Perspective(s) — Dinaburg Writes

by Laurent Binet

I often grapple with language in odd ways. Vocabulary, specifically. See, we need grand knowledge to be able to convey specific details–you want people to know what is in your mind, exactly, when speaking or writing, so expansive word-choice or technical punctuation can assist–but the receiver also needs to have grand knowledge, and the knowledge needs to be functionally the same, and the subjective interpretations must overlap. For a complex message to not become garbled, people need perspectives that align.

If, after taking a detour through Mt. Sutro Open Air Nature Preserve the last time it rained, I want to mention how I was overwhelmed by the petrichor of it all, I’m relying on you to know that petrichor is the smell of dirt after rain. Why do I not just say, “It smelled of wet dirt.” or, “I was hit with that fresh woodsy smell, especially potent right after the rain starts”? Is petrichor useful as a word, or linguistic fun, or just a weird intellectual flex?

Now that I spend a lot of time hanging outside of an elementary school waiting for my kid to be released, my reading-in-public time has almost returned to NYC subway levels (the main difference: I welcome conversation from other parents, as I will likely know this small community for like, the next decade). I read Pamela in college; I know Perspective(s) is an epistolary novel. Did I tell my parent-friend it was an epistolary novel when asked what I was reading? No, absolutely not. Part internalized stupidity from being called a nerd-dork-brain in the early ‘90s, certainly. But part desire not to want to force other people to guess what my flouncy words mean. More simple to say, “It’s all written letters between characters,” and now no one needs to grope in the dark for the meaning of “epistolary”. Maybe that is dismissive or elitist or pandering or helpful or cowardly, I don’t know, but I know my greatest fear in life is using an obscure term and either being misheard or misinterpreted. (I don’t have a lot of real things to fear.)

I’m not arguing that there’s no place for niche words: in writing, “epistolary” conjures a literary litany, like the aforementioned Pamela, perhaps Dracula (instantly definitions creak and bulge under scrutiny), and even the contemporary This Is how You Lose the Time War. On the page, seeing a specific word gives the reader a chance to look it up so they might know it for the future in a way that me speaking it aloud does not. I am not all-in for the 2PM forced vocab quiz, or interrogating the mother of a classmate such that we discover whether she is self-actualized enough to pause the conversation and ask, “What word is that, I’m not sure I know it?” Offering up the plainer words is, I believe, the linguistic act of accommodation: lesser-known sister to code switching, it’s the same sort of deal—make the person you’re with more comfortable.

And now I’m more comfortable moving onto the book! Perspective(s) has that fun preface-pretense of pretending this is real, oh, I just found these real letters, enjoy reading this not-fiction that I found, not wrote! This type of thing absolutely tricked me as a kid.

this AI overview was surprisingly helpful.

Am I growing concerned at how well google’s AI scrapes my website? I guess I would be more mad if I needed the click-throughs for ad revenue. I don’t monetize this stuff! What I will share is that we have a fresh newborn now, so a) expect more rambling & b) expect less editing & c) my segues, they will be abrupt. I am mostly talking to my future self, because I see the search results–no one but the AI spiders access these contemporary fiction reviews (except for me, when I want to read a diary entry. Performative introspection, thy name is blogging).

…I decided not to include footnotes, which have the benefit of highlighting their author’s erudition but th drawback of bringing the reader back to the here and now….All the same, in the spirit of magnanimity, and despite the great temptation I felt to through you in at the deep end, I have agreed to compile a list of correspondents – I almost said characters! – to aid you in the reading of a story that will, I hope, give you the sense of being inside a tapestry.
This is cute. It sets the tone for the book. Then you get a bunch of letters while people try to figure out a murder during Renaissance-era Florence. I have a special place in my heart for Florence since I studied abroad there: while I have spent more time in toto in London or Paris, they were from multiple trips over multiple years, added together. Florence was one contiguous chunk. It leaves an impression to be in an apartment, to have to go to class, to commute down the same street. To grocery shop. So a book about Florence comes in wearing an advantage, because while happenstance didn’t put me in Florence while I read Perspective(s), its letter-structure means you’re catching the highlights anyway: Arno, Duomo, Ponte Vecchio, that one gelato shop with the good stracciatella (It was good enough, to me, to have a 500-year lineage though it doesn’t make it into the book per se).

I’ve talked about this, about how reading a book in a space you’re visiting makes it better. Even when it happens on purpose!

AI: still not smart. Classic “user” Umberto Eco, using all that “content”

The beaurty of Perspective(s) is that the structure allows the cast of characters correspondents to lie to each other directly in sotto voce stage-chewingly over-the-top, and I love it:

I do not know what the Master was thinking, nor what Bronzino might have insinuated to put this idea in his head, but after reading this edifying prose, Master Buonarroti’s barely concealed advice to me was that I should investigate the duchess, on the basis that she had seen the frescoes long before they were revealed to the rest of us following Pontormo’s death.

I felt kind of clever seeing Michelangelo “hinting” at the duchess being the murder, and then to have a character flat-out say, “It is so obvious that Michelangelo is throwing the duchess under the bus” made me both laugh and feel sort of silly. Here’s another one:

But if the time ever comes when, despite my firm orders to the contrary, you opt for the perils of elopement and a life of adventure with the man you love and who loves you, then the painting must disappear.

“Here is why this thing you want to do is awesome for you, maybe don’t do it though, but if you did, it would definitely work out,” and then to a few pages later to someone else, “lol she’s so dumb, she’s definitely going to do that thing that will hurt her family, haha being a woman suxxs :(”

Epistolary format is basically Accommodation: The Book, where the tension comes from each character talking to other characters in unique ways. The decision to use “epistolary” or “petrichor” is half the book. How they talk, and to whom, is the plot. Epistolary novels, then, need us to follow their vocab choices more closely than a standard novel. For me, that beauty is hard to describe, akin to the difference between the feelings one might have toward Florence after a three-day vacation versus a few months in a Nonna’s rented home. Perspective(s) reminds me that there is a space in our world for, well perspectives. And also art analogies.