What if a female scholar, neurotic (but not so talkative) as a Woody Allen character, resented her husband for succumbing to a mid-life crisis (before he actually succumbed to one), and lapsed into her own? What if her reading of eighteenth-century philosophy and pornography penetrated her psyche in the same way that a method actor’s research oftentimes worries or warps the amorphous boundaries of his own actual identity? What if identity depended on memory, but this intellectual, female protagonist distrusted her own ability to retain connections, including those that lend names of persons and places relevance? What if chronic forgetfulness led to a paranoiac mistrust of her own judgment—so that she repeatedly ceded judgment to masculine teacher-lovers, i.e. those who inspired her with a form of “didactic lust”? (156). What if this character came to resent those she imbued with such trust? What if she began to find it “demeaning to have become so dependent on another person,” including a husband who was so “wonderful” that “his wonder weighed heavily”?(98). Such fretting can exhaust even as it entertains. Really, why do we retain brilliant, but difficult friends in real life, and why can’t we escape them in the pages of books?In other words, I’m not sure that one can like Margaret Nathan, the protagonist of Cathleen Schine’s Rameau’s Niece. Margaret probably wouldn’t like you for long if she liked you at all. And why should you like her when she really doesn’t much care for herself, discovering during a trip abroad that she has become “a sexually hysterical, xenophobic, middle-aged Midwesterner from the 1930s,” set adrift in modern day Prague? (136).For Margaret, every friendship proves a challenge for the “path toward socialization seem[s]…strewn with insurmountable obstacles. If she wished to have friends, she would have to be a friend, or at the very least approximate however it is that friends behave” (74). And, yet, this painfully introverted individual becomes obsessed with the idea of adultery. She fancies herself in love with at least three different persons—in addition to her husband, but these fancies wind up being formulated as “logical” propositions, her thought patterns afflicted and conflicted by the sense and sensibilities of her eighteenth century research. Although I can certainly see why the New York Times described Schine’s novel as a “comedy of modern manners,” I’m not seeing so much Jane Austen, or even Anthony Trollope, whom Margaret admires as a second rate novelist. Instead, as I read Rameau’s Niece, I decided that its protagonist really ought to be locked in a room with a Woody Allen character, or possibly Kenneth Branagh channeling Woody Allen in Celebrity. A “No Exit” sign must be posted above the doorway. Indeed, although I must say I was highly bemused by Margaret Nathan, I’m deeply gratified that I don’t have to be her husband, or even her friend.
Margaret è una scrittrice che, parallelamente allo studio di un manoscritto libertino, mette in dubbio il proprio felice rapporto con il geniale marito Edward e si lancia in un vortice di fantasie adultere.La prima parte del romanzo è un infinito racconto di felice vita coniugale e di insicurezze intellettual-borghesi. La seconda parte, invece, prendendo come pretesto un incontro a dir poco banale della protagonista con un misterioso francese, vorrebbe essere un parallelo della sua vita con il manoscritto studiato; non ci riesce, diventando un noioso sunto di ovvietà adultere trite e ritrite.Il finale scontato mette la ciliegina sulla torta al tutto.L'ho finito con fatica, annoiandomi di pagina in pagina sempre più.
What do You think about Rameau's Niece (1994)?
Fra il b�h e il b�h (son dovuto accedere alla sintesi per ricordarmi qualcosa) - onesto libro d'intrattenimento da commedia leggera, quella che diverte pur non rassomigliando in nulla alla vita, letto tanto tempo fa che potrebbe essere iscritto a campione del genio del marketing librario adelphiano, in compenso l'illustrazione � un dettaglio del meraviglioso "les hasards heureux de l'escarpolette" di Fragonard. Per alcuni, da secoli, quasi un talismano contro la tristezza.
—Procyon Lotor
While it's gratifying to see how much Schine has developed as a novelist between this and The Three Weissmans of Westport, I can't say that's reason enough to read this earlier effort. It sounded promising: neurotic professor in NYC, working on a text of 18th-century erotica posing as a philosophical documents (excerpted within the novel, a la Possession), and she becomes a bit too immersed in her work and it distorts her perceptions. But it's rather too fluffy, the perspective too embedded in one character, the character is annoying, the three men she becomes obsessed with are mildly-to-seriously repellant, and academic scholarship is not quite so ridiculous as here. It could be winsome that the main character is so petty and self-centered, but it's not. My attention flagged when she went to Prague, leaving her incredibly self-centered but somehow delightful husband behind in NYC--and without him the book, like the narrator, lacks ballast.
—Stephanie
