Response to Nicola’s Week 2/3
October 7th, 2009 at 16:32Nicola,
Most of my comments are in-line: CNF Week 2&3 – Waldfriedhof Pankow – Nicola Caroli – JP comments.
I see two new threads of interest in this second visit: the ancestry of the narrator (grandmother, great grandparents) and her three artist friends. I think it is beautifully written, but what does it mean “she is like them”? What are her artist friends like exactly? It would be good to have a scene or two of interaction, in memory, with her friends, so that her friends are characterized beyond what she has to think about them fleetingly. You begin to do this with the Anna Blau’s husband, though you might expand there, too.
I am very interested in the contrast between the narrator’s fleeting, abstract thoughts, and the hard reality of her relatives’ home. The first week it seemed as if she was alone in all the world; now we know she has family, albeit they don’t understand her. Can you characterize them? Sketch a scene? What kinds of things do they say? What do they look like/dress like compared to her?
She doesn’t feel at home here or where she comes from. Recently she went to visit her father’s sister, another aunt. They looked at her curiously, anxious about what she might say. She doesn’t tell them about Alfonsina Storni, that she walked into the sea, about her walks in the cemetery, about the ceramic angels or the planes passing overhead. It’s too far away, for them and for herself.