Marc’s Comments (group member since Apr 10, 2013)

Marc’s comments from the Chaos Reading group.

I don’t know how I feel about Cage in a TD season… But hansdown, I will watch it! Hadn’t heard about this so thanks for sharing..

I can't say I was too excited about the holds. Quite a few I couldn't even remember why I wanted to read them (I had set up a cascading set of holds, so some were 6 months old).

Molinaro's characters never disappoint!

(Not only do I not get the e-mails, but even the little notifications drop down menu only shows if someone liked or commented on a review. Bizarre.)

Apologies for the delayed response. GR no longer gives me any discussion notifications, but I did figure out last week if I click on the little discussion speech bubbles up near my avatar, I can see which discussions had activity last!

"I developed a little more sympathy for the father... "
It was hard not to, especially after Molinaro starts us off with such a sharp portrait of him from the mother's POV in the beginning. I was still left wavering between seeing him as a former-monster-rendered-sympathetic-by-age-&-stroke or just a bad dude. Certainly, he doesn't seem like a bad father. And come to think of it, as Molinaro marriages go, he's about what you'd expect from a husband no matter which version you accept as true! :D

Unless I'm misremembering her other books (which is quite possible), Molinaro seems to be making more explicit feminist statements here. I'm also impressed by her explicitly casual attitude toward sexual fluidity; this was written in 1983."
No, I think you're exactly right. This is the most directly feminist she's been in what I've read so far. Seems ahead of its time in terms of sexual fluidity and freedom.

The end sequence was just a whirlwind of traumatic events and revelations.
It was like the narrative was just walking along and then jumped off a bridge. I think all of the revelations about Clare were just in the daughter's head (at least, that was my initial reaction). You certainly get an entirely different perspective on Laura. She's like some sort of puppet master in all this. It was something like 12 years the two sisters hadn't talked--do I have that right? I was about to call that bizarre, but my in-laws have a family member who cut off all ties so what do I know?!!

Thanks for the Benderson essay--I plan to read it this week (had a bunch of overdue library stuff I needed to wrap up; I ended up canceling all my holds too as I went way overboard on what I thought I was going to read and would actually have time for)!

Finished this over the weekend. A pretty quick and enjoyable read. I was kind of fascinated by how much of it was essentially internal monologue, imagining what it might be like to actually talk to one another in the family. Molinaro kind of takes us from mom's POV to daughter's to father's and then mingles them a bit. At no point do we even get the daughter's name--she's Laura's sister, the "visiting daughter," or the "normal daughter."

The father seems so diminished by his stroke that it's hard to tell whether he really was the monster his wife makes him out to be (like you, I gave her the benefit of the doubt and this seems like the type of character Molinaro would include--a man who is charming to the outside world while being a kind of tyrant in the privacy of the home).

This was a reread for you so did you think much about the title on either read or did your interpretation of it change at all?

I'm with you marveling at how much twisted detail Molinaro weaved in (sibling sexual proxy, SM monastery, abortion, suicide, Christian sects, etc.). The references were pretty layered and wide-ranging too: Montaigne, Mary Stuart, Ninon de Lanclos, Cathari, and so on.

It seems sort of insane to me that you would fall in love with your abortion provider. It just seems incredibly complicated psychologically and then the way she describes Claire's philosophy:
"…if she believed Claire. Who believed that 'procreation was the cruelest act, because it forced a spirit to become body.'
Which had struck the hurting, fault-ferreting robot as a convenient belief, for a gynecologist who performed abortions."

Which Molinaros have you yet to read?

It is really nice to be familiar with her voice and feel like we're settling in together, just me and my pal, Ursule...

I'm not familiar with Mary Stuart at all, so I need to do some Googling.

I like the way the mom uses repetition, sort of constantly regurgitating her bile, especially about her husband's rep for humility and how he used to be a doctor. It occurred to me that I could treat her as an unreliable narrator, but so far I have assumed her husband it the nutjob in the family.

That's right, it's time for another pop-up Molinaro read.

This time we're mentally grapping with Positions with White Roses.

I know you've all been waiting eagerly (meaning all two of us!). We plan to start discussing it next week (9/23), but if anyone sees this and wants to join in, we'd be glad to delay a bit to include you in the mix.


(This woman is not Molinaro. This image has nothing to do with the book. It does include white roses...)

Great. No rush to start and I am open to a different Molinaro, as well.

Sorry, disappeared into a hectic few weeks of family and work stuff...

Very glad to hear you enjoyed Molinaro, Whitney. Don't have a good explanation for what he heard other than the fact he drinks a lot and it's hard to say how much we can trust any of his accounts...

