Iris Murdoch negli anni ’50. Oops, questa è Kate Winslet che la interpreta da giovane nel film “Iris” diretto da Richard Eyre tratto dal libro di John Bayley, marito della Murdoch. And that, precisely, is what’s saved him.He’s left behind hopeless love and the illusion of importance; he’s ready to work, and notice things, and that will be his salvation.In Murdoch’s novels, characters grow; they think about what matters, experience sorrow, guilt, heartbreak and passion, and try to be strong.Does it matter that this tends to happen in shabby London side-streets, in bosky woods or sunlit beaches, not in the White House or at war?Of course not.Fiction is about the variousness of being human, and Iris Murdoch, a complicated human and a great writer, is the perfect guide. Everyone needs books, particularly the newly gay. Books make us feel less alone, and there is nothing more strengthening than reflections of our own complicated selves. Murdoch, Iris (2002). Under the Net. London: Vintage Books. ISBN 9780099429074 . Retrieved 5 November 2016. I hate solitude, but I am afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a café will provide.

I am myself a sort of professional Unauthorized Person; I am sure I have been turned out of more places than any other member of the English intelligentsia.’The main change to Earl’s Court and Shepherd’s Bush in nearly 70 years has been price. Madge couldn’t afford anything in Earl’s Court now, let alone half a house. Shepherd’s Bush Green has become almost trendy, helped by its Overground station. As it happens, the transient Australians priced out of Earl’s Court have relocated to Shepherd’s Bush, and a local pub, now sadly closed, was rather wittily named The Bush Ranger (Queen’s Park Rangers are the local football team). This mesh may be fine or coarse, or its holes may be of different shapes, but it will always be regular, and represent an imperfect truth. We may have a unified form to describe the universe, but the selection of the form leads to a built-in inaccuracy. During the 1930s, Iris Murdoch had read for a first degree in “Greats” (Ancient History, Classics, and Philosophy) at Somerville College, Oxford. After graduating, she worked as a civil servant. (It was during this time that she wrote the unpublished novels.)

Still it's a good story and I enjoyed the humor in the writing. So why rate it a ‘3’? It turns out, and I did not know this while I was reading the book, that this was the first novel that Murdoch published, 1954. Obviously her skills improved over time. What if I try to be accurate?” Jake asked. Hugo’s response was: “One can’t be … The only hope is to avoid saying it … Language just won’t let you present it as it really is … [it] is a machine for making falsehoods … One must just blunder on. Truth lies in blundering on.” Jake and Murdoch both step lightly across London.Jake has lived in many parts of the city without becoming rooted anywhere. He has friends that he may run into in pubs, particularly in Soho, but he is not invested in local friendships or a local. Jake emphatically does not have a “manor”, or a “circle of friends”. Perhaps London is the only British city where this is possible.The first thing is that Nandakishore Mridula has already written the perfect review of Under the Net.

Con estos antecedentes, la novela discurrirá en una especie de comedia disparatada de formación y crecimiento en la que Jake se ve envuelto en un sinfín de aventuras grotescas repletas de casualidades imposibles, de planes absurdos y siempre fracasados, de comportamientos fuera de toda lógica, de toda teoría, que le irán provocando un cambio de perspectiva, de red, que provocará un giro copernicano en sus creencia sobre su entorno, sobre sí mismo y sobre sus supuestos grandes naufragios vitales, como el haber dejado escapar al que pensaba habría sido su gran amor, Anna Quentin, y el haber traicionado y abandonado a su amigo Hugo Belfounder, al que conoció en un experimento médico en el que ambos servían como cobayas, tras escribir un libro de título tan revelador como The Silencer basado en las ideas filosóficas que Hugo le transmitió y que tanta impresión le causaron. One essential feature aspect of Murdoch’s 1950’s London which strikes the modern reader is that there is no difficulty in finding affordable accommodation, at least for white people without children. Jake prefers to live in his friends’ flats because of his ‘shattered nerves’, not because he can’t afford to rent a room. John Wilson is a lifelong enthusiast for London the city and for London in literature, art and film. He came to London to study Physics at Imperial College and has lived in various parts of the city ever since. Ho iniziato a leggerla sicuramente perché la trovavo nominata spesso leggendo Arbasino. E ho cominciato proprio da qui e non da un altro dei suoi venticinque romanzi immagino per via della dedica: “a Raymond Queneau”. an extremely long-winded anecdote characterized by extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents and terminated by an anticlimax.

