Adriano Spatola (1941–1988)

Surreal. Grotesque, yet tender. Cognizant of all the horror & absurdity of 20th century Europe with its world wars, past, present & yet to come. Gender & species bending & blending. Guglielmo & Franz (Italian & German, the partisan & the enemy; comrades & adversaries); mother, father & child; I, her, & him. Birth & continual rebirth. The "hole in the wall" is the porthole, the window, the bloody birth opening, the oozing wound filled with maggots & stench, the opening in the barrel of the gun. And more.
In this series of prose episodes (not exactly a novel, nor stories, nor poems) the self and the other are permeable. Guglielmo is the eye and the other, the observer and the observed. Often the narrator speaks of G in the third person, but this first person narrator sometimes merges with G, the object/ subject of his observations. There is also a woman (or women, but all the women seem to be one woman with flowing blond hair) who is also an object of observation (through the hole in the wall) but who also sometimes merges with G and/ or the narrator. The woman is young & always disrobing. Not only is self permeable in Spatola's world, so is gender & even species.
The reader experiences not so much a shift in perspective or point of view as a rotation. We don't see through the eye/mind of different narrators but rather through the eye/mind of one narrator who is moving around & through the subject/ object of observation. As one might view the heart as inside the body or,conversely, the body (skin, bones) as outside the heart. Perhaps this is a shift, but not from one I to another I. It is a shift within.
The porthole is the hole in the wall, the window, the keyhole, the vagina, the eye/I. Looking/ watching through the hole in the wall makes the narrator & by extension the reader a voyeur as well as a spy, one who engages in surveillance.
There is constant repetition of word and of image; there are lists. An "ordinary" narrative will unravel into the grotesque, resembling Kafka gone awry. This is a cubist surrealism. There are cockroaches and many spiders; menstrual blood & rivers. There is torture, in war and as the legacy of war (Spatola was born during WWII).
On a personal note, when reading p. 63, an image came to my mind of the fish-cleaning table at my grandparents' cottage on Island Lake in Northern Wisconsin in the 1950s. Coming up the stairs from the dock and boathouse, at the top of the stairs, I'd have to pass a tall white enamel table with a hole on one end through which the fish heads & pinkish gray fish guts were shoved.There was a bucket on the ground below to catch the offal as it fell. There were my grandfather's gnarly hands & the stench of fish, not a putrid smell, since the fish were freshly caught but the smell of the lake and algae and weeds. Grasping the fish to twist out the hook, trickier when the hook went through the eye of the fish. This image of a fish hooked through the eye & the hook being given a twist would fit well in The Porthole.… (más)