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and clarifications about things apparently unconnected
with the death. Right away, despite the appalling news,
he is comparing it with the latest developments in his
marriage and career. Such is the nature of literary grief,
we might think; that’s not how it really is.
But rather than being just an example of callousness
on the part of the narrator, or an indifference to dramatic
incident on the part of the author, it is actually a truer
reflection of how one experiences grief. Remember,
Burton receives the news over the telephone. How can
such news be close to him when it is comes in the form
of electronic noise? The news makes itself felt in the
play of the distances between the plain fact and his imagination.
Burton becomes, at this point if not before, a
reader of his life. All action is kindled in the mind. For
us, rather than being insulated from the impact of the
news, as we would be in the usual novel, we become
Burton’s fellow readers, living in his uncertain present,
trying to understand what it all means. The style of
the narration is repetitious and associative. This could
descend into an annoying tic, but works here because
each sentence is necessary to the narrative.
There is a powerful section where Burton thinks
about the visit to the mortuary with his wife, as he
struggles, late at night, to urinate in the house of his
adopted daughter. This one part of a long paragraph:
“Remembering and forgetting amount to very little,
I reflect, remembering my wife remembering the
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miracle of her son’s birth, on our way to the mortuary.
It doesn’t amount to much. Not when it comes to
understanding. As if by parthenogenesis, I would tell
people, to make light of it, to turn it into a joke. My
wife would be boasting at one of her dinner parties
about how different her son was from his father. A
son in every way different from his father, she said.
It was my first thought upon waking. His birth was a
miracle, she claimed. You had nothing to do with your
son, she shouted outside the mortuary.”
The style, like Burton’s state of mind, is both
manic and extremely controlled. This is not streamof-consciousness.
It is not as random as that phrase
suggests. Troubling memories from various times
coalesce with the current event – struggling to piss –
as if, in all this distress, the divination of all troubles
is about to be revealed. Hence the title and subject of
the book: Destiny.
Appropriately, Burton hears the terrible news as he
tries to finish a book on Italian national characteristics
and how they determine Italian behaviour. All it needs,
he thinks, is an interview with the elusive elderly
politician Guilio Andreotti (who is, incidentally, a real
person). He thinks it will be the culmination, and mitigation,
of a career in journalism, which he now rejects
as “the endless description of hell”. The reference to
Dante’s Inferno (Hell) comes during a meditation in a
café named after the great Italian poet.
399
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