The pact with the reader differs from the pact of the conventional novel. As a general rule, the limits of the narrative strategy that is conventionally called autofiction are known. Knausgård will be its greatest exponent. As a rule, it leads to many disasters, making it easier for others to get into themselves, without leaving the reader the possibility of participating in the dialogic relationship: instead, they are only recipients. Once the limits are known, there are always ways to do good and ways to do harm. From the first few pages, it’s clear that Salem Levy does it right.
Better not to say it composes an organic narrative, which also includes the progress – artificial or not – of the narrative itself. While writing, the author comments on what she writes. In a narrative that seemed, a prioriUsing the past perfect tense, the calibrated, the author weighs the current relationships in the plot, which make up an organic whole, in a book that offers a panoramic view of several relationships. At its core is harassment by a stepfather; From there come the subsequent considerations – whether it is better to tell it or not –, the doubts, the sharing, the consequences. One of the most relevant points will be the moment in which the narrator – and from now on we will always use the word narrator, as romance –, 30 years old, in conversation with a boyfriend who is decades older, tells him the story of the harassment. The response is almost glacial, the discomfort is embarrassing for those who read it, the phrase tastes like a masculine pact: men do not like to know these things. Throughout the entire narrative, the reader has access, based on his life experience, to the way in which a scalpel that cuts empathy, devalues it or kicks it seems to be outlined over decades. aside, what belongs to it. only to the female body. We have doubts, for example, about the case of Virginia Wolf:
Is it so common that men like to lie on bodies weakened by pain?
That Virginia spoke about this in the 1930s, I never tire of repeating, is something extraordinary. That it has barely been heard during the decades that have passed is our world.” (p. 38)
Considering doubt has an impact, but it doesn’t even leave room to invent answers. In the end, Better not to say It was published at a time when a scandal broke out in France and around the world: Dominique Pelicot drugged his wife and invited a hundred men to rape her. Once the invitation was made, they accepted and carried out the violations. Doubt soon dies, both in the examples given throughout the book and in what we see in life.
Qualification: “Better not tell it”
Author: Tatiana Salem Levy
Editor: Elsinore
Pages: 224
Harassment by the narrator’s stepfather ends up being the axis that allows romance, but does not constitute it. It is necessary for the concatenation of the elements, but—and in this the author shines—it allows a panoramic view of family and romantic relationships. In most of the examples in which this narrative strategy is seen, a sinking into oneself occurs, with a formulaic composition that transforms the dialogic relationship into a board game, confusing the writer with the character and transforming the reading game. in the attempt to separate truth from invention. This implies that literature, as a general rule, is thought of as an autonomous place, resulting in a reductionist result, since the autobiographical impulse does nothing but limit the space of literature’s potential. And, starting from the exhibition of intimacy, the autofictional novel tends to become extimacy. However, in this case, the common thread introduces external elements into the composition of the self, which means that it does not matter whether what is there is real or not, and the novel can be read without this commitment. And that is why the following excerpt is illuminating:
Little by little I began to understand that I never identified with this question, because when I write it is not about exposing the facts of a life. I never feel like I’m revealing myself to others. Writing is very different from telling a friend a secret. I never, even when I exposed myself, felt like I was exposing myself. (…) Writing is not gossip. Not even simply telling what happened.” (p. 60)
The prose is skillful and, starting from an axis that makes the novel possible, Salem Levy makes a kind of review of a life, in a constellation of relationships, intertwining them. In clean, often cutting prose (which comes to mind: “When I think about that time, I feel a certain relief at not living in it anymore,” p. 22), he uses “an autobiographical first person, in a tone very low voice, almost a whisper, assuming it is me, the narrator is the character and the character is the author” (p. 50). In this, considerations about literature also arise, which not only focus on the idea that there is a minor literature linked to a sex (which exists in a relationship of alterity as literature seen as literature per se, devoid of inherently feminine subjects/experiences). , as if they were niches and not part of what is conventionally called “human condition”), but they also advocate the relevance of writing “in a personal way.”
The more I read women’s stories, the more sense I see in writing personally. What we experience in private, thinking that it happens only to us, and because of us, has been happening for many millennia, if not to all of us, to almost all of us. So, when we decide to show others what we write, our diaries, our letters, our first-person narratives are not considered literature, or they are minor literature. But nothing speaks more about who we are and who we have collectively become than the stories of our lives.” (p. 39)
The narrative is interrupted by fragments from the diary of the narrator’s mother, who died without knowing the secret that her daughter was hiding, a secret that, for years, was “image, secret, nightmare, silence, repetition, ghost, guilt” (p. 81) . These parts, chosen with a scalpel and almost always about small courtships, provide a comic relief to the narrative and allow the presence, and then with his own voice, of the character who triggers the existence of the book.
The author writes according to the old spelling.
Source: Observadora