One of the central themes of the novel, playing out with various characters, is the difficulty of seeing people clearly rather than resting with the image of them you’ve built up in your mind. I enjoyed Jake’s contrasting of physical and intellectual work, and his (sometimes contradictory) reflections on solitude and introversion: In this, too, Under the Netexcels.In Murdochland a sort of Ancient Greek pantheism rules, not in the form of merry bucolic spirits in tree-trunks but in the way that everything – animals, the horizon, nature, architecture, clothes – seems to think and feel, can terrify or give hope.The secret is curiosity: what Louis MacNeice called ‘the drunkenness of things being various’.To Hugo Belfounder, Jake’s obsession, everything is ‘astonishing, delightful, complicated and mysterious’.Hugo can find peace as a guinea-pig at a residential cold-remedy-testing clinic or as a watchmaker, because there is interest everywhere.As Murdoch wrote in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, ‘People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us’ and, although Under the Netis set in a hot dusty post-war central London, not beside mossy cliffs or monastic ruins, it too is made rich by noticing: sparrows, fire-escapes, cars, plywood representations of Roman market places.

Arriving in Paris always causes me pain, even when I have been away for only a short while. It is a city which I never fail to approach with expectation and leave with disappointment. There is a question which only I can ask and which only Paris can answer; but this question is something which I have never yet been able to formulate. Certain things indeed I have learnt here: for instance, that my happiness has a sad face, so sad that for years I took it for my unhappiness and drove it away.” Le meditazioni ad alta voce, i dialoghi, gli sproloqui sono arguti, divertenti, profondi. Quel tanto che m’ha fatto proseguire la conoscenza leggendo qualche altro romanzo della Murdoch (che ne pubblicò ventisei). The author’s day job was as a professor at Oxford so all her novels have concepts from philosophy or philosophy of life themes worked into them. Two are evident in this story. One is political, based around a socialist political activist appropriately named ‘Lefty.’ He corners Jake in a bar. They are both socialists but Jake doesn’t give a rap about politics, so Lefty engages him in a Socratic dialog to run him through the paces: Is it that you don’t care or is it that you feel it’s hopeless to try to do anything? Well, Jake tells him, it’s a bit of both and they’re interconnected aren’t they? Then why were you sneering? Don't deny it!" I cut off his objections before he could mouth them. "You were smiling. I saw it."Jake considered Hugo to be the most objective person he had ever met. Hugo had no general theories, but a separate definition, and theory, about everything. If Jake tried to tie him down to some particular concept, he could not. He was impossible to define. Iris Murdoch is one of my favorite authors. This is the 6th book of hers that I have read and I never thought I would rate one of them a ‘3’ but here it is. I'll explain below. It's still a good story. Jeeves," I said reproachfully. "This is pure apple sauce. Philosophy? What philosophy is there in this load of tripe other than the nonsense the hero - what is his name? Yes, Jake Donaghue - and his friend Hugo Belfounder keeps on jabbering about, and which he had the crust to publish as a book? I thought the whole thing was a joke. No wonder, in the novel itself, that the book didn't sell. And what did you mean by that word - pic-something?" And, as a consequence of this self-scrutiny, Jake develops a little emotional intelligence; not as much as his creator had, but enough to be a decent man.He evolves from scrounging taxi-blagging laziness worthy of Skimpole in Bleak House(‘there’s nothing that irritates me so much as paying rent’) through a bleak, albeit brief, depression reminiscent of Melville’s Bartleby, turning his face to the wall, to, eventually, understanding ‘the possibility of doing better’.By the novel’s end, Jake has resolved to earn money with a sensible job, to find a place to live for him and Mars.He might even begin to write a novel, possibly this novel, because he has started to notice the world around him.