AARON > Recent Status Updates

Part III: Ch. 18
The author really strains toward empathy, even for evildoers (especially for the world's worst) extending it as an example to the lions in the colosseum. Maybe that's the impulse for writing this book, even if little has been said about the Circeo massacre.

Part III: Ch. 17
Torturing a classmate in a mock, backwards inquisition. The author paints a harrowing scene, calling it a “holy spectacle” and dwelling on the victim’s “chaotic glint” and the “tautening of his features.”

Part III: Ch. 16
Fast fowards like three decades. Meets one Ezechiele Rummo. The chapter is only a page long.

Part III: Ch. 15
Soccer, biblical parallels, so much screaming. And I quote: "Ahhhrrr!"

Part III: Ch. 14
Our skeevy little boys find themselves on a double date. Pik is spazzing out. The evening is going well, and whenever things are going well, he has to know why they're going so well, overthinks, sputters: "Listen. You don't need to do anything, Pik. Nothing at all, got it? Have fun... and nothing more..." An amusing chapter but little splendor.

Part III: Ch. 13
I guess him and Pik are friends now

Part III: Ch. 12
Narrator's classmate Picchiatello (nicknamed Pik) is bullied so much his bullies are practically studying him, memorizing phrases of his like a religious leader. Hatred it seems is a sort of devotion. Narrator soon obsessed with Pik's mother as well.

Part III: Ch. 11
Another sketch of his classmates. Five out of every six are insane, the narrator claims. The exception, of course, being himself.

Part III: Ch. 10
A novel is the exact opposite of chaos, it is the natural enemy of disorder...
All right, then, shut the book.
Turn off your computer or your iPad.
Turn off the light, too.
Throw the window open wide and let in the evening air.

Part III: Ch. 9
The narrator is shown Arbus's almost manic, enchanted drawings depicting landscapes and living rooms in excruciating detail, composed in a single continuous stroke, the pen never leaving the paper. Cryptically, reveals in eight years he will sleep with (or marry) Arbus' sister.

Part III: Ch. 8
Narrator obsessed with his classmates' (Arbus) mother

Part III: Ch. 7
On having a sister: All brothers are necessarily Karamazov.

Part III: Ch. 6
This is finally picking up. More formulation of masculinity: potency, abnegation, domination.

Part III: Ch. 5
Don't send your kid to all-boys school lol in fact, avoid compulsory education altogether

Part III: Ch. 4
Still hardly a novel but dazzling prose and meditation -- metaphysics, introspection, the Incarnation. Best chapter so far.

Part III: Ch. 3
In which the narrator attends Mass.

Part III: Ch. 2
Finally some proper prose, actual scene-building (first time, in almost 300 pages) and it's a transexual sex act... O tempora, o mores! Mentions Stendhal at least.

Part III: Ch. 1
Some more commentary on education. Hatred, we also learn, at least can make somebody very motivated.

Part II: Ch. 15
Interesting reflections on justice, forgiveness and history. Does forgiveness redeem the victim or eradicate the past? The author asks, parallelly, if his book in an attempt to draw attention to the crime preserves its violence.

Part II: Ch. 14
The veneer of autofiction is disappearing

Part II: Ch. 13
In the ranting of Mr. Golgotha, some talent is on display in capturing his idiosyncrasies and thick, accentual voice. We learn: one part of yourself gratifies the desires of the flesh... and the other half suffers for it.

Part II: Ch. 12
Priests, Buddhist monks, the only perfection is a total separation from the world

Part II: Ch. 11
Something about the attraction of a someone overlaps into an obsession to become that very person.

Part II: Ch. 10
The narrator is keenly aware of the changing machinery and tech around him (machinery becoming technology, in fact) which suggests to him that humans themselves are meant to be modified: "sculpted, engraved... the body thus becomes a virgin expanse, ideal for experimentation..."

Part II: Ch. 9
The modern inert, game-show "intelligence":
"AND MY CULTURE? My endless and inquisitive knowledgeability in such subjects as film titles... nicknames of soccer players... made me a sterile little champion out of some TV quiz, who stays at home, that is, the guy who answers the question from his easy chair, the kind of know-it-all... when it’s time to play Trivial Pursuit.”