This is pretty similar to how most of our family vacations go... :p

We definitely get more older woman-younger man sex in the short stories!

I have jumped the gun and acquired Positions with White Roses. Have you read that one, Bill?

There's a lot of stuck-in-one's-own-head conjecture in this book. And a kind of wonderful tension created by this (as each character seems to want something from another character that they're not really getting). Maybe they should all take up surfing and guitar playing...

Bill, I did not expect the lightning strike at all. In fact, I was reluctant to believe what I was reading as if 'ol Birdie were just playing a practical joke when he collapsed on the beach

Chapters 3 and 4
I still enjoy Molinaro very much at the line level---case in point: "That art had protected their daughter from seeing life. A stilled life."

Very much enjoying the way she moves from one character to the other giving us a kind of stream-of-conscious speculation/paranoia on the part of father, mother, and daughter. And we get a lot of info about the relationship dynamics at work here!

Bertram Higgins is actually the name of an Australian poet (https://search.informit.org/doi/10.33...). I haven't the slightest idea if Molinaro knew him, but given the brief bio in that link, it seems likely. And was such a specific name that it didn't feel made out of whole cloth.

The voice here feels slightly more passive and tangential so far… as if these things are happening to the characters (or maybe just the stepfather without him considering himself an active participant). Edging on all kinds of tense unbalances: the accusations of parental abuse (yet we have seen no fear/anger from the daughter herself), the wife’s stepping outside the marital relationship (yet has she confirmed this yet? At least not through chapter 2), the lopsided power dynamics (painter husband largely financially supported by his wife in a way that seems to indicate his position of comfort might be worth being cuckolded or already has been), etc.

I missed your book-arrival announcement!
Will start reading tonight...

I might hop on the JAW train while we’re waiting for the Molinaro to ship.

Cool! Most people know Molinaro better as a translator (I think best known for translating Herman Hesse).

Whitney wrote: "WTF? Did you two just parachute in with your ready-made discussion of an obscure-ass book?"

Yup. Pop-up discussions—it’s a thing! (I was actually going to DM you last night about this and the fact that this group would make a nice space for reads any of us might like that don’t fit in other groups. I thought what you did with the Night Country discussion worked great. Bill and I have read a couple other Molinaros and discussed via DM.)

For those in-the-know and those who've stumbled here by accident, feel free to join in the discussion. We'll be reading Molinaro's second book published in 1969. You have the rare opportunity to read a book that currently has 0 ratings and 0 reviews here on GR.
(As a little bit of background, Bill and I are both fond of Molinaro's work and have been meandering our way through her catalog. We decided it might be fun to open up the discussions in case any one else was interested.)

Jump in if and when you're ready!

Whitney wrote: " liked that the show left many things without a tidy explanation; the polar bear, the orange, Travis, and especially the tongue. "

In that sense, it felt sort of daring---like, hey, we're not going to tie this up in a neat bow for you. Quite in fitting with the landscape/setting and the indigenous supernatural beliefs. Even the minor characters (who someone online called "Auntie Team Six" which I thought was pretty funny) said, "Their clothes were right there, they could have come back and got them."

I interpreted Navarro's ending/actions the same as you, Whitney, especially because the supernatural provided her native name giving her some sort of peace with her ancestry/sense of belonging.

Great, now I have to unsubmerge those bodies I ditched last night if the whole puncture-the-lungs-so-the-body-sinks method isn't legit...

I didn't think they were going to be able to pull things together in a satisfying way, but they mostly proved me wrong. It still felt a bit rushed and they didn't give me any more explanation on the polar bear, but I found the episode itself gripping, hilarious in odd moments, and satisfying enough for plausability/explanation.

What did you think?

My wife and I were in disagreement over whether we thought Navarro committed suicide or not. Thoughts?

Whitney wrote: "I like the way they are already giving us explanations that are both plausible and supernatural."

Me, too!

Whitney wrote: "Episode 5. So, a quiet little episode. Not much happening, eh?"

hahahahahhhhh...

$%7@ got real. Fast. Damn.

Before I forget (and get into this episode), I just realized that Tsalal is a mysterious land in Poe's only complete novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and Related Tales (I haven't read it, but know of it through the satirical and brilliantly funny Pym which picks up on the expedition where Poe's tale dropped off). Lots of racial and colonialist issues.

Whatever trace of sympathy we had with Hank sure as hell went out the window, eh?!! Bastard.

Given those previews of the final episode, it feels a bit like the "pull" of the Night Country and visions for Navarro might be the biggest challenge to the dynamic duo wrapping up this case (with both of them still alive)...