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He tried to remember when he first began to think she suffered something that had an outsized force in her life, that made it harder for her to work, to get along, to enjoy what good things exist. Early on it was clear at least she had that chemistry of mood he’d come to see as characteristically feminine, if only for the way it gets reflected. Like most men who profit from understanding and adaptation, he’d long ago formulated a set of relatively simplistic guiding principles for it: That women allow for feelings, though it was sometimes only their own feelings. That one has to attend to these, even if they show them in ways that are sometimes quite elusive. That good outcomes depend on being able to attend to them in a very particular and unvarying manner, with interest and empathy, though these things too have a very particular nature in this context. That one must very forcefully resist the impulse to respond with anything that could be seen as problem solving. As incomprehensible as this is for men, it isn’t what women desire–they prefer solving problems for themselves. 

Finally but most crucially, one must never tell a woman that what she is feeling is crazy, no matter how strong the evidence for this.

—The Italian Novel

Crossing the room from behind the young man, she could have a long look at him unobserved. He sat elbows out on the wide oak table top, hunched a little over his books with that well cut tweed coat of his hanging from his chair. Something about his shoulders in that fine white cotton shirt caught her eye, and she felt her center tighten a little.

—The Italian Novel

Posso chiedere. Questo libro che leggi tutti i giorni? she went on as she sat down.

He looked up again, back to the folio on the table in front of him, gave it a half turn so it was facing her and slid it toward the middle of the table. It was a facsimile of something very old, reproduced at scale perhaps. Open to her on the left was a long paragraph of Italian printed with movable type. La cosa dolce, read the heading. But she turned from it before reading further to view the engraving on the facing page. After a moment she looked at him again across the table, showed the young man the blankest face she could contrive, and slid the volume back to him.

—The Italian Novel

He felt like the surface of a manifold in a space curved with pain, empty of everything but a grief like nausea. All he wanted to do now was to lie down.

—The Italian Novel

It’s how we organize great densities of things, along the X and Y axes, how we push things together so we can pull them apart again, by requiring ourselves to traverse them always only up and down or back and forth. Such spaces Y had always found difficult to navigate. X called it Agnosia del piano cartesiano. Cartesian Grid Agnosia. It was just one more tyranny of reason to Y’s mind. Thought may be able to move in space that linear, but not a body, not her body. Y wanted to move always along a curve.

—The Italian Novel

The little bits I’m posting here are from the book I’m working on now, The Italian Novel. It’s set mainly in Firenze, in 2032, and unfolds the story of a young scientist, his poet-lover, and a new planet. And they are all collected here.

Available wherever you buy books sometime in 2023?