A rather gruesome tale indeed

of a highly dysfunctional family that has reached the verge of a complete melt-down. This turmoil is triggered by the untimely death of the overbearing Mother. The main character, at times, comes across as stupidly naïve, which adds an interesting layer to the narrative. However, the characters in general are finely drawn, with their flaws and idiosyncrasies clearly defined. It is a bleak and rather depressing story, yet there is a glimmer of light at the end. The interesting use of the Italian girl as a source of stability is notable, even if this stability is somewhat artificially constructed by the other characters. Overall, it is a complex and engaging tale that explores the darker aspects of family dynamics and the human psyche.

Well written.

Melodrama, very much on the edge of soap opera. The main character, for me, was insipid and detached to the point of obnoxiousness.

The house mood feel was excellent. However, other than that, this is a forerunner in the underlying voice and overriding attitude towards the moderns of the elite "what's it all about Alfie" crowd.

Most especially those in economics, where the men had gentlemanly time-consuming arts or leisure professions. And the women were more usually surrounded by servants, bored and beastly because of it.

I was glad it was short.

It seems that the story, while having some redeeming qualities like the well-crafted house mood, fails to engage the reader fully due to the unappealing main character. The portrayal of the elite crowd also comes across as somewhat one-sided and perhaps a bit too critical.

Despite its flaws, the brevity of the piece may have been a saving grace, preventing it from becoming overly tiresome.

Overall, it's an interesting but ultimately flawed work that leaves room for improvement.

My first reading of Iris Murdoch was a wonderful experience, and I really liked it. I found "The Italian Girl" somewhere between a Greek tragedy and a theater play. Scene by scene, everything developed, and I saw it all, witnessed its staging. What a feeling!

Also, although one is a storyteller and the other is a novelist, the complex family issues and the troubled mother-child relationship in the father reminded me of Alice Munroe. In fact, the language, plot, and structure are completely different. Maybe I was missing reading Munroe.

At 171 pages, this is practically a novella, yet it manages to pack an astonishing amount of emotion within those pages. Even though it is an early work, it is very clearly an Iris Murdoch creation, albeit perhaps a touch less subtle than her later masterpieces.

Edmund returns to his childhood home following the death of his manipulative and estranged mother. His brother Otto, an alcoholic, resides there with his wife, daughter, and the eponymous Italian girl (an au pair who has stayed on), none of whom he has seen in years. His brother is a "half-stranger" to him, and he can't recall how old his niece is. However, this detachment began much earlier, as Edmund remarks, "My father had passed from us almost unnoticed, we believed in his death long before it came."

These five characters, along with two others, have multiple and complex relationships and neuroses that they discuss, yet with little hope of ever overcoming them. They have all missed out on happiness in some way, and thus seem fated to sabotage any possibility of it in their own lives and those of others. Despite his introspective nature, Edmund distrusts psychiatrists, describing them as "modern necromancers" and stating, "I preferred to suffer the thing that I was."

There are two additional characters. The house itself possesses dark qualities, which are made evident from the start when Edmund arrives so late that the house is dark, everyone is asleep, and it has a haunted atmosphere: "The closed doors breathed a stupefaction of slumber." Lydia, the deceased mother, continues to exert a major influence on the lives of all those within.

The plot twists, turns, and tangles, with the Italian girl remaining in the background until the end. Some aspects may be a little dated (which is understandable) or stretch credulity, but it is still a good story and is well told.

Having attended a couple of humanist funerals recently, I was particularly struck by this passage: "At least a Christian burial would with ancient images and emotions have covered up this moment of blankness and lent to that querulous frailty the dignity and sadness of general mortality."

If Woody Allen hasn't read any Murdoch, he really should. They have a great deal in common.

In a rich and interesting story, the tale begins when Edmund returns to his family to attend his mother's funeral.

He not only faces the old problems that once led to his solo escape from home but also discovers a new set of difficulties surrounding him, once again putting him in a situation of confronting himself and what he fled from.

This return home becomes a significant turning point for Edmund.

As he deals with the aftermath of his mother's passing and the resurfacing of past issues, he is forced to reevaluate his life and the choices he has made.

The story unfolds, revealing the complex web of emotions and challenges that Edmund must navigate in order to find some sort of resolution and perhaps a new path forward.

It is a journey of self-discovery and growth, filled with unexpected twists and turns that keep the reader engaged and eager to see how Edmund will ultimately overcome his obstacles and find peace within himself.

Otto was not scary at all. He might have had some quirks, but there was nothing about him that would send shivers down one's spine.

David, on the other hand, was far from being sexy. He had an average appearance and lacked that certain charm and allure that would make someone sexually appealing.

As for my imagined garden, it continuously failed to meet my expectations. No matter how hard I tried to envision it in all its glory, it always seemed insufficient. It just wasn't very satisfying. There was something missing, something that would make it truly magical and enchanting.

I longed for a garden that would take my breath away, a place where I could lose myself in its beauty and tranquility. But for now, my imagined garden remained a disappointment.

# The Irish Readathon

I always thought I would like Iris Murdoch, which is why I had four of her books without even having skimmed through their pages. I wasn't wrong; at the sentence level, she is extraordinary.

"Of course I had never escaped from Lydia. Lydia had got inside me, into the depths of my being. There was no abyss and no darkness where she was not. She was my self-contempt."

However, at the plot level, this book is a shapeless mess. "The Italian Girl" seemed to me a farce whose argument was written on the fly, despite some well-executed dialogues and with the worst actors in the vicinity. There's Edmund, the stuffy brother who returns for Lydia's funeral, the domineering mother; Otto, the drunk and irascible layabout; Isabel, his neurotic wife; Flora, the beautiful hysterical adolescent; and finally the so-called "Italian girl", the former nanny of the two boys, who appears only as a secondary character until the last third of the work. Outside the family nucleus, to make the relationships even tenser and to heighten the drama to the extreme, a seductive couple of Russian brothers appears: Elsa and David.

