Rachel Kushner

[Lemuel Underwing]

Ooh I'll definitely have to check her out, thanks for sharing.


On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 4:06 PM, <malignd at aol.com> wrote:

> This woman and her new novel are getting some great reviews.
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> 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.
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130418/792437bd/attachment.html>