Finished Boredom a few days ago but wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to say about it, hence the lack of pseudo-intellectual commentary. I don’t know why it had this effect on me, I certainly enjoyed reading it, looking hip and subversive in Starbucks holding my copy over an Americano, but when the experience was over I didn’t find myself rushing to the computer to type out some effusive panegyric to its greatness (as I thought I might). Instead, I just let the influence that it had on me slowly work its magic, hovering in and out of my consciousness, knocking on the door of my psyche, perhaps because every so often I recognised something of myself in the character of Dino, an over-privileged prick with an antipathy towards money and an inability to feel a connection to his surroundings.
Now, although I don’t have the same problems of being over-privileged, and I don’t really have too much of a problem with money, I do find that in general I am of a rather detached disposition and find myself getting bored of things or people after the initial lightness accompanying introduction has evanesced into the blur of the mundane. To Dino, in the book, his connection to objects, the inability to feel one, is what leads him to an almost paralysing state of ‘boredom’ which he feels can only be cured if were able to feel a sense of possession over them.
As a study of the male ego Moravia examines the effects on Dino that a young girl, an uncarved block of wood of a girl, onto whom Dino can project his vacillating insecurities and ideas about her machinations, will have as he tries to possess her. The narrative follows Dino’s thought pattern as he attempts to deal with this young woman and her infidelities, first deciding that he is okay with it, then that he isn’t, then that he will be because if he can just make her fall in love with him he will be able to possess her and then let her go, banish her from his life forever. The book was also translated under the title ‘The Empty Canvas’.
I won’t delve too far into the plot in case you find yourself reading it and I ruin it for you. Instead, as with my last attempt at ordering my thoughts about a book I read, I’d like to be as pompous as possible and, for my own benefit really, try to figure out what I took from this book and what, if anything I learned from it.
I guess what I took from the book is that we can feel a connection to things if we just let them be what they are, not try to project our own ideas of what we want them to be upon them. Perhaps this is an obvious point and something that I could’ve realised even before I read the book, but in many ways it’s difficult to see things with complete objectivity all the time and, in most cases, we do not get to see things for what they really are because of our preconceptions of what they are supposed to be. The most obvious example of this in action is with our parents or other members of our family whom we see not as the individuals that they are but in the roles we expect them to be playing. Perhaps if we didn’t try to mould everybody and everything to our desires, they would be allowed to shine, resulting in everybody being happy. Dino’s problem, seemed to me, that he did this to the extreme and it caused him all kinds of issues.
Another, once again obvious, thing that I picked up from the book, is that things always look better in the distance. This is a platitude for sure, but the things that attract us often lose their appeal once we truly get close to them, either when we see a mountain in the distance and then get closer to find that it is just a pile of ash, or when we find that a person is not who we thought they were once we truly get to know them. The book seems to study the way in which we deal with the jarring sensation that occurs when our idealistic ideas about what the future has in store for us to not quite match our expectations.
From the book:
In the beginning was boredom, commonly called chaos. God, bored with boredom, created the earth and the sky, the waters, the animals, the plants, Adam and Eve; and the latter, bored in their turn in paradise, ate the forbidden fruit. God became bored with them and drove them out of Eden; Cain bored with Abel, killed him; Noah, bored to tears, invented wine; God, once again bored with mankind, destroyed the world by means of the Flood; but this in turn bored Him to such and extent that He brought back fine weather again. And so on. The great empires – Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman – rose out of boredom and fell again in boredom; the boredom of paganism gave rise to Christianity; that of Catholicism, to Protestantism, the boredom of Europe caused the discovery of America, the boredom of feudalism kindled the French Revolution; and that of capitalism, the revolution in Russia.
Definitely a book I’d read again. Moravia has another book called ‘Contempt’ which I intend to read in the near future.
