I mentioned 3 posts and 5 or 6 weeks ago, that I’d taken-up reading “New Finish Grammar” (2000) by Diego Marani following a Tweeted recommendation from Anil Seth.
I read about a third of it the first night I received it, but read the middle third rather disjointedly over several weeks as I was distracted by another piece of work, and eventually finished the final third in a couple of sittings yesterday and today. In the flow of the final third I was as gripped as I was intrigued by the initial third. The twist(s) that resolve the layers of confusion become more certain as the end approaches, finally cleared-up in a classic murder-mystery dénouement, though it’s a long way from a murder-mystery, despite the fact it’s the first of a trilogy compared to the original Nordic noir “The Killing” which the original Italian writing pre-dates. Nordic noir mystery it clearly is, in its unsettlingly dark style and mostly Helsinki-region dark-winter and simmer-dim geography.
The simplest summary of the plot premise I quoted in my first mention.
“A wounded sailor is found on a Trieste quay -amnesiac, unable to speak and with nothing to identify him except a name tag pointing to Finnish origins.”
It’s set in WWII involving Italians, Germans, Finns and Russians and is really an exercise in how little language disconnected from lived experience can ever mean and how far from reality it can lead us, as our protagonist Sampo attempts to reconstruct his forgotten identity, memories and language, with the help of fallible friends along the way. The narrative is partly that of Sampo drafting the story of his own adventure and partly that of a medic tracking him down by researching his identity and the written evidence he and his correspondents leave behind.
“What we today regard as music would have been seen as noise a hundred years ago. Yesterday’s mistake is just today’s harmless oddity. The rule always succeeds the word: this is the great weakness of all grammar. The rule is not order, it is just a description of some form of disorder. Like everything peculiar to man, language changes too, and to strive for linguistic purity is as senseless as to strive for its racial equivalent. Linguists say that all languages tend towards simplification, aiming to express the maximum of possible meaning through the fewest possible sounds. So the shortest words are also the oldest, the most worn away by time …”
” I thought that I could master [feelings bigger than myself] simply because I was able to write them down. In fact here too I was behaving like a scientist. I described my state of mind just as I would the symptoms and course of a disease. I had not yet realised that nothing that concerns man ever happens the same way twice …”
Obvious linguistic and epistemological reasons why it fits my Psybertron agenda. Reminiscent of Eco to me? I will have to hold off the remainder of the trilogy, and the remainder of the 10 books Marani has written, until a later date.
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