Sudden End

Three shockers from Natalia Ginzburg, Norman Mailer and A.S. Byatt.

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In The Naked and the Dead the death goes on and on and on, a never-ending serial, it is long-lasting, ever so drawn-out, the soldier stretchered over page after page until, finally, the author no longer able to carry him, he fades out and dies. We are sad. There is also relief. The rest of the novel is, we assure ourselves, going to be all right, there will be no awful surprises, no terrifying climaxes to trouble us. Innocent kids in the presence of an evil master we are wholly unprepared for what Mailer does next: he kills the next character suddenly, quietly, instantaneously. A swift shoots into the evening sky.

Wham! A brick falls from the air… In Still Life the death is an electric shock; we leap up from the sofa throwing the book across the room. No prelims. There isn’t an inkling. We are not even softened up, as with Mailer, his words pummelling us with their little jabs and gentle uppercuts. Wham! These pages are bruised beyond recovery. It happens in an instant; so quick and utterly unexpected, we do not know what is happening. She can’t have died. No, we won’t, we refuse, we simply cannot believe it. Our confusion adds to our grieving that lasts until the funeral, this novel’s end.

On his office wall, the publisher had hung a photograph of Leone, with his head slightly stooped, his spectacles low on his nose, his thick black hair, the deep clefts in his cheeks and his feminine hand. Leone had died in prison, in the German wing of Regina Coeli prison in Rome, one icy February during the German occupation.

This is a knockout blow. It could be a newspaper reporting a friend’s death. In one moment we are alienated from our past, foreigners to the life we have lived. The doubts start, it is an interrogation, the accusations hitting us like punches: we knew him better than that, we were close, intimates, certainly we weren’t strangers; so we should have known; why weren’t we informed, by his family, by others that knew him; why didn't we talk to him in the days before he died… An obituary notice… To find out - it is like stumbling over a lost memento - through some official communique; no, we cannot, we will not - will certainly not - accept that. The offhand way the death is described in Family Lexicon is what stings the reader. Natalia’s aside could be a journalist’s. We are hurt. I know I know this is the way you would have been told, but really, my dear, have you forgotten how close we are to you; the reader is your intimate now, is a friend, a lover almost. You have hurt us, you must be told this, very badly. A bee attacks in the summer sun.