The Story of My Solipsism

Illustration by Danny Gregory

If you?re like me, you read the unabridged Pride and Prejudice in fifth grade, ate lunch in the library all through high school, and often fixate on the Purpose of Literature. If you?re like me, you?ll understand that a book titled The Story of My Purity (aka what I?ve been calling my teens and early 20s) brought up a few questions.

The Story of My Purity, translated from Italian by Stephen Twilley, is a novel narrated by Piero Rosini, a 33-year-old ?flabby? tragic antihero who is in a sexless marriage and has devoted his life to Jesus. He addresses an open audience, telling us he?s ?totally committed, in my own way, to becoming a saint?; and yet, he?s just like us, with the same quotidian troubles: ?Saints don?t ask their parents for loans ? But I wanted to change jobs. I absolutely had to change jobs.?

He works at Non Possumus, a ?far-right Catholic publishing house? that plays a ?distinct role in the internal debates of the Church ? Who else talks about the cultural power of the Jewish lobbies in Europe and America, their dechristianizing efforts?? It?s an anti-Semitic publishing house, but Rosini rationalizes, ?the times being what they are, you don?t turn up your nose at a chance to earn a living.? One time I worked as a makeup artist for child actors.

Non Possumus?s current project is a book purporting John Paul II was secretly Jewish, aptly titled The Jewish Pope. (Entertaining aside: Before The Jewish Pope, Non Possumus published The Book of Cocks, proving that ?producers had inserted nudity into children?s movies and cartoons in the form of photographs or drawings of breasts, vaginas, and penises, as new single frames or montaged existing ones.?) Non Possumus refuses to publish novels, an ungodly genre.

For the first half of the book, Rosini rattles off a litany of cultural toxins in descriptively baroque paragraphs?but not to warn readers against them or offer treatment, not to make any point other than to talk shit about dark times where entertainment and art take us away from accessing a deeper part of ourselves, hijacking our connection with God. There are long philosophizing passages?about the church, about cunts, about nature?that don?t enlighten so much as provoke. Our narrator says stuff like: ?Certainly, after 9/11 my world of ideas, of pleasure, of books, had collapsed a bit like the towers.?

I?m paraphrasing Mary Karr and David Foster Wallace when I say literature ought to be a service to a reader?s interior life. I read to feel, to be moved, to live a more engaged and aware life, to have an emotional response I don?t get from sitting at a computer eight hours a day. This is my hope in literature, that it will alter and improve the way I view and interact with the world, that it will in some sense rescue me.

?The truth can?t be found in novels!? Rosini says, explaining why he stopped reading them. As with most things Rosini says, I don?t agree.

The first ?turning point? in Rosini?s life is meeting Corrado, an aspiring novelist who pitches Rosini his novel about a gay couple that wants a traditional family. Rosini pontificates to Corrado how Italy is full of aspiring writers: ?I?ve seen so many ? illiterates who use too many ellipses ? You know that you shouldn?t ever use more than one question mark?? These meta-moments are the best?self-aware, funny, genuine.

Corrado introduces Rosini to Lavinia. One night at a bar, Lavinia places her legs on Rosini?s left thigh, at which point he throws his chaste thoughts out the window. When he talks about sex (not celibacy), both the narrator and prose come alive: ?When you start having sex you discover new lifestyles and forms of art, entire continents and alternative vocations, new ideologies and ways of falling asleep, breakfast menus, combinations of amusement and mystery.? Turning point No. 2.

Rosini doesn't know what he wants in life or out of life, and these ambiguities launch a familiar ennui and panic that drives him from Rome. Sans job and chasing Lavinia, he flees to Paris, where he interns at ?ditions du Bac and lives rent-free in the adjoining flat. His wife doesn?t follow, and yet they don?t divorce. It?s complicated. Ostensibly he?s avoiding the public outcry when The Jewish Pope is published.

Instead of working hard, he takes a lot of strolls in Paris, searching for Lavinia. (Spoiler: He never finds her?is this some post-modern technique or just sloppiness?)

In Paris books are no longer bullshit. ?Corrado?s novel had renewed my love of literature, Lavinia my love for the human species, prompting me to reread the stories that had formed me.? Novels are a slippery slope. One day he wakes up with an erection. Next he masturbates. He explores Internet porn. One evening he meets ?a quartet of female bourgeois bohemians? tripping on MDMA who change his life. Again. He tells them his name is Chewbacca as he thinks of himself as ?an enormous, hirsute Cinderella, a listless, sweaty insect.? With them he gets drunk and smokes hash and forgets his wife.?

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=50c5f88c8ae6b5ad767932bc2fc703f3

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