work (connections at times perhaps too uncomfortably explicit): the thesis on "male redundant" loser Darwinian selection, related to the discovery of female Frederica and the other, their transgression of single mothers who rebuild their lives and sneak into areas masculine animal studies asexual and hermaphroditic sexuality to discover a free and independent; theories of neuronal synapses fatigue of human beings to remember, the Fibonacci spiral phyllotaxis to identity, studies of meiosis and the suffering of their brothers, identical twins-and Ottokar opposed to the theory of syzygies of the Gnostic Manichean; formalized rituals the courtship dance of Sula nebouxi ethology of survival in suffering love, which the mathematical languages aphasia affective science. In short, we need a map provided to start reading. But exactly when and next to the Congress develops un'Antiuniversità, a radical contestation of culture and forms of knowledge sedimented, whose lessons of counter-culture and whose troubles are bound to explode in violent form in a fire (cathartic ?) that has all the energy and violence of a world that is regenerated or perhaps die. An apocalyptic conflagration of hatred that leads to fatal fire which consumes the degeneration of a group of psychiatric therapy in a Manichean sect (again, body and mind, matter and light bleeding). Two different packages in a micro, in turn reflected - the macrocosm / microcosm, and you'd almost wonder what is the one to which the other - in studies on two species of snails, the ' arion ater autofecondante, clones meek, el' Arion rufus , hermaphrodite and cannibal in search of sexual dominance.

The relationship between sex and reason, between science and life, is the painful backdrop on which the characters move in a world where, as Wittgenstein and Gödel, the mathematician paradise of perfect forms is demoted to a marsh, a swamp full of wisps philosophical. So the studies on the chemistry of memories are bound inextricably to the reemergence of an old nightmare of carnage and blood never removed, the terror of a light of love is fragile, a gnostic Without Sofia, abortion expelled from the Pleroma, which is fear, pain, perplexity, imploring . Because research which investigates the man himself is confusion and mystery. And in the relationship between reason and faith we will have the Darwinian scientist, the kierkergaardiano hardened and unbelieving, the Jungian mystic visionary.

Science and culture seem to know no longer contain the collapse. Students whose application is Use the cock and pussy not the brain, and fungi have not Shakespeare, or at least to finalize the design of jewelry. The same BBC program "Through the Looking Glass (by which Frederica-Alice becomes a national star), meta-television broadcasting at a time when television becomes the new form of reproduction, and image of the world and the same thought, not just the place which retrieves the major themes of a changing society, and questions about herself, but also a talk-shaw culturaleggiante and worldly, with great intellectuals ready to discuss either of tupperware and Freud and abortion. Lively hypostasis of a dismembered thought, popularized, apparently made (and rejected by any of the characters), but also effective, relevant, suited to the new world of disorder and crisis.

On this stretch the world's cultural and social satire el'invettiva Byatt - to affect most Wijnnobel Eva, the wife of the rector, and his arrogant and psychotic cialtroneria astrologizzante - and condemnation of fanaticism irrational with rage at the "anti-anti-being" dell'antiuniversità, and dismayed with pity for Josh Lamb, psychotic, delusional, a family tragedy behind him, which inexorably sinking into madness, paranoid and in a religious system, has some of the darkest pages of the novel and beautiful.

A novel is a kind of summa scientific, restless and curious, ready to absorb and experiment, but also that it is a bulwark against all forms of irrationality and fideism rampant, almost desire to rebuild that shattered the Gnostic Pleroma human suffering and the triumph of darkness. An ambitious, perhaps too much, not irritating or pretentious emptiness, of course not, but every now suspect that the overall aesthetic result does not withstand all the massive scientific, and the danger of falling, rather than in the Rector's Theory of Everything Wijnnobel, in the treatise de omni re scibili et quibusdam aliis on which Voltaire quipped, those remain.