Autumn 2022
David Plante (born March 4, 1940 in Providence, Rhode Island) is an American novelist, diarist, and memoirist of both French-Canadian and North American Indian descent. He graduated from Boston College and the Université Catholique de Louvain. He taught creative writing at Columbia University. Plante lived in London, and now resides in Lucca, Italy. His novels examine the spiritual in a variety of contexts, and his work, for which he has been nominated for the National Book Award, includes The Ghost of Henry James (1970), Slides (1971) and Difficult Women (1983), a memoir of his relationships with Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell, and Germaine Greer and also the widely praised Francoeur Trilogy–The Family (1978), The Country (1980) and The Woods (1982). His most recent book The Pure Lover (2009) is a memoir of Nikos Stangos, his partner of forty years. He has been published extensively including in The New Yorker and The Paris Review and various literary magazines.
Here are some reflections.
I have found your ‘minimalist’ stories very interesting. I like the tension in them. They begin in medias res with an apparently ordinary situation and then almost immediately a subtle tension and a feeling of unspecified threat appear and gradually increase. At the end, the threat either suddenly reveals itself through a deadly outcome, or is partially and unexpectedly reversed (like in the “Mother” story where it is revealed that in reality the world does not matter, only the love between mother and child matters), or remains unresolved leaving the reader in a limbo of anxiety. These are bites of intense life.
I also find the reflexion on the process of writing very interesting, we readers are positioned by the author as witnesses in the writing process and, at the same time, become aware of the indeterminacy governing our lives.
Allow me to say that, as some of the stories in the collection reveal (i.e. ‘The Fall’, but not only that) your novel inspired by Francesca Caminoli’s story would work very well like this, beginning in medias res, gradually revealing the tension and the threat, focusing on the relationship between mother and child, and only very vaguely hinting at the context and characters bio. Also the intertextual reflexion on writing hinting at the possibility of rewriting the story and/or, perhaps, more likely, the lack of control on the part of the author on ‘that’ story, would be rather interesting.
Chiara Calabrese
For more about the author, who also writes poetry, click here.
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