In this post I'll be talking only about the first 2 of these short stories.
SPOILERS ahead because if I can't talk about the tales in their totality then I might as well give short outlines for the stories and just leave it at that.
The Wall
The first is the titular "The Wall" which over the course of a single night follows three political prisoners, Tom, Juan and Ibietta as they come to terms with their impending death by firing squad at dawn on the next day.
We are presented with an unflinching look at the misery of humanity as these characters wrestle with their fears while their weaknesses are put on full display.
In the short story we follow Ibietta who unlike his two companions, doesn't cling to life with desperate denial in the face of the unavoidable but who instead finds his salvation in nihilism, in full recognition of the futility of it all.
The climax of the tale is where he has to give up a revolutionist leader, Ramon Gris, in order to save his own life, but as his tormentors have left it too long he has become fully under the sway of nihilism, giving up on his own life and purpose. It is made clear that Ibietta would rather die than to give up Gris, not because he imbues Gris' life with any sort of meaning but only out of a sense of stubborn wilfull humanity. Thinking to have a last laugh at the expense of his tormentors and thinking that is doesn't matter either way, he gives them what he thinks is the wrong information. In the face of the final end he still gives some meaning to this one last petty act of vengeance.
When he is subsequently released he is told that Ramon Gris has been found and executed in the exact location that Ibietta had given. In a terrible moment of irony it is revealed to him that the revolutionist leader had moved from his previous location to the one Ibietta had given his captors. It is a cosmic joke punishing the one act that Ibietta still imbued with meaning, however so small.
The one act of agency that Ibietta has, that he thinks doesn't really matter, is ironically the one that DOES.
He realises that he only was released because of his stubborn denial to give up the revolutionist's location. If he had tried to preserve his life by giving up Gris' location, that one wouldn't have been at that location and Ibietta would have been executed. He laughs until tears roll down his face.
You know, at first I wasn't all that impressed with the tale but in the process of setting it down I realised how subtle it was. The first person narrative adds an extra question of whether we are actually following the thought process of an unreliable narrator who might be lying to himself but I ended up dismissing that in the end.
It's a good tale but I find I still can't say with any real assurance the reason for Ibietta's laughter. There are so many possible reasons but it's hard to deduce it from the text alone.
Possibly it's a combination of multiple; a roaring cauldron of emotions arising from: Relief at being alive, recognition of the paradox; if he had wanted to live/he wouldn't have and the one of resigning himself to death/unwittingly giving the right information/ keep on living, coming to terms with an undetermined length of life ahead while still in full acceptance of death, recognition of his culpability in Ramon Gris' death and so on.
Eh, yeah. Actually very good.
The Room
The Room
Holy shit. where do I even begin with this one?
This story disturbed me quite a bit. During the reading I had a sense of very immediate tension; a ball of it rising up from my stomach to my throat. I was glad when I could put the book down.
It's quite a reading experience.
This story is about one man's psychosis and how it infects the woman who has chosen to stand by him. We are introduced to the insanity gradually, in a roundabout way, starting in the room where the two parents are discussing their daughter and their insane son-in-law. From the insulated mother and that one's placid resentment of her husband we switch to the point of view of the father who we follow several steps closer into his daughter Eve's home and finally into the room of the title. What we have been given at this point are biased glimpses from the parents. Prejudiced opinions on a soul, who reminded me a disturbing amount of myself (or so I thought at the time). Someone who they, as outsiders, can only have a blinkered and skewed perspective on that would lead them into biased and malign opinions.
But when we finally switch to Eve's point of view and move into her husband's direct orbit, when all the mental instability and psychoses are revealed we aren't quite prepared enough for how deep the rabbit hole goes and it is quite a disturbing and bewildering experience.
Specifically in the last part, where Eve's husband's psychosis was at its height I found my tension heightened as well and just like Eve I was drawn in into her husband's delusions, almost willing them to be real.
It's obvious that several of these people are tied to their rooms. The least likeable of these, the most normal (read; not haunted by neuroses and anxiety) and sociable (and is this tied to my dislike of him?), mister Darbedat, is the one who isn't tied to any of the rooms. He is an active member of society and has little time and understanding for the three others. In Eve's opinion he spends his time worrying about looking young, but this is an outside opinion and coloured by her resentment of him. In Mister Darbedat's mind there is no lingering on the passing of his own vitality and only a sense of appreciation of what he is now. He lives in the moment.
Like daughter, like mother, because the sickly wife of mister Darbedat finds that one's vitality terrifying and monstrous. She resents his intrusion into her sickroom and when left alone solely indulges herself by reading histories (a little on the nose there, Sartre) and reminiscing. She lives in memories of better times.
Pierre is his room.
Black and morbid and shut out from mankind. It is a vehicle for his delusions and an enabler to his madness.
