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The therapist Martin Carr is in a dilemma. He learned that a new patient, Carmen, is already known to his adoptive daughter Olivia and her husband Francis. However, his professional ethics is tested more when his “most traumatized patient”, Sebastian, turns out to be Olivia's biological brother. “These things do not happen, cannot happen and should not happen,” he said.
The life of Sebastian and Olivia took place according to parallel lines until, defying the laws of geometry but fulfilling the requirements of fictionThey meet at the home of their biological mother, Karen. Olivia is scandalized by Karen's deception, but her adoptive mother Lizzie retorts that “it was terribly irresponsible, but I can imagine that she could have gotten lost in a fantastic world where it was a magnificent and redemptive act – reconciliation at the end of a comedy of Shakespeare.” This hope is ready for the credibility of the echoes of Twelfth night in the names of the brothers and sisters.
Edward St AubynOne of the most acclaimed novelists of his generation, is best known for the five semi-autobiographical books by Patrick Melrose, who make the brilliant comedy of heartbreaking events from the beginning of the protagonist, in particular the mistreatment of childhood, drug addiction and a feast of the country house assisted by a Margaret dyspeptic princess. He revisits the theme of abuses in Parallel linesthrough the central character of Sebastian. Having been assaulted as a child by his biological father, intimidated as a child by his adoptive father and spent a large part of his adult life in the hospital, he is in the fifth year of his analysis with Martin.
In a novel overflowing with puns, Sebastian is the most character, which he is wrong to “masturbate” for chewing or punning that “my shrink made me a bigger man”. His answers are fresh and relevant; By attending his first opening of art, he assumes that people “had to talk about Leonardo da Vinci”, and his eagerness to establish significant ties affects.
The parallel lines of St Aubyn extend beyond the family to include Hunter, an American billionaire who develops “happy helmets”, a system of “trans-Cranial stimulation” which offers the user “a shortcut towards deep communion” that the Italian mystic Fra Domenico has devoted his life to reach. There is also the wife of Hunter, Lucy, who suffers from an aggressive form of cancer, and Hélio, a Brazilian nurse and artist. But with the exception of Father Guido, an abbot whose isolation uncomfortable in a hermitage is powerfully transmitted, the characters, including the family, remain unlikely and largely defined by their intellectual and political concerns.
Thus, Olivia and Francis are both professionally and personally concerned about the prospect of global extinction. Olivia produces a series of radio programs on the different Armageddon routes, while Francis is an environmental activist, involved in projects in South America. When he does not treat his patients, Martin focuses on the gaps in Lacan's analytical methods. The description of Hunter of the heroic missions of the American light artist James Turrell to save the Buddhist monks of Tibet occupied by Chinese during the Vietnam War offer real life a richer story than any of the fictional of St Aubyn, outside Sebastian.
The novel bristles with ideas. Unlike Fra Domenico, who made a wish of silence since “Show Not Tell was his philosophy”, St Aubyn chose to say it rather than showing. There are therefore short worse digressions on subjects such as the nature of mental and visual perception, the limits of Christian compassion, the power of political activism and the discoveries of Humboldt and Darwin. The ideas are supported, tending to obstruct the story rather than the reader.
The same goes for raised metaphors distributed at random between the characters. Sebastian is thinking about changes in his routine like waves behind a surfer; Olivia's guilt is transformed by an unwanted gatecrasher into an honored guest; Francis on the fight between Gaia and Mammon; and Martin on the system of caves of a patient associations and the Borgia type poison of Lacan methods over the duration of a single page. With certain metaphors operating at a dozen or more lines, they are used to obscure rather than improving initial thinking.
When Sebastian meets for the first time one of the computerized light sculptures of Helio, a version of “The Birth of Venus” renown “at the time of weakness” as a response to the misogyny of President Bolsonaro, he begins to think that the work of Helio was in the game of the joke, the game of play, the words, the art-art game “. St Aubyn falls here in the same trap. Witness – Repeated pun – which, at the same time, the distinctions between the characters and harm the serious intention of the novel.
St Aubyn is at its best in comic pieces, which recall the radiance of the quintet of Patrick Melrose. During dinner in a restaurant, Olivia and her family discuss the failures of recent conservative politicians with a hilarious effect, especially when a server asks questions about their allergies and she answers “Boris Johnson and her predecessors”. Similarly, when the art is opened, the owner of the gallery, desperate to follow the latest trends in criticism, confuses the naive remarks of Sebastian for an unorthodox genius and asks him to write a catalog test. Overall, however, although the parallel lines of the convergent novel, its individual elements do not consistent.
Parallel lines by Edward St Aubyn Jonathan Cape £ 20 / Knopf $ 28, 272 pages
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