Death in Venice (1912) by Thomas Mann - I first read Death in Venice in college—one of Mary Gordon’s “Writers of the 20th Century” courses. Professor Mary Gordon taught me to love reading. (My high school English teacher, Daniel Weinstein taught me to love writing) I digress. I am re-visiting Death in Venice for its concise, vivid description of a simultaneously frantic and romantic city . I’m using Mann’s depiction of the corners and characters of a scene in a town square as inspiration for the prom scene in my novel. Like the narrator’s depiction of Venice, high school prom is an overly idealized setting, full of promise and unprecedented beauty, which must combat the realities of bad weather, putrid odors, poor health, and painful social interactions.
The Tragedy of Othello, Moor of Venice (c. 1601–1604) by William Shakespeare - I’ve never read Othello actually. But I’ve been skimming Shakespeare ever since I came across the term “gobbet titles”: titles which are quotes from other works of literature (often poems, plays, the King James Bible). I’m always jotting down possible titles (for this novel, for future novels, etc). Since many of my favorite titles are rhythmic, gobbet titles (Catcher in the Rye, Infinite Jest, The Sun Also Rises), and Shakespeare’s works are all metered, I’ve taken to reading Shakespeare in search of some title inspiration. Maybe I’ll do another post on this because I’ve written down a ton of gobbet titles from various Shakespeare plays that I probably won’t use. The point here is, in my search for a title, I have found that Othello is relevant in more ways than just title inspiration.
In Joan Didion’s novel, Play it as it Lays, the protagonist, Maria, opens the first chapter asking, “What makes Iago evil?” Iago, being one of the characters in Othello. It’s a rhetorical question. Maria doesn’t actually care to know the answer (hence the title: she doesn’t look for answers to anything, she just plays things as they lay). But then I started wondering, well, what does make Iago evil? Unlike jaded Maria in Play it as it Lays, my protagonist, a fourteen-year-old girl, wants answers for everything. One of the questions she seeks an answer to: are women are evil?
The Story of a New Name (Book 2 of the Neapolitan Novels) (2012) by Elena Ferrante - Just picked this back up after New Year’s. Needed something easy to get back into my workflow and I absolutely love this series of novels (I also finished watching season 1 of the HBO show My Brilliant Friend and want to finish book 2 before season 2 comes out). As always seems to be the case, this was exactly the book I needed to be reading. An inspiring reminder that:
You don’t need to describe everything. Sometimes you can just fucking tell the story and keep going without dwelling at all.
Female friends often engage in a silent competition with one another.
Across generations, there are men with a compulsive need to spout the information they have compulsively acquired.