Eve is in turn tied to the room and the psychosis of her husband, but there was a scene where, in the process of escorting her father out of her home, she stalls in an antechamber before going back to Pierre's room. (and it really is Pierre's room, she has no identity in the room. He adresses her as someone he used to know and she finds that her possessions have been slowly subsumed by his madness.). She recognises that the antechamber is healthy but she also sees that the room is unlived in, sterile and without personality, like her. She hates Pierre's room and hates herself when she is around him, but she is tied to him by chains of past love and an intense desire to resonate with and feel Pierre's delusions and visions. She lives only for him and has cut herself off from society because of it. She recognises the madness in herself and in him for what it is but is at that point still unable to unchain herself from it and her husband. But she recognizes his impending and inevitable mental deterioration and as she implies by her last lines, she will have to take drastic steps in the coming future. These steps, the likely coming act of violence is in fact almost all she can look at. The brief memories of a time before the room are shook off almost as quickly as they come. She lives in the future.
Where the three Darbedat characters live in a recognizable moment in time, Pierre is the one who is unhinged from it. He has no ties to the outside and his room is his whole world.
He reminisces, true. But he also does more than that. He adresses Eve with another woman's surname; Agatha. With this he invokes the past and brings it squarely into the present. Eve's tacit submissal to the name enables him to mash the two times together without pause even if he secretly doesn't believe it.
Like how his past influences his present and turns it into a lie, so does his constant worrying for the future bleed into the present. Pierre lives only in constant dread of the reappearance of the 'Buzzing Angels' and can only spend his time thinking about them. There is no room for response outside of the preparations he thinks he can make for them. The terror they inspire in him boils his focus down into a singular source of anxiety which leaves almost no room to think of the time outside of their coming. Pierre is disconnected from the past, present and the future. They're all lies to him, knowing or unknowing.
Observation:
At one point, when we have just met Eve, we see mister Darbedat internalize this observation:
This story disturbed me quite a bit. During the reading I had a sense of very immediate tension; a ball of it rising up from my stomach to my throat. I was glad when I could put the book down.
It's quite a reading experience.
But when we finally switch to Eve's point of view and move into her husband's direct orbit, when all the mental instability and psychoses are revealed we aren't quite prepared enough for how deep the rabbit hole goes and it is quite a disturbing and bewildering experience.
Specifically in the last part, where Eve's husband's psychosis was at its height I found my tension heightened as well and just like Eve I was drawn in into her husband's delusions, almost willing them to be real.
It's obvious that several of these people are tied to their rooms. The least likeable of these, the most normal (read; not haunted by neuroses and anxiety) and sociable (and is this tied to my dislike of him?), mister Darbedat, is the one who isn't tied to any of the rooms. He is an active member of society and has little time and understanding for the three others. In Eve's opinion he spends his time worrying about looking young, but this is an outside opinion and coloured by her resentment of him. In Mister Darbedat's mind there is no lingering on the passing of his own vitality and only a sense of appreciation of what he is now. He lives in the moment.
Like daughter, like mother, because the sickly wife of mister Darbedat finds that one's vitality terrifying and monstrous. She resents his intrusion into her sickroom and when left alone solely indulges herself by reading histories (a little on the nose there, Sartre) and reminiscing. She lives in memories of better times.
Pierre is his room.
Black and morbid and shut out from mankind. It is a vehicle for his delusions and an enabler to his madness.
Eve is in turn tied to the room and the psychosis of her husband, but there was a scene where, in the process of escorting her father out of her home, she stalls in an antechamber before going back to Pierre's room. (and it really is Pierre's room, she has no identity in the room. He adresses her as someone he used to know and she finds that her possessions have been slowly subsumed by his madness.). She recognises that the antechamber is healthy but she also sees that the room is unlived in, sterile and without personality, like her. She hates Pierre's room and hates herself when she is around him, but she is tied to him by chains of past love and an intense desire to resonate with and feel Pierre's delusions and visions. She lives only for him and has cut herself off from society because of it. She recognises the madness in herself and in him for what it is but is at that point still unable to unchain herself from it and her husband. But she recognizes his impending and inevitable mental deterioration and as she implies by her last lines, she will have to take drastic steps in the coming future. These steps, the likely coming act of violence is in fact almost all she can look at. The brief memories of a time before the room are shook off almost as quickly as they come. She lives in the future.
Where the three Darbedat characters live in a recognizable moment in time, Pierre is the one who is unhinged from it. He has no ties to the outside and his room is his whole world.
He reminisces, true. But he also does more than that. He adresses Eve with another woman's surname; Agatha. With this he invokes the past and brings it squarely into the present. Eve's tacit submissal to the name enables him to mash the two times together without pause even if he secretly doesn't believe it.
Like how his past influences his present and turns it into a lie, so does his constant worrying for the future bleed into the present. Pierre lives only in constant dread of the reappearance of the 'Buzzing Angels' and can only spend his time thinking about them. There is no room for response outside of the preparations he thinks he can make for them. The terror they inspire in him boils his focus down into a singular source of anxiety which leaves almost no room to think of the time outside of their coming. Pierre is disconnected from the past, present and the future. They're all lies to him, knowing or unknowing.
-----
Observation:
At one point, when we have just met Eve, we see mister Darbedat internalize this observation:
He was always analysing himself, always turned in on himself too much.
But was it the cause or effect of his sickness?
But was it the cause or effect of his sickness?
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