Anthony Stadlen: "I second Jansy's approval of
SES's suggestion to discuss "Natasha", which I haven't even read yet. But I
will be continuing writing soon about "Signs and Symbols", and I hope
others will too."
Laurence Hochard [ SES: "It's
unusual for VN to make a female character the center of consciousness in a
story, particularly when the plot emphasizes her desirability"] adds that:
"It seems very true to me ; however, I can think of another story
written from the woman's perspective ("with a third person limited omniscient
narrator") and it is the one that has just been discussed here: Signs and
Symbols; although of course the woman has no "obvious beauty", to quote "...That
in Aleppo Once...".
JM: I just finished reading "Natasha"
which vaguely reminded me of VN's 1924 semi-fables:"Gods",("Sounds",
"Wingstroke"), " Matter of Chance" - a flickering mood that almost clashed
into incongruency - like in some
kind of drug-induced state. My first impression was of
"Colors"...I counted fourteen variations of "blue", two or three
"red","yellow","black","white","green","beige", "gray". One "turquoise", one
"emerald" & also golden, bronze and silver. The story itself, though,
felt mainly as in "gray and white" with one "orange-hued" wind
music. The Baron, with his "light-blue head like a bull" seemed, to Natasha,
"all blue, as blue as the evening" in her "blue mist of happiness." Still,
I couldn't see this story as arising
mainly "from the woman's perspective" (with a third person limited
omniscient narrator), although I cannot really disagree with that
description, nor with SES's "female character as the center of
consciousness". As if the narrator's hazy haloed presence made itself
felt side by side to Natasha?
The story describes a sick old man in
agony and two lovers, smiling away reality in their cumplicitous
hallucinatory mood and denial.
Although the bulky, "somewhat corpulent" Baron
Wolfe climbs the stairs "laboriously", his mood is sprightly. His
head is shaven "pale blue". He is not yet thirty. He is blushingly in love
with Natasha, the dying man's daughter and they live in exile in a strange
city after old Khrenov's two sons were killed. The old
man is feverish and haunted by memories of fighting, of crossing a bridge,
of sawdust and sand close to a lumber mill. His hearing is acute and
he fore-hears his daughter's return from the street and his neighbour's outing.
He seems to be searching for a lost object and once he appears lying prone
on the floor, nauseated with a spinning head, to look for it under his
daughter's knobbly couch ( a tin toy, perhaps?)
Baron Wolfe carries a cigar case and in the old
man's room there is a table "littered with cigarette stubs". Who smoked
them?
Two enchanting details called my attention: "As
usually happens when the weather is mentioned, the others looked out the window.
That made a bluish-gray vein on Khrenov's neck contract"..."Natasha counted the
drops, and her eyelashes kept time."
Natasha's hair is twice described as "sleek" ( "he
caught sight from overhead of the sleek, girlish part in her hair." ..."Her
sleek dark hair was beaded with rain and under her eyes there were adorable blue
shadows.")
Baron Wolfe recognizes that he is
sustained by grandiose fantasies, similar to Natasha's who saw the Virgin
Mary cross the room with a pail like Cinderella and, later, with baby and
agitated cherubs. He wonders if " Am I really lying when I pass off
my fantasies as truth?" after he confesses that his inventions are inspired by
the drab experience of friends, such as one who lived in bombastic
Bombay. He asks: "Which of us really visited India?" because the Baron allows
words to carry him away into a world of sensations.
I wonder about the word "formication", how it sounds in
Russian ( "formica": related to antlike tingling or numbness).
"shoo away the silken formication that was making her involuntarily compress her
knees and shut her eyes." The description is as erotic as in
"fornication"...