Book 002 - The House on Moon Lake

I like books and stories that wrap up nicely in the end. I've been told that both in my reading practices and my movie watching pleasures that that is an uneducated and unoriginal way of looking at things and I should work on appreciating the art of the alternative. Anyone who's spent time with me or pays careful attention to anything I write/photoshop/create/whatever will notice that I require symmetry or order. Sometimes one, sometimes both. I consider my need for an ending in a nice neat package my way having order to something I didn't have any control over; without the nice neat package, I find myself going a little crazy and having a strange sort of anxiety.

And that little side trip brings me to The House on Moon Lake written by Franchesa Duranti and then translated into English from Italian. I think I enjoyed the book. I'm not totally sure. Our story is about Fabrizio, a translator by trade, who stumbles upon a lost book by a completely unknown author who is considered to be awful. Fabrizio becomes obsessed with the book and alienates his quazi-girlfriend, his best friend and publisher, and eventually the world at large. Eventually he finds himself locked in a fantasy world that he created around the author's last three years of his life and his final mistress which he named Maria. As the story closes, although his girlfriend came looking for him, his captor kept him locked up and he decides that he will face the fate of dying in that house, the same house where his author and made up mistress spent their days.

The story closes around itself well enough that I'm almost okay with it, but at the same time...Fabrizio goes a little too crazy, and the craziness is not confined. In reality, he doesn't go crazy at all, just drives him sick by over thinking things, but the way the way the narrative is written it is hard to swallow that he just accepts his fate. So for that reason I'm left dissatisfied, and with a bit of an itch to rewrite the ending so I don't feel so tense and nervous without my symmetry.

This, my friends, is why I hate literature as a general rule. It usually makes me uneasy.