The narrative of this entire book is a succession of apotheotic entrances and melodramatic exits, after brief moments of histrionic representation, touching on themes such as abortion and exile along the way.

"Her face was a yellowish white and narrowed. Shrunk already away from life, altogether smaller. But her long hair which had been bronze once, now a dark brown striped with grey, seemed vital still, as if the terrible news had yet come to it. (...) Her dead face had an expression which I had known upon it in life, a sort of soft crazed expression, like a Grünewald Saint John, a look of elated madness and suffering."

There is an abundance of drama that is tightly packed into this concise book.

Published in 1964, the title ingeniously represents a minor character who experiences a remarkable transformation and comes into her own towards the conclusion.

The central question that looms large is whether obligation or self-preservation takes precedence when Edward is confronted with his family, which has become unraveled and is teetering on the verge of exploding.

As the story progresses, secrets are gradually revealed, and Edward finds himself helplessly pulled into the drama, much like being trapped in quicksand.

This story is replete with a plethora of emotions, yet I have the distinct impression that the most crucial points are artfully written between the lines, requiring the reader to engage in a deeper level of analysis and interpretation to fully grasp their significance.

The story presented a rather lackluster set of characters. They seemed flat and devoid of life, failing to truly capture the reader's attention. Additionally, the plot didn't offer much in the way of excitement or intrigue.

Despite its brevity, it was still a somewhat difficult read. The lack of engaging elements made it a bit of a chore to get through.

One can only hope that the next work by Murdoch will be more captivating. Perhaps it will feature more dynamic characters and a more interesting plot that keeps the reader on the edge of their seat from start to finish.

Until then, we can only wait and see what Murdoch has in store for us.

Iris Murdoch emerges not only as an important writer but also as a significant moral philosopher. The author, who writes works that reflect society and individuals through her own moral realist mirror,同样在《意大利女孩》中包含了超越表面虚构的道德探究和社会背景。

The novel focuses on the protagonist Edmund Narraway's return to the house where he was born and raised years after his mother's death and his finding himself in a web of problems despite not wanting to. Gradually, the psychological portrait of a family left over from an authoritarian, dominant mother and a meek father (or rather, a father seen as a deficiency by his artistic, idealistic, gentle wife and reflected as a disgrace to their children) is revealed before us. The foggy curtain that has been drawn with the death of Anne Lydia shows us the inner emptiness and incompleteness of a household that has indexed itself to Lydia and shaped its life and personality according to her. We see that the authority of the deceased Lydia still sways over the characters like the sword of Damocles, and we realize the inner face of the psychological pressure created by such a controlling behavior that caused Edmund to flee the house years ago. As Edmund is drawn into a tangle of problems consisting of his brother Otto, his aunt Isabel, his niece Flora, the Italian servant Maggie, and the family's seasonal workers Elsa and David, he faces a very painful inner conflict. Although he initially feels a great aversion to this mess and sees himself as a moral authority, he gradually cannot escape change. Especially, Edmund is crushed in the face of the pure life energy of his niece Flora, who symbolizes a great rebellion against morality with her dynamic towards pain and joy, and begins to question his view of life. For his brother and aunt, this task is taken on by Elsa and David. We see that at the root of what undermines their moral comfort lies the existence of these two rather grotesque immigrant Jewish siblings. Finally, at the end of all this conflict, we witness that the characters who are forced to grow and transform both morally and spiritually have become better versions of themselves.

**

Murdoch, while making a critique of her own society based on a beautiful on the outside but rotten on the inside, two-faced moral understanding, also weaves in her work a thought that believes in the dialectic of morality and that a person can change towards good and objective morality. In doing so, she makes extensive use of the moral images from religious texts and classical works of art and filters and reinterprets the moral through the sieve of her own philosophy.

My first experience with Murdoch's writing was truly remarkable.

Her words flow like a gentle river, captivating the reader from the very first sentence.

The way she weaves her stories, creating vivid characters and immersive worlds, is a testament to her talent as a writer.

Each page is filled with beautiful prose that makes you want to slow down and savor every word.

Murdoch has a unique ability to explore complex themes and emotions with such depth and sensitivity that it leaves a lasting impression on the reader.

Whether it's a love story, a mystery, or a coming-of-age tale, her books always manage to touch the heart and engage the mind.

I can't wait to discover more of her works and continue to be inspired by her beautiful writing.

This was my first encounter with an Iris Murdoch book, and for some inexplicable reason, I simply couldn't muster up any enthusiasm for it.

I am fully aware that, from a technical standpoint, it is extremely well-written. The prose is elegant, the descriptions are vivid, and the characterizations are complex. However, despite all of these literary merits, the story itself just failed to draw me in.

The book was filled to the brim with dysfunctional relationships and a pervading sense of melancholy. It was as if a dark cloud hung over every page, making it difficult for me to find any glimmers of hope or joy. I often found myself struggling to keep reading, and more than once, I considered putting the book down for good.

A part of me insists that I should give this classic writer another chance and attempt a second of her novels. After all, one book does not necessarily define an entire body of work, and perhaps I simply chose the wrong one to start with.

But another part of me is hesitant. It took a great deal of effort to get through this first book, and I'm not sure if I'm ready to subject myself to another potentially difficult read.

We shall see... Only time will tell whether I will have the courage to pick up another Iris Murdoch novel and give her a second chance.