conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about It's, Labrador with the genre: Romance, Romantic Suspense?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Hell And Back'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first five paragraphs for this book? Start with the sentence 'Hell and Back
  But is Verga straightforwardly on the side of the victim? A few years later the short story 'Spring' would tell the simpler tale of a love affair between an ambitious but indigent young musician and a shop assistant'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Hell and Back
  But is Verga straightforwardly on the side of the victim? A few years later the short story 'Spring' would tell the simpler tale of a love affair between an ambitious but indigent young musician and a shop assistant. When the man finally gets a valuable contract, he drops the girl, who is heartbroken. The cruelty is now presented as an inevitable part of life; the man's interest in career, artistic fame and money are entirely natural. This is his destiny. One can no more quarrel with it than with a mother's desire to marry off her own child rather than her stepdaughter. Is there a sniff of justification in the air here? Or rage at life itself?
  In any event it seems only appropriate that when Verga at last found his voice, money was the stimulus, together with the felt need to maintain a social façade. It was 1874. His publisher had just turned down not one but two novels. Verga considered giving up, then fought back. A literary magazine invited him to contribute a story, something he was not in the habit of doing. But "in order to resolve economic problems resulting from his desire to cut a fine figure in Milanese society', writes critic Carla Riccardi, he accepted. In three days he wrote "Nedda\ "The merest trifle,' Verga remarked, and made a point of insisting he had only written it for money.
  To come to 'Nedda' after reading the earlier works is to savour the surprise of seeing the competent craftsman transformed into the great artist. Something has happened. But what? The story is simple. Nedda is a young Sicilian peasant girl travelling the countryside for work to support a dying mother. Verga, it seems, has gone back, not so much to his own childhood, but to the poverty-stricken world that surrounded it, that threatened it, a world at the furthest remove from fashionable Milanese society, and somehow a rebuke to it too, as the poor left behind to die of cholera while the rich flee the city might well present themselves to a child as a silent rebuke, and a warning.
  The mother dies. Nedda has exhausted her resources paying for medicines. She is criticised by the villagers for going to work immediately after the mother's death. Clumsily courted by the poor but honest Janu, she becomes pregnant. He works hard to get the money to marry her. But the most fertile fields below Etna are also those damp areas where malaria is rife. Janu falls ill. Fruit picking with a fever, he falls from a tree, dies. The girl goes through with her pregnancy, winning the scorn of the village. Refusing to give her baby to the nuns, she nurses it in the most abject poverty. As the story closes, she has a corpse in her arms: "Oh blessed you who are dead, she cried, "Oh blessed the Holy Virgin who has taken away this creature so as not to have her suffer like me!
  So many elements recall "Storia di una capinera'. The lonely individual dreams of access to society. Society is ugly and cruel. Religion is a sop and a whip. Love is sweet but always imprudent and quite unequal to economic forces and illness. Even the landscape is an enemy. Yet the story never becomes forced or formulaic. Overnight, it seems, Verga has learned the secret of narrative dispatch, of naturalness, and above all of a swift and terrible irony:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is three more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Or perhaps it was just the wrong moment. For it is with some awe that one tries to imagine what Sironi's inner life must have been in those post-war years. He was sixty now and everything had changed. In 1948 his second daughter committed suicide. Partly as a result, the first daughter broke off all communication. His reputation was gone, his very name a scandal. But doggedly he painted on, appropriating abstract expressionism now, the same way he had previously appropriated every other style. As steadfast and isolated as the figures he had always painted, there were no confessions and no explanations. When he died in 1961, he used his will for one last act of will. His wife Matilde was barred from attending his funeral.
  Fortunately, satire is only one of Saramago's many suits and hardly his strongest. He lacks the accuracy in establishing his target that makes the ruthlessness of a Cervantes, Swift, or in modern times and different ways Beckett, not only acceptable, but admirable, even necessary. Faced with a recognition problem - is this target really so guilty? - the reader begins to suspect an excess of rancour in relation to the misdemeanour (so much so that the placing of that rancour becomes one of the most intriguing challenges in reading Saramago's work). Meanwhile, though, as the powers that be behave badly and in such a way as to keep the reader ever aware of the circumstantial nature of old certainties, others - notably the humble and the womenfolk - are adapting to change and all kinds of positive developments are occurring.
  Saramago is on record as saying that, "I cannot save anything but what I can do is write about what I think and feel and the anguish of seeing a world that could already have resolved a large portion of its humanitarian problems, but which not only has not solved any, but which in fact aggravates many of them.' Surprising here is the opening gesture. Did anybody expect or imagine that Saramago could 'save anything'? 'Nobody saves anybody,' Cioran reminds us in one of his caustic corrections of, as he puts it, 'the obligatory optimism' of modern political thought. Clearly Saramago, like many genuine political idealists of whatever persuasion suffers considerable disappointment at having observed over the years how the development of increasingly sophisticated technical skills has not made it possible to resolve all 'humanitarian' problems. (One presumes here that he is referring above all to diet, disease and conflict, since the word 'already' suggests a reference to progress in time, whereas it is difficult to imagine that our deeper existential problems will ever be susceptible to resolution.)
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last four paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Then the wonderful final irony: the Duke, the artist, reveals -how infuriating - all the while he appeared the sovereign, he was in fact in his audience's thrall, they had to be kept constantly in mind.
  Like Leopardi two centuries later, Shakespeare alerts us to the contradiction at the heart of the writer's aspirations: his strength as magician and seducer, his weakness in needing recognition for this strength. Prospero seems to be trapped on the very stage that was the scene of his triumph, the world he watched over and made conscious for us. In the end the writer will ever be dogged by the reflection that once the work is over, he ceases to be god. And the work itself will ever be fuelled by the rancour consequent on that knowledge, and the rancorous determination that everybody else be aware they share the same limitations. Here is Beckett's Malone giving us a splendid combination of vindictive-ness and awareness of the futility of seeking recognition at all:
  Let me say before I go any further that I forgive nobody. I wish them all an atrocious life and then the fires and ice of hell and in the execrable generations to come an honoured name.
  The wonder is that in taking it to such extremes Beckett can actually seduce us with these negative emotions. The humanistic project of generating sympathy and a sense of shared destiny is most nearly achieved when the artist's essential rancour is most openly recognised.