Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books - Posts Tagged "roth"

Piperno’s The Worst Intentions (Europa Editions, 2007) has been compared, with some justification, to Ph. Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. In fact, Piperno’s novel is better. As a big reader of Proust (I had read all the volumes of A la Recherche… by the time I was 22, and wrote my BA thesis on it) I can say that this is the closest equivalent to Proust’s masterpiece. I usually don’t like such comparisons because they are rarely founded, and even when they are, they indicate that the author of the “equivalent” is no more than a talented epigone. But what makes the comparison to Proust justified in this case is not only the fact that Piperno has deeply absorbed the work of his predecessor—a French scholar, he is the author of a work of literary criticism, Proust Anti-Jew—but also the fact that his novel is extremely contemporary. It is an updated version of Proust in the sense that it gives us a remarkable portrayal of Italian “high” society from the fifties until 2001. The snobbery of this society, while reminiscent of the old-fashion mannerisms of Mme Verdurin’s and Mme de Guermantes’s inner circles, is at the same time very contemporary. Piperno’s snobs are universal because any high-school student who wishes to be “popular” can recognize himself/herself in them; and yet, they are so…Italian. Never before have I read a novel whose protagonists are so concerned with appearance, especially fashion.

Another Proustian element of the novel is the construction of desire (with its corollary, jealousy and/or envy). Daniel, the half-Jewish narrator—who later becomes the author of a successful book with a provocative view on the Jews—is hopelessly in love with the most beautiful, the richest and most popular girl in his school, Gaia. Gaia is a cross between Nabokov’s Lolita and Proust’s Odette—inaccessible (though, as in Proust, it turns out that she is inaccessible only for the narrator, and quite accessible for the others), very desirable and very shallow (the narrator compares her to Britney Spears).

What I find amazing about The Worst Intentions, a novel written in long, complicated, Proustian sentences (translated with sophistication by Ann Goldstein), is that it was a best-seller in Italy.