Rachel Kushner

[malignd at aol.com]

This woman and her new novel are getting some great reviews.



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From: rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
To: “pynchon-l at waste.or
 g“ <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wed, Apr 17, 2013 7:37 pm
Subject: Rachel Kushner


fine essay

http://www.theparisreview.org/art-photography/6197/the-flamethrowers-rachel-kushner

he young woman in war paint was from an archival document of 1970s Italy, and she symbolized for me the insurrectionary foment that overtook the country in that decade. “Autonomia” was the term for this foment, the movement of the 1970s, a loose wave of people, all over Italy, who came together for various reason at various times to engage in illegality and play, and to find a way to act, to build forms of togetherness in a country whose working class was impotent and whose sub-working class was fed up with work, by turns joyous and full of rage, ready to revolt, which they did. There were various layers, of which the most violent, shadowy, and clandestine (and yet, paradoxically, the most visible and sensational) were the Red Brigades. The Italian seventies had seemed a logical subject for fiction, on account of the fact that I kept stumbling upon its lore. It all began when I met a mys- terious and magnetic Italian woman who didn’t say much, and who, when I naively asked her what she did, what she was interested in, stared at me and said, “Niente.” She had been the girlfriend of a Red Brigades terrorist, I learned. Her “niente” did not mean “nothing.” It meant, I don’t engage in what you’d call work. Or interests. I might add that I met this woman in a house on Lake Como that was filled with someone’s mother’s Fascist memorabilia, busts of Mussolini, D’Annunzian slogans chiseled into marble.

 
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