36 Comments

As the Nameless One is described I thought of Qii-Gon Jinn in Star Wars, “ There’s always a bigger fish”.

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This is a great chapter in the way it compares gradations of power, and also the difference between soft power and hard power. There is the soft power of the Count and the Father Provincial and the hard power of the Nameless One. The centre of the chapter is the power pas de deux between the Count and the Father Provincial. There is so much going on here. I love Manzoni's description of the Count's lackeys: "They said yes to everything, starting with the soup course. They said yes with their mouths, with their eyes, with their ears, and with their whole heads, whole bodies, and whole souls. By the time the fruit came round they were little more than who no longer remembered how to say no" Later, the narrator observes, once again in the manner of a Proust, this encounter of the Count and Father Provincial, : "For anyone witnessing this exchange, it would be as if, while at the opera, the backdrop had been raised too early, by mistake, in the middle of the scene, revealing the singer-unaware that the audience is watching-chatting freely with a colleague." The comedy of power.

I am pleased that Michael has retained that evocative and powerful word 'illiad' in his new translation. 'I predict a mountain of troubles, an illiad of disorder' (io prevedo un monte di disordini, un’iliade di guai). The previous translation by Bruce Penman omitted it. There is a world of poetry in that one word.

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At last the Nameless One appears, my candidate for the one bravi who comes closest to my idea of a Mafia boss.

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We have a Voldemort - and a Malfoy. Now who will be Harry..:?

Also, I halfway expected Cristoforo to suspect the wrongdoing involved in his transfer and prepare a secret message for Agnes/Renzo/Lucia. Maybe that’s coming…

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Okay, so I had to laugh at the end of today’s chapter. The Nameless One is so evil. The Count Uncle not far behind. And the lackeys, “They said yes to everything, starting with the soup course...By the time the fruit came round they were little more than men who no longer remembered how to say no.” Brilliant! Which leaves us with poor Fra Cristoforo armed with his “breviary, his Lenten sermons, and the bread of forgiveness inside his basket” now also banished. While Renzo, Lucia, and Agnese are surrounded by enemies who are closing in. Yet, as the Fra indicates when he raises his eyes to heaven and repents for his “lack of faith,” he trusts Divine Providence. What a yarn! The proverb, “L’uomo propone e Dio dispone” seems to be guiding Manzoni’s hand.

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The subtext of the power struggle b/w Count Uncle and Father Provincial is brilliant. I particularly love: "But at a certain point, the priest steered the conversation away from Madrid, from one court to another, and from one dignitary to another in the direction off Cardinal Barberini, a Capuchin friar brother to none other than the current Pope." I'll take your royal court and raise you a Vatican!

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If this chapter captures Italian life, I don't think I could ever live there. I get angry just reading it!

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Mar 17, 2023Liked by Michael Moore

"Everywhere you look there are instigators, troublemakers, or at the very least malicious busybodies who get a kind of mad pleasure out of seeing the nobility and the clergy at one another’s throats."

“'We know from experience the generosity of your house,' said the Father Provincial, also rising and following the victor to the door."

"Whenever a strange and particularly savage bravo appeared somewhere, or whenever a horrific crime was committed whose perpetrator could not immediately be named or guessed, people said or whispered the name of the man who we, thanks to our authors’ blessed (to avoid using another word) circumspection, are forced to call the Nameless One."

Here we see the oligarchs and the clergy with a symbiotic relationship and also a tension between them. And there is a "Nameless One" who stands for something like the Stasi. The angle of repose for human societies has a structure characteristic of all authoritarian regimes.

Hannah Arendt described the twin pillars of totalitarianism as terror and ideology. Here, we see the tension between the clergy and strongmen nobles as perhaps the thing that enabled Europe to escape the hammerlock of monarchy/theocracy and pioneer liberalism.

Liberalism always resists the tendency toward the authoritarian repose.

All great novels have liberalism or humanism vs illiberalism as their central theme, in my opinion.

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Is anyone else surprised by how much has stayed the same throughout history?

I’m also doing a study of the Gospel of Mark right now.

The Pharisees and Roman leaders

The Provincial and the Count

Evangelicals and Congress

I’m really blown away. It reads like the beginning of a law & order episode - this story is based on real events…the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

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I too loved the description of the men who by the end of dinner couldn't say no. And the exchange between the two seasoned veterans. The padre seemed like a super well trained customer service agent, kind but firm, placating and yet somehow hardly giving much at all.

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Sounding like a character right out of The Wire, or other stories of gang leaders continuing to run their gang from jail, and also sounding like Harry Potter‘s Lord Voldemort (He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named), we may have just met the most despicable character in the book. And he’s brought to us and let loose by also despicable Don Rodrigo

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Mar 17, 2023Liked by Michael Moore

I love this chapter too! Here it feels as if tensions between the aristocracy and the clergy, which were previously more subtextual, have come out into the open.

Also, I’m still thinking about your comment, Michael, that in Italy The Betrothed is seen as a book about Divine Providence. This is still my first reading of it, but so far it feels to me more about power (which everyone is noting is front and center just now): who has it and the many ways it operates.

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I'm struck by this chapter like everyone else, and I love the movement from one tyrant to a bigger tyrant to the biggest tyrant of all -- how Don Rodrigo just gets smaller and smaller--first younger, relative to his uncle, then both of them smaller than this Nameless One.

The paragraph introducing the long manipulation/sparring scene was amazing:

"Sometimes it is easier to deal with a leader of many individuals than a single individual, who sees only his own cause, feels only his own passion, and defends only his own concerns. A leader can see at a glance a hundred connections, a hundred consequences, a hundred interests, a hundred things to shun, and a hundred things to preserve. Which also means that he can be approached in a hundred different ways."

And yet, as the scene continued, the manipulation seemed so familiar (the more things change...etc.), but I thought how unused we are to seeing this kind of manipulation so slowly played out in such detail--it's so loquacious, and I think we're used to sound bites instead of long speeches.

Also I loved how Fra Cristoforo's first thought was for Lucia, Renzo, and Agnese, and his second was that "he raised his eyes to heaven and repented for his lack of faith, for presuming he was indispensable."

And poor Don Rodrigo who "did indeed aspire to be a tyrant, but not a brutal and solitary tyrant; for him his profession was a means, not an end."

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Ooo, the ominous introduction of the Nameless One, after a chapter rife with manipulation, a highly enjoyable matching of wits before a minor key change, a darkening. To be so sinister and dangerous that you must go nameless in a language that has nuanced names and adjectives for every variation of behavior! The Keyser Soze of The Betrothed. I can not wait.

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The lovely first paragraph starts so softly, "Anyone who spotted a weed in a neglected field--a nice wild sorrel say--and wanted to know whether it had come from a seed that had sprouted in the field, was blown in by the wind, or had been dropped there by a bird, would never, no matter how long they pondered it, reach a conclusion." yet leads us to ponder the origins of the evil that is to follow, and the way power and influence lead to such abuse. What a writer!

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So many great notes and comments on this chapter, which, along with 18, is among my favorites so far too. (I can't keep up right now--March is too crazy--but when I can't sleep, I enjoy reading this novel.) The villains become not sympathetic but human, trapped in the lives/personas they've made for themselves. All I can say about the various masterful exchanges between power brokers is the ellipsis...

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